The Market Dominant and Competitive price changes took effect on Sunday, July 12, 2026. While all have been preparing for the postage increase, many were unprepared for the impacts associated with the structural changes- namely, the system limitations of PostalOne! Part of this price change was the elimination of all ADC/AADC and MxdADC/MxdAADC sortation levels and rate components. These eliminations, aligned with the price change, required a very hard line cut-off of when jobs could be presented include these components. PostalOne! Could not accept files with new sorts pre-July 12th, or accept jobs containing ADC/AADC post-July 12th.
The industry experienced a variety of situations that resulted in mail files needing manual interventions to pass validations:
- Some mailers using the correct sort files for jobs planned to mail by July 12th ran into production delays due to labor, equipment issues, or lack of postage funds that prevented them from submitting their mailings by July 12th. These things happen often in the mailing world, and all understand that if this happens during price change, and it is no fault of USPS, the mailer must change mail dates and pay new postage rates. Changing the date alone would not solve the issue.
- On Friday, July 10th at 7pm, USPS released an Industry Alert acknowledging this situation and provided the instructions for mailers to manually edit their CQT and CSM files to re-map original ADC/AADC to SCF as appropriate. They are allowing mailers to complete this process for two weeks. The jobs will pay at appropriate post-July 12th rates, but will be allowed to enter with the pre-July 12th sort plans.
- Some mailers with large jobs that had post-July 12th planned mail dates did not receive the necessary software updates from their vendors with enough lead time in order to run production to meet the job’s planned complete date.
- Mailers in this situation are following the Industry Alert to edit their files, but due to some extended software release delays, will need to ask USPS for extensions beyond the originally planned two week period.
- Some mailers prepared jobs with post-July 12th software but uploaded to pay for the jobs July 10th & 11th. These files failed to upload to PostalOne!
- Traditionally, you would expect the mdr client to kick the mail.dat files back alerting you to an issue. If that had happened, mailers would have fixed their mail dates and re-uploaded. This didn’t happen, so instead mailers realized it when they went to enter their jobs on July 13th, only to find out the files never made to PostalOne!
If you find yourself in the above situations and are unfamiliar with the manual edit processes, contact your software vendors support teams immediately.
The traditional pdf Notice 123 is now available online at Postal Explorer with the July 2026 postage prices.
HAZMAT Handling Fees effective July 12, 2026
📦 There is a new HAZMAT Handling Fee of $7.50 for mailable HAZMAT sent using Priority Mail or Priority Mail Express. The Fee will be $0.00, for now, for items sent using Ground Advantage or Parcel Select.
💰 Importantly (also as of July 12th), a new non-compliance fee of $50.00 per piece will be applied to all packages that do not comply with USPS HAZMAT requirements.
Boxes with HAZMAT logos/symbols on the outside that may have been repurposed to ship non-HAZMAT items will incur the $50.00 non compliance fee as well as any package that includes HAZMAT materials, but is not properly labeled.
