Australia Post proposed stamp price increase - stakeholder survey

Overview

Australia Post is legally required to a provide a range of letter services (reserved letter services) to the Australian community that are reasonably accessible to all people across Australia.

Over recent years Australia Post’s reserved letter services have made a significant loss. This is largely driven by a substantial reduction in the volume of letters sent, while the number of delivery points Australia Post must service continues to grow.

The increased costs of letter delivery combined with reduced revenue is putting pressure on the financial sustainability of Australia Post’s reserved letter services. The viability of these services impacts Australia Post’s services more broadly, including their availability to the Australian public.

To help reduce the losses associated with its reserved letter services, Australia Post states that it requires an increase to its stamp prices of 13% from mid-2025.

This proposed price rise would result in the following stamp price increases:

• 20 cents, from $1.50 to $1.70, for ordinary small letters
• 40 cents, from $3.00 to $3.40, for ordinary large letters up to 125g
• 60 cents, from $4.50 to $5.10, for ordinary large letters over 125g up to 250g.

Australia Post is also proposing to increase the prices of a range of its other reserved letter services, including the price of priority labels by 30 cents, from $0.70 to $1.00. Combined with the proposed regular stamp price increase, priority ordinary small letters are proposed to increase by 50 cents, from $2.20 to $2.70.

Australia Post is not proposing to increase the price of concession stamps ($3.00 for 5) or seasonal greeting card stamps (65 cents each).

On 12 November 2024, Australia Post provided the ACCC with a public draft price notification and supporting information outlining the above proposed price changes. As part of its draft price notification, Australia Post included an indicative price path for future years, encompassing additional proposed increases to the basic postage rate of 15 cents in both mid-2026 and mid-2027. These future indicative price increases have been included to provide context regarding Australia Post’s forecast cost and revenue data, but will not be assessed in the ACCC’s current price notification process.

Australia Post intends to submit further documents in support of its draft price notification by the end of November 2024. This information may be relevant to stakeholder survey responses and submissions on the proposed price increase. The ACCC will upload any additional public information provided by Australia Post to the ACCC website as it becomes available.

Following this consultation process and a cost-based assessment of Australia Post’s proposal, the ACCC intends to publish our preliminary view on the price increase in early 2025 and seek further feedback from the public before publishing our final decision.

ACCC role in stamp price regulation

The Australian Competition and Consumer Commission (ACCC) is required to assess proposed stamp price increases in accordance with the Competition and Consumer Act 2010.

The ACCC does not have the power to approve a proposed price. Instead, we can decide to object or to not object to a proposed stamp price increase. We must notify Australia Post of our decision, and Australia Post may only then raise prices if the Minister for Communications does not disapprove of the increase.

When assessing a price notification, the ACCC must balance the interests of mail users with the financial sustainability of the reserved letter services provided by Australia Post.

While the ACCC carefully considers community feedback as part of our assessment of a proposed stamp price increase, our regulatory role limits the weight we may place on certain issues. As outlined in the ACCC’s Statement of Regulatory Approach to Assessing Price Notifications, our final decision is primarily based on an assessment of Australia Post’s ability to recover its costs for the reserved letter services.

The ACCC only has a role in assessing the price of ordinary letter services. We do not have a role in assessing the price of other Australia Post products such as Express Post or parcel services.

Submissions

We are seeking your views through either a short online survey, a written submission, or both. The survey will take approximately 5-10 minutes to complete. Written submissions can be either uploaded via the survey below, or emailed directly to postalservices@accc.gov.au. Submissions are due by 11:59pm, 22 December 2024.

All submissions, including survey responses and files uploaded, will be treated as public documents and published on the ACCC website in accordance with the ACCC’s Information Policy, unless otherwise requested.

Any parties wishing to submit commercial-in-confidence material should submit two versions of the submission:

1. A public submission that can be published on the ACCC’s website, in which all confidential material has been removed and replaced with ‘c-i-c’. Please ensure that redacted information is not searchable or otherwise able to be viewed.
2. A confidential version that clearly identifies the information over which confidentiality is claimed by bookending the confidential material with a marking of ‘c-i-c’. Please also highlight for ease of reference the material over which confidentiality is claimed.

More information about the ACCC’s treatment of confidential information can be found in the ACCC’s Information Policy and section 4.2 of the ACCC’s Statement of Regulatory Approach to Assessing Price Notifications.

Your personal information

The ACCC will handle personal information collected in this survey in accordance with the Australian Privacy Principles. We will only use your email address for the purpose of providing you with a copy of your survey responses and we will not disclose it without your consent, except where authorised or required by law.

Information about how to access and/or correct your personal information, and how to lodge a complaint in relation to the handling of your personal information, is set out in our Privacy Policy on our website.

What happens next

The ACCC will analyse the responses to this survey in the course of undertaking an assessment to decide whether to object or not object to the proposed stamp price increase.

Once the survey period has closed, a summary of survey results will be published on the ACCC website.