With U.S. consumer prices increasing to their highest levels in 13 years, FedEx Corp. recently announced it will raise surcharges on deliveries into next year. Along with a series of surcharges effective beginning Oct. 4 at the start of the holiday shipping season, Fed-Ex will levy a 60-cents per package surcharge into 2022.
Holiday surcharges will be placed on shipments that require “special handling” or are oversized. A $5.95 per-package charge will be in effect on shipments that need extra handling procedures. $62.50 will be charged for oversized freight which doesn’t fit the shipper’s conveyable process. Another $350 charge will be levied on “unauthorized” shipments that would be more appropriate for LTL shipping rather than parcel.
The new surcharges apply to air and ground services in the U.S. as well as international shipments.
In addition to these charges, beginning Nov. 1 a $1.50 per piece levy will be put on deliveries through FedEx Ground Economy, formally known as SmartPost at a time when FedEx transferred parcels to the U.S. Postal Service for residential delivery. Now all those shipments are done exclusively by FedEx.
The Nov. 1 surcharge expires on Nov. 28 when prices go up to $3 per package, running through Dec 12. After that, the levy decreases back to $1.50 from Dec. 13 to Jan. 16.
Beginning Nov. 1, FedEx will implement a residential delivery charge on large enterprise customers using the company’s domestic express and ground services. The charges will apply to customers who ship more than 25,000 weekly packages through Express and Ground Economy.
The per-piece pricing formula is determined by a “peaking factor” that takes the appropriate holiday volume, divides it by the weekly average residential and Ground Economy parcels shipped between Feb. 3 and March 1, 2020 — the last period of normalized volumes before the pandemic, and then multiplies that number by 100.
