A postal clerk or mail clerk's primary responsibilities include selling postal materials such as stamps, postcards, envelopes and sorting and preparing mail for delivery. You are expected to properly label, manage and sort out outgoing mail or packages into categories for easy delivery. Also, your job requires you to forward misdirected mail, keep concise records of all incoming mail and packages, and ensure concerned parties sign off on delivered mail. In addition, you are to notify the proper party about packages that could not be delivered and handle questions and complaints from customers regarding delivery problems, postage rates, and damaged or lost mail.
You need just a high school diploma to get a job as a postal clerk. Also, you must possess excellent organizational, interpersonal and verbal communication skills. You must be able to pay attention to detail and have basic knowledge of computer usage. The average yearly salary is $39,111 or $19 per hour.
How to Become a Postal Clerk
There is more than meets the eye when it comes to being a postal clerk. For example, did you know that they make an average of $15.72 an hour? That's $32,697 a year!
Between 2018 and 2028, the career is expected to grow -21% and produce -103,800 job opportunities across the U.S.
What Does a Postal Clerk Do
There are certain skills that many postal clerks have in order to accomplish their responsibilities. By taking a look through resumes, we were able to narrow down the most common skills for a person in this position. We discovered that a lot of resumes listed physical strength, customer-service skills and detail oriented.
How To Become a Postal Clerk
If you're interested in becoming a postal clerk, one of the first things to consider is how much education you need. We've determined that 35.6% of postal clerks have a bachelor's degree. In terms of higher education levels, we found that 4.0% of postal clerks have master's degrees. Even though some postal clerks have a college degree, it's possible to become one with only a high school degree or GED.
Choosing the right major is always an important step when researching how to become a postal clerk. When we researched the most common majors for a postal clerk, we found that they most commonly earn bachelor's degree degrees or high school diploma degrees. Other degrees that we often see on postal clerk resumes include associate degree degrees or diploma degrees.
You may find that experience in other jobs will help you become a postal clerk. In fact, many postal clerk jobs require experience in a role such as cashier. Meanwhile, many postal clerks also have previous career experience in roles such as customer service representative or sales associate.
Postal Clerk Career Paths
In addition to switching up your job search, it might prove helpful to look at a career path for your specific job. Now, what's a career path you ask? Well, it's practically a map that shows how you might advance from one job title to another. Our career paths are especially detailed with salary changes. So, for example, if you started out with the role of human resource specialist you might progress to a role such as human resources coordinator eventually. Later on in your career, you could end up with the title office manager.
Average Salary for a Postal Clerk
What Am I Worth?
Top Skills For a Postal Clerk
The skills section on your resume can be almost as important as the experience section, so you want it to be an accurate portrayal of what you can do. Luckily, we've found all of the skills you'll need so even if you don't have these skills yet, you know what you need to work on. Out of all the resumes we looked through, 17.4% of postal clerks listed customer service on their resume, but soft skills such as physical strength and customer-service skills are important as well.
Choose From 10+ Customizable Postal Clerk Resume templates
Zippia allows you to choose from different easy-to-use Postal Clerk templates, and provides you with expert advice. Using the templates, you can rest assured that the structure and format of your Postal Clerk resume is top notch. Choose a template with the colors, fonts & text sizes that are appropriate for your industry.
Postal Clerk Demographics
Postal Clerk Gender Distribution
After extensive research and analysis, Zippia's data science team found that:
- Among postal clerks, 52.8% of them are women, while 47.2% are men.
- The most common race/ethnicity among postal clerks is White, which makes up 60.9% of all postal clerks.
- The most common foreign language among postal clerks is Spanish at 57.9%.
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Best States For a Postal Clerk
Some places are better than others when it comes to starting a career as a postal clerk. The best states for people in this position are New Jersey, Oklahoma, Indiana, and Pennsylvania. Postal clerks make the most in New Jersey with an average salary of $33,420. Whereas in Oklahoma and Indiana, they would average $33,384 and $33,272, respectively. While postal clerks would only make an average of $33,121 in Pennsylvania, you would still make more there than in the rest of the country. We determined these as the best states based on job availability and pay. By finding the median salary, cost of living, and using the Bureau of Labor Statistics' Location Quotient, we narrowed down our list of states to these four.
1. Indiana
$33,272
Avg. Salary
2. Texas
$32,955
Avg. Salary
3. Michigan
$32,018
Avg. Salary
How Do Postal Clerk Rate Their Jobs?
Top Postal Clerk Employers
Most Common Employers For Postal Clerk
| Rank  | Company  | Average Salary  | Hourly Rate  | Job Openings  |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Jacksonville University | $53,403 | $25.67 | 3 |
| 2 | United Service Technologies | $42,301 | $20.34 | 6 |
| 3 | US Post Office | $32,697 | $15.72 | 487 |
| 4 | United States Marine Corps | $32,697 | $15.72 | 151 |
| 5 | USAF Police Alumni Association | $32,697 | $15.72 | 29 |
| 6 | Berry College | $32,697 | $15.72 | 8 |
| 7 | Vectrus | $31,695 | $15.24 | 9 |
| 8 | UPS | $31,007 | $14.91 | 4 |
| 9 | Williams Sonoma | $30,930 | $14.87 | 4 |
| 10 | US Air Conditioning Distributors | $30,888 | $14.85 | 53 |
Postal Clerk Videos
