An Post fell further short of next-day delivery targets last year

An Post delivered just 78% of single-piece priority mail on the next working day across Ireland in 2025, five percentage points below its 2024 performance and well short of the 94% regulatory target set by ComReg.

The decline was particularly marked on some routes. Mail posted outside Dublin and sent to addresses in the capital reached next-day delivery at a rate of 64%, down from 78% in 2024. In December, a peak period for postal services, that rate fell from 52% to 18%.

An Post's average next-day delivery rate from January through November was 81%, compared with 85% during the same period a year earlier. The December average was 49%, a 12-point drop from December 2024. The figures came from postal-service monitoring carried out for ComReg by Ipsos B&A, which examined delivery times for about 27,600 items posted during 2025.

Performance varied according to how mail entered the system and how it was prepared. Next-day delivery reached 90% for mail collected from businesses, compared with 74% for post-office collections and 72% for post boxes. Typed addresses recorded an 82% rate, while handwritten addresses reached 74%. Metered mail performed better than stamped mail, at 84% versus 73%.

The report also recorded a decline in deliveries completed within three working days. The rate fell to 96.5% from 97.9% in 2024, below ComReg's 99.5% standard. Snow in early January and Storm Éowyn later that month disrupted deliveries, but affected items were excluded from the published analysis. December's three-day delivery rate was 92.6%, compared with 96.8% from January through November.