At four in the morning on the third Monday of January 2026 the loading dock at the DHL Cargo facility in Frankfurt-Rebstock was running, as it had been running for forty hours straight, on coffee that had been black since Sunday and a printer that had refused to acknowledge the new rate card. The technician kept hitting the reset switch. The supervisor, a woman named Karin who has been on this dock since the Deutsche Post grey livery, did not bother to look up. The rate card had been published in November. She had already re-priced everything in the warehouse management system on the second Tuesday of December. The printer was, in her phrase, "catching up to a war that had already been fought."
This is how the annual general rate increase lands at sea level. There is a press release in October. There is a one-line news item in December — five point nine percent across the board, FedEx and UPS and DHL Express all converging on the same headline number as if by treaty, which of course they more or less had. There is a slightly amused editorial in the trade press. And then there is Karin, who has already done the math and knows what the operators behind her know: the headline GRI is the smallest of the three numbers that will move the bill this year.
The other two numbers are the surcharges, which rose between seven and nine percent depending on the lane, and the dimensional-weight thresholds, which on the twelfth of January quietly redrew the line at which an Additional Handling charge attaches to any package exceeding 10,368 cubic inches, and the line at which the Oversize Charge attaches to any package above 17,280 cubic inches or 110 pounds. The Residential Surcharge alone went up 8.4 percent year-over-year, and FedEx Home Delivery's appointment, evening, and date-certain charges moved from per-shipment to per-package — a change that does not appear in any press release and that the cosmetics warehouse three doors down from Karin's dock will feel every time it sends a customer a four-box gift set.
"The five-nine number is the one they put on the slide. Eight to twelve is the one I show my CFO. The difference is the surcharge stack, and the surcharge stack is now a product line, not a footnote."
— Andrei Lemmer, head of logistics, Falke Hosiery, Schmallenberg
This is the ninth volume of The Shipping Annual. We started it in 2018 because there was no one place a small shipper could read, in one sitting, a useful field assessment of who the parcel carriers actually were that year — what they were good at, what they were bad at, where their rates were going, and what tricks the surcharge departments were running on the side. The format has not changed much. The carriers have. DHL Express is no longer simply a courier; it is a customs platform with airplanes attached. FedEx is two companies trapped in one bird logo, an excellent air freight network bolted to a domestic last-mile economy that does not fully work. UPS is still the most expensive way to get something across a city and the cheapest way to get it across a continent on a Tuesday. USPS is, against all predictions, alive and modestly competitive on the residential lane. Royal Mail is rebuilding from the 2022–2024 strike fallout one Tracked 24 label at a time. La Poste is methodical. And the Asia-Pacific upstarts — Evri, GLS, Canada Post across their respective lanes — are quietly eating inbound volume the big three assumed was theirs.
What follows is the issue. We have profiled nine carriers, costed a single four-kilogram shipment from Berlin to Singapore three different ways, walked through dimensional weight in plain words, and let an operator in Schmallenberg say what the trade press will not. The cover photo, for the record, is Karin's dock at 4:38 a.m. on the morning the printer finally caught up.