PostNL failed to meet its legal obligation to deliver 95% of letters on time in 2024, with just 86% arriving within 24 hours, according to the annual postal and parcel monitor published by market regulator ACM.

It is the sixth consecutive year that the delivery service has missed its target. The drop in reliability is steepest in the past three years, with on-time delivery falling from 94.3% in 2020. Around 14% of letters now arrive late, while some are never delivered at all.

The ACM said it had received an increasing number of complaints about delivery performance. “More and more concerns are about post arriving very late or not at all,” the watchdog said.

The quality issues come on top of other challenges at PostNL. Letter volume has shrunk by 25% in four years. Both business and consumer mail has declined, with consumer post seeing the steepest drop.

PostNL may also face new competition. Spotta, a company that delivers door-to-door advertising, has applied to the ACM for a licence to deliver addressed mail.

Last October, parliament voted against allowing PostNL to cut deliveries from five to three days a week in an effort to cut costs. Delivery times and targets are set down in law.

In February, PostNL announced that post boxes will now be emptied throughout the day instead of in the evening, and the number of post boxes has been cut from 23,000 to 10,000.