The US Postal Service has spent nearly two decades bleeding money, more than $118 billion in net losses since 2007, and warned earlier this year that it could run out of cash as soon as February. Now it has signed a deal that could change that trajectory: a multi-year contract with DHL eCommerce, a US unit of the German logistics giant DHL Group, expected to be worth more than $10 billion.

The arrangement is straightforward in structure. DHL handles pickups and sorting across its 19 US hubs, and then USPS takes over for the final stretch, delivering the parcel to the door. That last mile is where logistics networks are most expensive to build and hardest to scale. USPS already has it, reaching 170 million households six days a week. DHL gets the reach; USPS gets the revenue.

Postmaster General David Steiner put it plainly: DHL could either "invest a ton of capital to build out an end-to-end network, or they need to partner with someone that has that last-mile capability." The alternative would have meant DHL spending billions to compete directly with infrastructure the postal service has spent generations building. Instead, they're renting it.

Why this matters for the Postal Service

USPS's financial trouble has a structural cause that no single contract can fully fix. First-class mail, the agency's historically most profitable product, has fallen to its lowest volume since the late 1960s. People send emails now. Bills arrive digitally. The envelopes stopped coming, and the revenue that once funded postal routes across the country went with them.

Packages have partially filled that gap. The rise of e-commerce meant more boxes, and USPS has positioned itself as the affordable last-mile option for retailers, small businesses, and logistics companies that don't want to pay FedEx or UPS rates to reach rural addresses. Last month, Amazon separately signed a new package delivery agreement with USPS, another sign that the agency is becoming an essential contractor for the private delivery economy rather than just a government service.

The DHL deal accelerates that shift. DHL eCommerce Americas CEO Scott Ashbaugh said the company expects to roughly double its US business by 2030, and USPS is the vehicle for that growth. DHL could have acquired a delivery company or built its own network; Ashbaugh said USPS was simply the most effective choice.

What it means for you

For most people, the immediate effect is invisible. Packages shipped through DHL in the US will increasingly arrive via the familiar mail truck, the same way Amazon and other retailers already route deliveries. You may not notice the handoff at all.

What you will notice is the price of stamps. USPS is raising the cost of a first-class stamp to 82 cents, up from 78 cents, effective July 12, after winning approval for a temporary 8% price increase on priority mail and package deliveries to offset rising transportation and fuel costs. That increase was coming regardless of this deal.

The bigger question is whether commercial contracts like this one can actually stabilize the postal service over time. USPS's losses are structural, rooted in a business model built around mail volume that will never return. Parcel delivery revenue is real and growing, but it also puts USPS in direct competition with private carriers that can price, route, and invest more flexibly than a federal agency with a universal service mandate.

For now, a German company choosing to rely on American postal infrastructure rather than build its own is a genuine vote of confidence in what USPS has. Whether the agency can convert that confidence into long-term solvency is a different bet entirely.