PostNL delivered letters on time and had enough locations in 2015

In 2015, Dutch postal company PostNL met the statutory requirement of delivering at least 95 percent of letters the next delivery day: 96.4 percent of letter-size mail and 96.8 percent of mourning cards and medical letters were delivered on time. PostNL also has enough service locations to ensure that everyone in the Netherlands has sufficient access to PostNL’s services.

PostNL has received confirmation of these conclusions from the Netherlands Authority for Consumers and Markets (ACM). ACM makes sure that PostNL complies with the rules.

Obligations on PostNL

Being the only postal company in the Netherlands, PostNL is required to provide a basic set of postal services. For this reason, there are statutory requirements that PostNL has to comply with. These requirements concern the quality and the accessibility of postal services. PostNL is required to deliver letter-size mail the next delivery day from Tuesday through Saturday; mourning cards and medical letters should also be delivered on Monday.

Sufficient service locations

In 2015, PostNL was required by law to have at least 2,000 service locations, of which 900 locations should carry a wide selection of products and services. At service locations with such wide selections, customers are, for example, able to buy stamps, or they can make use of services such as sending registered mail. PostNL has met its statutory obligations.

Accessibility of services

In principle, everyone in the Netherlands should have a service location with good enough a selection of products and services within a five-kilometer radius of their homes. The law uses a more lenient standard for residents in more sparsely populated areas than for those in more densely populated areas. In 2015, PostNL has met the requirements for both of these groups.