If you’re planning on mailing a check to settle your tax bill this year, be sure not to overpay – in postage.
For the first time in nearly a century, the cost of postage is going down. The price decrease is expected to occur on April 10, 2016 – about a week before Tax Day. (Remember, Tax Day is April 18 this year.)
Expected? That doesn’t sound terribly certain, right? That’s because the U.S. Postal Service is still hoping that might change. When postage recently went up a few cents in order to reverse a slide in revenues, it was supposed to be a temporary increase. The boost was intended to be reversed when the Postal Service collected $4.6 billion in surcharges. That benchmark is expected to happen on April 10, 2016.
According to the Postal Service, despite the surcharges, ramping down the cost of postage is not a good plan. Postmaster General and CEO Megan J. Brennan worries that “[r]emoving the surcharge and reducing our prices is an irrational outcome considering the Postal Service’s precarious financial condition.”
Congress could opt to extend the price increase but that’s not terribly likely. Generally, the price of postage is tied to inflation (which hasn’t moved much of late) unless Congress steps in and proactively changes the pricing. There has been no signal from Congress that it will to extend the price increase or make it permanent. Assuming that Congress doesn’t act on postage, here’s how the cost of stamps will be affected:
For an extensive list of postage prices that are affected by the change, you can head over to the US Postal Service website where the agency is touting – and I’m not making this up – “Spring 2016 Rollback Pricing.” The new prices will be effective on April 10, 2016.
And yes, watching those numbers go down instead of up is pretty unusual. The last time that the cost of stamps dropped was 1919.
I know what you’re thinking: if the cost of stamps drops and the Postal Service can’t meet costs, will your tax dollars kick in to make up the difference? No. The Postal Service doesn’t receive federal tax dollars for operating expenses. It’s self-funded – even though its ability to make business decisions is regulated by Congress – through the sale of postage, products, and services.
