BONN (dpa-AFX) – In Germany, never before have so many consumers complained about Deutsche Post (DHL Group (ex Deutsche Post)) and its competitors as last year. As the Federal Network Agency announced, it received 55,395 complaints about postal services, a quarter more than in 2024. At that time there were 44,406.
It’s about letters and packages that arrive damaged or end up with the wrong addressee. Consumers also complain that they had to wait too long for their shipments. A small part of the requests to speak are about branch opening times and mailboxes. According to the Federal Network Agency, around 90 percent of the complaints relate to the logistics group DHL, which operates domestically as Deutsche Post and is the market leader. DPD is one of the competitors.
Billions in shipments every year
In Germany, 9.4 billion letters and 4.5 billion parcels were sent last year; the proportion of complaints is small compared to this total volume. “The postal service in Germany works very well,” said Deutsche Post in response to the increase in complaints. For every million shipments transported, there would be around four complaints. “This shows very clearly that there is no structural quality problem.” But we know that not everything can always work out 100 percent and we take every complaint seriously.
According to the yellow giant, some of the complaints that refer to the postal service in citizens’ submissions concern completely different companies. A company spokesman reports 800,000 so-called lost and found letters. These are letters that were posted to the wrong addressee and then thrown into a postal mailbox for further delivery to their correct destination.
These 800,000 lost and found letters were delivered incorrectly by a competitor’s deliverers and the recipients mistakenly assumed that the post office had made the mistake, according to the post office spokesman. “There will probably have been a number of complaints about this.”
The company spokesman does not mention the number of self-found lost letters – i.e. how many letters were accidentally thrown into the wrong mailbox by postal workers and these letters were then returned to the delivery system via postal mailboxes. Of course that could also happen, but this number is not collected.
Demand is changing: fewer letters and more parcels
The level of complaints is significantly higher than it was a few years ago. In 2021, the Federal Network Agency received around 15,000 complaints, and in 2022 the number shot up to around 43,000. At the time, the Post spoke of “local problems” and justified this with high Covid sickness rates and a tight labor market. But there was also criticism that the staffing level was too thin. At the time, the postal service emphasized that it had taken appropriate measures, but the number of complaints did not decrease significantly in the years that followed.
The post office is changing: parcel volumes are increasing because people are ordering more and more goods online, and letter volumes are decreasing because people and companies are relying more and more on digital communication. This means that DHL has to change its delivery network. The post office says we are undergoing the biggest renovation in its history. The entire infrastructure must be modernized and geared towards a digitally operating society. In recent years, several billion euros have already been invested in modern, quieter and cleaner infrastructure and modern operating resources.
Many people probably get upset and don’t complain
In politics, the development of the number of complaints is met with concern. “The trend has to be taken seriously,” says the economic policy spokesman for the SPD parliamentary group, Sebastian Roloff. “It is an indication that mail quality is no longer as important to the postal service as it used to be and that the postal service needs to focus more on universal service again, i.e. the supply of letters and parcels.” Roloff advocates that the Federal Network Agency step in as a supervisory authority and carry out checks for local deficits more frequently than before. The post office has legal obligations that it must comply with.
Roloff admits that the number of complaints is small compared to the billions of shipments that are delivered in Germany every year. “But only a small proportion of those who wait in vain or for a very long time for a letter are likely to bother to file a complaint with the Federal Network Agency – many others are probably annoyed and then simply swallow their anger without complaining.”
An amendment to the law came into force at the beginning of 2025, and since then the post office has had more time to transport letters. While she previously had to have delivered 80 percent of the items posted today on the next working day, she now has to deliver 95 percent of the items on the third working day after they were posted. It may be that consumers are annoyed about a longer waiting time than before, even though the delivery is only due to this legal relaxation. 99 percent must be delivered on the fourth working day after posting.
High level of complaints again this year
And what happens next? In addition to the year 2025, the Federal Network Agency also published the first figures for 2026 on its website; in the first quarter, 20,316 critical comments on postal services were received. If things continued like this, the previous year’s figure would be significantly exceeded this year. However, the monthly number of complaints has recently fallen – while there were 8,742 in January, there were only 4,768 in March.
In addition, the complaint numbers from 2026 are not one-to-one comparable with the numbers from 2025 because the methodology has changed: Last year, consumers still had to submit their complaints in writing on the network agency’s website. A complaint tool called Defect Reporter has now been launched, in which the answer options are given – you just have to click on them and don’t have to put them into words yourself.
The Post fears that the new multiple choice system will make submitting complaints so easy that the proportion of irrelevant requests to speak will increase and the statistics will be inflated to a certain extent./wdw/DP/stw
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