Christmas shipping deadlines for 2026

USPS send-by dates for 25 December 2026

Transcribed on 2026-09-28 from the USPS holiday shipping dates page and the Postal Service newsroom release of 22 September. These are the dates USPS recommends for arrival by Christmas Day, not delivery guarantees.

For parcels leaving the country, the same USPS page lists Wednesday 9 December for Priority Mail International and First-Class Package International Service and Wednesday 16 December for Priority Mail Express International, the same for every region it names. Re-read on 2026-10-07, those three dates had not changed, and the page now carries the military dates as well.

The dates are the same for every APO, FPO and DPO ZIP range USPS lists: 090–099, 340 and 962–966. Ground Advantage is the one to watch, because it closes five weeks before First-Class Mail and Priority Mail.

What we checked, and what came back

This page exists because the alternative is repeating dates that nobody has published. Here is the state of play on the day of writing.

• FedEx — posted. Checked again on 2026-09-21: the last-days-to-ship page has moved to fedex.com/en-us/holiday/last-days-to-ship.html, and it now offers a 2026 shipping deadlines document alongside the 2026 operations schedule. FedEx was the first of the three to put send-by dates out. The document itself is a PDF that refuses automated requests, so we are not transcribing dates from it here — open it from that page and read it at the source.
• USPS — posted 22 September. The Postal Service announced its 2026 recommended dates in a newsroom release on 22 September, and on 2026-09-28 the holiday shipping dates page on usps.com carried them in full. The domestic dates are in the table above. On 2026-09-21 that same address still redirected to a general shipping page, which is why this page said otherwise for a week. Re-read on 2026-10-07: the international dates were unchanged and the military dates had been added; both sit under the domestic table.
• UPS — operations calendar only. Re-read on 2026-09-21 from the 2026 U.S. holiday operations schedule UPS publishes as a PDF. There is still no standalone Christmas cutoff sheet; what the calendar gives you is which days run and two dated pickup cutoffs for late December, both transcribed below.

So on 2026-09-28 two carriers out of three have published send-by dates. If you ship UPS, what you can plan against right now is which days its network runs, in the calendar below.

December 2026 as the carriers have published it

Every entry below is transcribed from a carrier calendar read on 2026-07-28; the UPS and FedEx rows were re-read against the same calendars on 2026-09-21 and had not changed. Christmas Day falls on a Friday this year, which puts the closure at the end of a working week rather than the middle.

Where a row says not listed, that means the date does not appear on the UPS holiday calendar at all, which is how UPS marks an ordinary working day. We are not going to translate that into a promise on its behalf.

Working a safe date out yourself

Until the cutoffs land, the method is straightforward: take the window your own quote returns, add every closed or modified day inside it, then add a buffer for the weeks when volume is highest. Here is what the windows look like on a long domestic lane right now.

The three ground rows carrying a window run from 5-6 to 7-8 business days across $1.20 of price, and the air row cuts the window to 2-3 for $12.29 over the cheapest row on the lane. A parcel bought on ground in mid-December with a 7-8 business day window is realistically crossing two weekends before it lands, which is the arithmetic the deadline charts exist to save you from doing.

Quote your parcel and count backwards

Holiday deadlines: straight answers

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