Royal Mail parcel prices rise on 5 October. Franked prices don’t.

September 2026 · 10 min read · Angler Fulfilment

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On 5 October 2026 Royal Mail puts up the stamp price of parcels. Not letters. A First Class letter stays at £1.80 and a Second Class letter stays at 91p. Parcels, and the tracked and guaranteed services that sit alongside them, go up by between 35p and £1.45 an item, which is roughly 8%.

That much has been reported widely. The part worth your attention has not: Mailmark franking prices are not changing on any format. Neither are account-contracted rates. The increase applies to the retail price, which means it lands on exactly one group: sellers who are still buying postage the way a member of the public buys postage.

What actually changes on 5 October

These are the headline parcel changes. Every figure below is the published price for a parcel up to 2kg.

Royal Mail Tracked, Signed For and Special Delivery Guaranteed are also affected. Letter and large-letter stamps are not. Nor is Mailmark franking, on any format at all.

So a Second Class small parcel bought with a stamp goes from £4.25 to £4.60, while the same parcel franked stays at £4.25. The two prices were identical before. From 5 October one of them is 8% higher for an identical journey by an identical van.

What it costs you, in your own numbers

Percentages are easy to shrug at. Here is the same increase expressed as money, for a seller sending mostly Second Class small parcels, the single most common shape in UK e-commerce.

That is 35p multiplied out, nothing cleverer. Send First Class instead and it is 45p, so add roughly 29% to every figure in that table. Send medium parcels and it is 55p or 65p.

The number that tends to land is the annual one. A seller doing 300 parcels a month is looking at £1,260 a year of additional postage for shipping precisely what they shipped last year, to precisely the same people, at precisely the same speed.

Three ways not to pay it, and the honest break-even on each

1. Move to an Online Business Account

An OBA is Royal Mail’s account product, and account prices are contracted rather than retail. This is the direct answer to the increase for most sellers: the volume thresholds are lower than people assume, and it is the same collection, the same network and the same tracking. If you are sending a few hundred parcels a month with stamps or a retail Click & Drop login, this is the first call to make and it costs nothing to ask.

2. Frank your post

Franking holds its price through this change, which is the whole point of the story. The honest caveat is that a franking machine is rented, not free, and the rental is a fixed monthly cost regardless of how little you send. Work out your own crossover: divide the monthly rental by 35p and that is roughly how many Second Class small parcels a month you need before franking pays for itself on this increase alone. Below that number it is a worse deal, and nobody selling you a machine will volunteer that.

3. Let someone else’s account carry it

A fulfilment provider buys carriage on contracted rates across everything it ships, and those rates do not move on 5 October either. We should be straight about our interest here: we are a 3PL, so this is the option that involves paying us. It is worth saying plainly that it only makes sense if the postage saving plus the labour you get back exceeds the pick-and-pack fee, and at 100 parcels a month it very often does not. We have written separately about where that line actually falls, including the volumes at which the answer is honestly “keep doing it yourself”.

The five things worth doing before 5 October

1. Find out what you are actually paying. Not the price you think you are paying. Open last month’s postage spend and divide it by the number of parcels. Sellers are routinely 20 to 30p out on this.
2. Check which side of the change you are on. If you buy postage through a retail Click & Drop login without an account behind it, you are on the retail side and the increase applies to you.
3. Re-measure your top ten products, boxed. Measure the parcel you actually send, taped and filled, not the product. The small-parcel limit is where most avoidable money goes, and it costs more than this entire price rise.
4. Repost your shipping charges. If you offer free delivery over a threshold, 35p a parcel comes straight off your margin unless you move the threshold. Decide deliberately rather than discovering it in November.
5. Do it before peak. Whatever you change, change it in September. Nobody should be switching carrier accounts in the third week of November, and peak planning starts earlier than most people think.

Questions we have actually been asked

Does this affect letters and large letters?

No. First and Second Class letter and large-letter stamps are unchanged on 5 October. A First Class letter remains £1.80 and a Second Class letter remains 91p. If you ship flat items that genuinely post as large letters, this change does not touch you.

Is franking really unchanged, or just increasing by less?

Unchanged. Mailmark franking prices are not moving on any format on 5 October. That is what creates the gap: the retail price rises to meet a franked price that stays still, so the saving from franking a parcel becomes roughly 7 to 9% where before it was nothing.

I use Click & Drop. Am I affected?

It depends what sits behind it. Click & Drop used without a business account bills at retail prices, so yes. Click & Drop linked to an Online Business Account bills at your contracted account rates, so no. If you are unsure which you have, that is the single most valuable thing to check this month.

Should I just move to another carrier?

Possibly, but not because of 35p. Carrier choice should follow your parcel profile, your delivery promise and your returns experience, and switching carrier in the run-up to peak to save a few pence per parcel is how sellers end up with a worse Christmas. Fix your account type and your box sizes first; those are reversible and they are usually worth more.

When exactly does this take effect?

Monday 5 October 2026. Postage bought before that date at the current price is not affected retrospectively.

The point underneath all of this

Two sellers can ship the identical parcel to the identical address on the identical day and pay prices that differ by 8%, and the only difference between them is a piece of admin one of them did and the other did not. That was true before 5 October. It is simply more expensive to ignore afterwards.

If you want a second pair of eyes on your own numbers, send us what you are paying now and what you ship, and we will tell you which of the three routes above is actually cheaper for you, including when the answer is that you should stay exactly where you are.

Prices in this article are Royal Mail’s published rates for parcels up to 2kg, taking effect 5 October 2026, and were checked against multiple published sources on 5 September 2026. Royal Mail publishes its current tariff at royalmail.com/prices2026. Always confirm against your own account rates before making a decision.