Delivery Industry Statistics: About 3 Million Workers in Five Federal Industries #
US delivery is five industries, not one. Federal statistics split it by what moves and how far, and together the five employ about 3.0 million people, a VantaInsights estimate built from 2023 federal counts (see Sources and Method). The four private industries took in about $449 billion (Census Economic Census, 2022). "Last mile" is a job, not a classification: no NAICS code carries the name, and the final leg of a delivery can belong to any of the bottom three rows below.
Rounded. Census CBP 2023; Postal Service: BLS QCEW 2023 annual average.
Growth and Prices: Local Delivery and Couriers Lead, Parcel Rates Keep Rising #
Employment moved in different directions across the five between 2017 and 2023.
Even this table understates the last mile. County Business Patterns counts only businesses with paid employees, and app-based delivery drivers usually work as independent contractors. Census Nonemployer Statistics counted about 1.44 million courier and messenger businesses with no employees in 2023, outnumbering the industry group's payroll employees, a count that surged after 2019.
Prices split the way the business models do. Parcel and postal prices, set from published rate schedules, have risen steadily; truckload prices follow the freight cycle and fall when trucks outnumber loads (BLS Producer Price Index, through August 2026). Exact growth rates are reserved for our reports. For the demand side see logistics industry trends, and for truckload economics, trucking cost per mile.
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Delivery Workforce: One Federal Employer, a Few Networks and Nearly 880,000 Owner-Operators #
The five industries organize their labor in very different ways.
- Postal Service: a single employer, the US Postal Service, operating under a universal service obligation.
- Couriers and express delivery: large sorting and delivery sites run by a few national networks.
- Local delivery: a small staffed base, alongside the nonemployer couriers and messengers above, which Census does not split between parcel and local delivery.
- Freight trucking: tens of thousands of small fleets across NAICS 484, plus nearly 880,000 trucking businesses with no employees at all, the owner-operator end of the industry (Census Nonemployer Statistics, 2023).
Pay by industry, and how it lines up against headcount, is covered in our reports. Driver pay by type of haul is in our truck driver salary guide.
Market Structure: Concentrated Parcel Networks, Fragmented Trucking #
- Postal Service: a single federal operator, and by law the only carrier allowed to deliver most letter mail.
- Couriers and express delivery: highly concentrated. A handful of national networks account for most of the industry's revenue.
- Local delivery: concentrated at the top, with a long tail of small local operators.
- Freight trucking: highly fragmented. Even the largest carriers hold a small share of trucking revenue.
Four of the five industries have a full written report, and each one adds what this page leaves out:
| Benchmark | This page | Each report |
|---|---|---|
| Employment and locations | Yes | Yes |
| Employment growth | Direction only | Yes |
| Pay and payroll | No | Yes |
| Market concentration (top-four share) | Label only | Yes |
| State-by-state breakdown | No | Yes |
| Five-year outlook | No | Yes |
Get the reports: Couriers and express delivery → · Long-distance freight trucking → · Local freight trucking → · Local delivery →
Every code on this page except the Postal Service links to its report, where the one-industry data pack is also available. The Postal Service has neither, because USPS sits outside the Census business count both are built from. The wider industry groups are truck transportation, couriers and messengers and the Postal Service.
Sources and Method #
Employment and locations for the four private industries are Census County Business Patterns 2023, which counts establishments with paid employees and excludes most government employees, so it leaves out the Postal Service. Postal figures are the BLS Quarterly Census of Employment and Wages 2023 annual average for NAICS 491110 under federal ownership. Table figures are rounded.
The workforce total of about 3.0 million is a VantaInsights estimate. It adds CBP 2023 employment for the four private industries to the QCEW 2023 Postal Service average. The two programs measure employment differently, CBP in the pay period including March 12 and QCEW as an annual average, so the sum is rounded and is not an official federal count.
Receipts are the 2022 Economic Census, which does not cover the Postal Service. Nonemployer counts are Census Nonemployer Statistics 2023, published for couriers and messengers only at NAICS 492. Price directions are BLS Producer Price Index by industry, through August 2026. Growth directions compare 2017 and 2023 employment.
Growth rates, pay, concentration ratios, state-level breakdowns and projections are reserved for our reports and do not appear on this page.