CMRA and PO Box Statistics: How Many Private Mailboxes and PO Boxes the US Has

Key findings

• Nearly 12,000 CMRAs were registered with USPS as of February 2025, serving over 1.6 million customers.
• In a random sample of CMRA business applications, 69 percent were on an outdated form version and 7 percent had no application on file at all.
• USPS manages 21 million PO Boxes, about the same as the 21.2 million it reported in 2018.
• The PO Box vacancy rate rose each year, from 44 percent in FY2021 to nearly 49 percent in FY2023. That works out to about 10 million empty boxes.
• Competitive-priced locations are 29 percent of PO Box facilities but bring in 78 percent of PO Box revenue, and they have the highest vacancy, 51 percent.

How well USPS tracks CMRA businesses

Each CMRA business files PS Form 1583-A with its local post office to be set up as a delivery point. The Inspector General pulled a random sample of 205 of these applications and checked them for completeness (Report 24-146-R25, p. 8).

The identification problems included blank fields and unacceptable IDs such as wholesale store cards or credit cards. The same audit estimated that USPS missed collecting about $5.2 million in CMRA-related revenue for FYs 2023 to 2024, the fees it could have charged under a cost-recovery approach.

These findings are about the CMRA businesses' own paperwork. The audit did not test the customer's USPS Form 1583, so it says nothing about how often individual mailbox holders fill out their forms wrong.

Where PO Box revenue comes from

PO Boxes brought in $1.46 billion in FY2023, and revenue grew 21 percent (more than $250 million) between FY2021 and FY2023 (Report 24-017-R24, Table 1 and p. 10). Most of it comes from a minority of locations.

Competitive locations make up 29 percent of facilities (8,704 divided by 30,535) but 78 percent of revenue ($1.14 billion divided by $1.46 billion). The audit's summary rounds total revenue to $1.5 billion.

Methodology and limits

• Direct figures are quoted from the reports, with the report's own rounding words kept ("nearly," "over," "about").
• Calculated figures (F24 to F26) show their inputs in the table. The vacant-box estimate multiplies two rounded numbers, so it is shown as "about 10 million" and should not be read as an exact count.
• Different periods. The CMRA counts are from February 2025 and August 2024. The PO Box counts are from FY2023. Compare them with that gap in mind.
• What a CMRA count is not. It is not a count of virtual mailbox users. It includes walk-in mailbox stores and every other registered CMRA.
• The application sample covers CMRA business applications (PS Form 1583-A), not customer forms.
• Context. For scale, USPS delivered to 170.4 million delivery points in FY2025 (USPS Postal Facts).

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