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FedEx to impose residential delivery surcharge

Levy will impact enterprise customers, takes effect in mid-February

Mark Solomon
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Still more surcharges. (Photo: Jim Allen/FreightWaves)

FedEx Corp. (NYSE:FDX) said Friday that it will impose a 30 cent per-package surcharge on U.S. residential delivery traffic tendered by large customers, effective Feb. 15.

The surcharge will apply to customers that shipped, on average, more than 30,000 packages per week from Jan. 4 to Jan. 31, FedEx said in a note on its website. The levy will apply to any combination of FedEx’s air, ground and last-mile delivery parcels that hit or exceed the 30,000 weekly volume threshold, FedEx said. 

The levy, once it takes effect, will remain until further notice, FedEx said. 

Customers only using the last-mile service, SmartPost, will be exempt from the new surcharge, FedEx said. The SmartPost service, which for years was managed in conjunction with the U.S. Postal Service, has largely been taken in house and is operated under the FedEx network.


In its statement, FedEx said the continuing surge in e-commerce volumes due to the COVID-19 pandemic continues to put elevated demands on its network, resulting in higher operating costs.

The announcement should have surprised no one given the ongoing volume spikes, said Rob Martinez, founder and co-CEO of Shipware, LLC, a parcel consultancy. 

13 Comments

    1. Rich

      Sure. The nation’s largest e-commerce shippers disagree. UPS is signing their own execution order by relying so heavily on Amazon.

Comments are closed.

Mark Solomon

Formerly the Executive Editor at DC Velocity, Mark Solomon joined FreightWaves as Managing Editor of Freight Markets. Solomon began his journalistic career in 1982 at Traffic World magazine, ran his own public relations firm (Media Based Solutions) from 1994 to 2008, and has been at DC Velocity since then. Over the course of his career, Solomon has covered nearly the whole gamut of the transportation and logistics industry, including trucking, railroads, maritime, 3PLs, and regulatory issues. Solomon witnessed and narrated the rise of Amazon and XPO Logistics and the shift of the U.S. Postal Service from a mail-focused service to parcel, as well as the exponential, e-commerce-driven growth of warehouse square footage and omnichannel fulfillment.