USPS Wants 90 to 95 Cent Stamps After a $9 Billion Loss. Yes, Your Mailbox Is Paying for Washington's Mess
USPS says a 90 to 95 cent stamp hike could steady losses after a $9 billion year, but families are once again being asked to cover Washington's dysfunction.
Americans may soon need almost a dollar just to mail a basic letter. That is where the U.S. Postal Service says things are heading after posting a $9 billion net loss in 2025 and warning Congress that, without changes, it could run out of cash in less than 12 months.
If that sounds like the sort of sentence that should set off alarms in Washington, it should. Instead, the country gets the usual bureaucratic performance: years of structural problems, years of bad incentives, and now a demand that families cough up more money to keep the machine wheezing along.
What USPS Told Congress
Postmaster General David Steiner told a House Oversight subcommittee on March 17 that the Postal Service is at a "critical juncture." In his written testimony, Steiner said USPS would be out of cash in less than a year if it keeps operating under the status quo.
He also argued that raising the price of a First-Class stamp from 78 cents to somewhere between 90 and 95 cents would "largely solve" the agency's controllable loss.
"If we were to change the stamp price to 90 to 95 cents, which is still less than half of the cost of most foreign posts, that would largely solve our controllable loss."
That is the headline number. But the deeper problem is not just the stamp. It is the system behind it.
The Numbers Are Brutal
According to USPS's own fiscal year 2025 results, the agency reported:
$80.5 billion in operating revenue
A $9.0 billion GAAP net loss
A $2.7 billion controllable loss
First-Class Mail revenue up $370 million, even as volume fell by 2.2 billion pieces
Total mail volume down from 112.5 billion pieces in 2024 to 108.7 billion in 2025
That last part matters. USPS is trying to support a giant nationwide delivery network while Americans send fewer letters every year. Steiner told Congress that annual mail volume has fallen from 213 billion pieces in 2006 to about 109 billion pieces today.
That is not a slowdown. That is a collapse.
And yet the infrastructure, labor costs, pension obligations, delivery mandates, and federal rules are still sitting there like nothing changed. Because of course they are.
Why USPS Says Prices Need to Rise
Steiner's case to lawmakers was simple: every business has three options. Sell more, raise prices, or cut costs. USPS says it is trying all three, but it is boxed in by federal law and regulation.
He pointed to several problems:
A statutory borrowing cap that has been stuck at $15 billion for decades
Heavy retirement and pension costs, including roughly $3 billion a year tied to CSRS obligations
A six-day universal delivery mandate to more than 170 million addresses
Rules that prevent USPS from managing workers' compensation claims the way private companies do
Regulatory limits on pricing flexibility
Steiner even said 71 percent of delivery routes are underwater financially, while 58 percent of post offices do not cover their operating costs.
That is not a sign of a healthy enterprise. That is a sign of a federal institution trapped between public-service obligations and political refusal to make hard decisions.
The International Comparison. Useful, but Not the Whole Story
USPS also argues that American postage is still cheap compared with other industrialized countries. Steiner told Congress a U.S. stamp at 78 cents is the lowest in the industrialized world, with countries like France and the United Kingdom charging much more.
Fair enough. But there is a difference between saying America has cheaper postage and saying families should be thrilled to pay more for a system that keeps bleeding money.
The comparison helps make one point clear: the current price is not sacred. But it does not erase the bigger question. Why should ordinary Americans keep being the first ones tapped when Washington's management model clearly is not working?
What This Means for Families and Small Businesses
A stamp moving from 78 cents to 90 or 95 cents may not sound catastrophic to Beltway experts, but those little increases stack up fast in the real world.
If you are:
A small business mailing invoices, notices, or customer correspondence
A church sending letters, donation appeals, or event mailers
A family managing bills, paperwork, and legal documents
A rural household with fewer private shipping alternatives
then this is not abstract policy chatter. It is another price hike on top of the inflation squeeze Americans have already been dealing with for years.
That is the part official Washington always forgets. Every "modest" increase lands on somebody's budget.
The Real Question Congress Has to Answer
If USPS truly is less than a year away from a cash crunch, Congress has two choices.
First, it can keep pretending the old model works, jack up prices, and hope nobody notices the contradictions.
Second, it can finally deal with the structural mess: borrowing limits, pension burdens, compensation rules, delivery mandates, and the regulatory straightjacket that treats the Postal Service like a monopoly from another century.
Reasonable people can debate the mix of reforms. What should not be debatable is the reality in front of us. You cannot lose billions, watch mail volume crater, and then act shocked when the math stops cooperating.
Washington loves to postpone hard reforms until ordinary people get handed the bill. That appears to be exactly where this is going again. If Congress wants to protect universal service without turning the stamp into a symbol of federal dysfunction, now would be a very good time to prove it.