Air mail never carried much cargo tonnage. Its share shrank to about a quarter of one percent by the late nineties and sat a little above one percent through the twenty-tens, before the jump at the end.
What this shows: The chart covers 1990 Q1 to 2025 Q3 and its vertical axis shows Mail share of air cargo tonnage (%). The latest value is 5.45 percent. Data run through 2025 Q3.
Conditions and method
Status: descriptive (the late mail jump is the postal air contract moving to a carrier that reports that tonnage as mail rather than freight).
Mail is a small share of air cargo tonnage throughout: the plotted series runs 0.21% (1999) to 5.45% (2025) across 1990-2025. It settles near 1.3% through the 2010s.
Carriers decide for themselves whether postal tonnage is reported as mail or as freight, so this share moves when the Postal Service changes carrier. The Postal Service’s primary air contract moved from FedEx to UPS on 30 September 2024. Over the four quarters from 2024 Q4, against the four before, UPS’s mail rose by 739 thousand tons. FedEx reported 0 tons of mail before and 0 tons after, while its freight fell by 1,109 thousand tons. The late jump is postal tonnage changing reporting category, not evidence that more mail is flying.