Beacon Hill residents are heading into the holiday rush with a Postal Service that federal auditors say is still struggling to meet on-time delivery goals.

A federal audit in July found that the USPS fell short of many service targets during last year’s peak season, underscoring the ongoing challenges facing the nation’s mail system.

The USPS reports that many products average above 85% on-time delivery, but the federal auditor believed that service performance had declined for most products compared to the prior peak season.

Representative Jay Livingstone said that resident complaints about postal service issues had greatly declined since a November 2023 staffing shortage that caused unexpected service stoppages at the Charles Street post office.

"[Sen. Edward Markey] and his staff were having, at one point, weekly or biweekly meetings with the post office,” Livingstone said, attributing the improvements to the senator’s efforts.

USPS spokesperson Steve Doherty said in an interview that, “The vast majority of mail was delivered to customers last year within two-and-a-half to three days from the time it was entered into the mail stream.”

This year’s holiday send by dates remain consistent with previous years.

For packages to reach their destination by Christmas, USPS Ground Advantage and First Class mail should be received by the post office by December 17, Priority Mail by December 18, and Priority Mail Express by December 20.

For Alaska, Hawaii, Puerto Rico and U.S. territories, the Ground Advantage deadline is December 16.

On staffing, Livingstone said postal employees in his district have not raised concerns about holiday shortages. Though he added that letter carriers have expressed a broader concern with the Trump administration’s continued efforts to privatize the post office.

As the way the mail has been used has changed, so has the USPS funding model. The 1971 Postal Reorganization Act shifted the USPS to a self-funded service. Still today, the USPS funds its operations through postage and service revenues rather than taxpayer dollars.

“We don't deliver mail just where it's economically convenient or profitable to deliver it. Other companies, our competitors, will deliver the mail to us for the last mile,” Doherty said.

Asked about delivery logistics in Beacon Hill’s narrow streets, Livingstone said USPS has not raised any neighborhood specific operational concerns with him.

“The delivery trucks they tend to use are on the smaller side, and most deliveries happen by postal carrier that's walking,” he said.

Doherty said that the agency has increased its daily processing capability from 60 million to 88 million parcels, heading into this year’s peak season.

"A big part of it, and it was long overdue, is retooling and modernizing the equipment to match the way that people use the mail today. With people ordering more and more things online, the package side of the business has grown exponentially.” Doherty said.

Additionally, the USPS has been changing its hiring structures to be less reliant on a surge of seasonal hires. Doherty said finding seasonal hires in the Northeast can be particularly difficult due to the area’s low unemployment.

This year’s hiring goal is to reach 14,000 holiday employees, but many of these temporary positions are now designed to be converted to career positions at the start of the next year. Since 2020 the USPS has converted nearly 232,000 pre-career positions into full-time career jobs.

“We've been doing Christmas now for 250 years. I don't want to say we have it down to a science, but it's not our first rodeo, and we keep tweaking the process to make it more and more efficient as the customers’ needs change,” Doherty said.

“We plan to do it again successfully this year, and we have everything in place to achieve that. We're very confident about being able to get your packages home for the holiday.”