About the mail market

Here are some key facts about the UK mail market. For more detail on some of the issues covered, see also our series of downloadable factsheets, as well as our web pages listing UK market reviews, and outlining the development of competition in the mail market. 

Key facts

Businesses send about 87% of all mail 

in the UK licensed postal market, with the largest 500 companies accounting for 50% of all mail volumes. About 60% of mail goes from business to consumers (B2C), and 27% goes from businesses to businesses (B2B) (source: Royal Mail).

Consumers post the other 13% 

of mail in the licensed area - about 10% goes to other households and 3% to businesses.  

The total letters market

 (in the licensed area) dropped by 7.3% in 2009/10 - and accounts for 18.8 billion items. The market is worth £6.5 billion. (Source: Postcomm, with data from Royal Mail. Based on Royal Mail volumes including access, regulated mail and non-regulated mail. Excludes Door-to-Door and International services.) 

Forty nine licensed operators

can now provide mail services.

Several companies have signed "access" agreements

with Royal Mail, allowing mail they have collected and sorted to be fed into Royal Mail's network for final delivery. Royal Mail made 6.4 billion access deliveries in 2009/10, compared to 5.3 billion the year before. In 2009/10, access mail was around a third of Royal Mail's total operational volume, with customer direct access making up 30% of this amount (source: Postcomm, with data from Royal Mail).   

New operators deliver 11.9 million items in the licensed area

providing collection, sorting and delivery, in 2009/10 (source: Postcomm). This is a 50% decrease from 2008/09. However, this is partly due to a couple of licensed operators changing the way that they report delivered volumes to improve accuracy.  

But Royal Mail still dominates postal services 

delivering 99% of volume in the addressed letters market (items weighing less than 350g and costing less than £1 to post) in 2009/10 (source: Royal Mail).