A year of postage data, summarised

Twelve monthly medians for freight and transit, with the surcharge window marked. We collected it on 2026-10-05, from 96 entries, and we state the limits as plainly as the finding.

Seasonality hits transit harder than it hits freight. The surcharge is the visible part; the queue is the part that costs you a week.

The economy lane often avoids the surcharge entirely and loses priority instead, so the saving shows up as time rather than money. That trade is worth taking in September and questionable in November.

A EU standard order reaches the door in a median of 21 days and a p90 of 36. The tail is not a slower version of the median; it has its own causes, and they are listed rather than left to chance.

Last-mile delivery accounts for the largest single block — five of 21 median days. The two customs steps, which buyers worry about most, account for a combined two to five days in the median case.

Holiday closures

The warehouse closes but the seller clock keeps running, which adds two to three days at the front.

Battery or liquid declaration

A different export route, adding two to four days.

Address failure

A failed delivery attempt adds two days and sometimes a redelivery fee.

Peak season priority loss

The economy lane loses queue position from late October.

Four lanes and five weight bands produce twenty cells, and the ranking is stable across all of them: economy is cheaper at every weight, by a margin that widens.

Cost per day saved is the honest ratio: about $0.69 at 1.5 kg, $1.94 at 8 kg and $2.50 at 12 kg. The premium triples while the saving stays roughly constant.

At 1.5 kg

About $0.69 per day saved — a deadline makes this obvious.

At 8 kg

About $1.94 per day saved — a different week is the better lever.

At 12 kg

About $2.50 per day saved — a second parcel or a later date wins.

With 13 entries averaging $41.71, pants/shorts ranks 5 of 8 by item value in our census. What makes it distinctive is not the price but how it packs.

Weight bands across the sample run 38 light, 44 mid and 14 heavy. The category you are buying from shifts those odds considerably: shoes and t-shirts concentrate in the lower bands, jackets in the upper.

• Dense categories — shoes, accessories, headwear — bill on actual weight and are predictable.
• Bulky categories — jackets, hoodies — bill on volume and change at packing.
• Mixed categories — pants, other-stuff — can go either way and carry the widest spread.

Volumetric weight is volume divided by a divisor, usually 5000. In the light (< 0.8 kg) band the packed dimensions typically decide the bill rather than the scale, which is why an estimate built from item weight alone is a lower bound rather than a quote.

Rehearsal exists precisely for this. It packs the parcel before the international payment so the freight can be quoted on the packed dimensions — and it is the stage where estimates most often change.

• Ask for packed dimensions, not item dimensions.
• Request compression where the category tolerates it.
• Check the volumetric weight before paying, not after.
• Remove one bulky item rather than changing lane when a parcel sits on a boundary.

The checklist is deliberately short. Eighteen items across five groups is enough to catch the defects that show up in practice, and short enough that it gets used on every order rather than only on expensive ones.

The verdict rule: one fail is a return; three queries, or any query on shoes and jackets, is a query; everything else passes. The lower threshold on shoes and jackets reflects how hard those defects are to remedy after shipping.

A verdict you wrote down before looking at the next photo set is worth more than one you reconstructed afterwards.

Four terms carry most of the misunderstanding: billed weight is not scale weight, rehearsal is not QC, and consolidation is not packing.

Landed cost

Item plus domestic delivery plus service fee plus freight plus duty plus insurance. Six segments, not one.

Billed weight

The greater of scale weight and volumetric weight. What the tariff applies to.

Volumetric weight

Volume in cubic centimetres divided by a divisor, usually 5000.

Rehearsal

Packing the parcel before the international payment so freight can be quoted on packed dimensions.

Consolidation

Combining parcels from several sellers into one shipment. Not the same as packing.

QC

Photographs taken at the warehouse before shipping; a separate step from rehearsal.

The common misuses are predictable: “billed weight” used to mean scale weight, “consolidation” used for combining items from a single seller, and “landed cost” used for the item price plus freight alone.

• Billed weight ≠ scale weight.
• Consolidation ≠ packing.
• Rehearsal ≠ QC.
• Landed cost ≠ item price + freight.

Comparing calculators by their outputs flatters all of them. Comparing them by their omissions is what tells you which number to trust.

The common omission is the volumetric step, and the more dangerous version is applying it silently. A silent application produces a number nobody can reproduce, which is worse than an obvious omission.

1. Enter a parcel with high volume and low weight.
2. If freight does not change, the volumetric step is absent.
3. Then change only the declared value.
4. If the total does not change, duty is not modelled.

Three source labels apply across this site, and each figure states which. Nothing is presented without a sample size, because a range without one is an opinion.

Known biases are stated rather than hidden: bands are assigned rather than weighed, prices were read once, and duty is modelled rather than assessed. Each of those is a real limitation and each is labelled wherever it appears.

Corrections are logged publicly on the errata page, with the date and what changed.