At a glance
Share of Royal Mail consignments that arrived at the addressee on or before the contracted service day. Computed across every shipment with a delivered scan in the period, against the Royal Mail aim-to-deliver date for that service code (Tracked 24 = next working day, Tracked 48 = within two working days, Special Delivery = 1pm next working day, 1st / 2nd class untracked = aim-only, no contractual SLA).
Calculation
Calculated automatically from your Royal Mail data. See the At a glance summary above for what the metric tracks and the worked example below for a typical reading.Worked example
A UK DTC homewares brand based in Manchester, around 4,200 outbound parcels per week, dual-carrier strategy: 60 percent Royal Mail Tracked 48 (the cost-sensitive default), 40 percent Evri ParcelShop (used for chunky home accessories where Evri’s per-kilo rate is cheaper). Reading taken at 09:00 BST on 12 Mar 26 for the trailing 30 days (10 Feb 26 to 11 Mar 26). Royal Mail leg only:
The card reads 96.3 percent on the dial, the alert at
<95% is not tripped. Five things to notice:
- Tracked 48 sets the headline. It is 84 percent of volume; everything else is rounding. If Tracked 48 dips, the dial dips. Pair with Tracked24 Service Day Promise to isolate the premium leg, the Tracked 24 SLA is contractually tighter and a 94.5 percent reading there is below Royal Mail’s published 93 percent floor but worth a service-credit conversation.
- The cost story is the other half of the picture. Compare against the Evri leg: Evri ParcelShop delivers at around 92 to 94 percent OTD for this same merchant at roughly £2.10 per parcel. The brand explicitly accepts a 4-point OTD hit on the Evri half in exchange for a 39 percent unit-cost saving. That trade is the merchant’s call, not ours.
- Same-period Evri OTD will read lower. Do not compare a single carrier’s OTD rate to a target without context; compare it to the merchant’s own historical baseline and to the alternative carrier they could be using.
- The “rate suddenly degraded” debug case. During the CWU industrial action window from August 2022 through April 2023, this same card would have read 71 to 82 percent for many merchants on Royal Mail-only weeks, and dropped as low as 52 percent during national strike days. The pattern was not “carrier broken”, it was “carrier on strike”, and the action was to temporarily shift volume to Evri / DPD / Yodel, then reset thresholds when service resumed. The card does not auto-detect industrial action; an operations playbook should.
- Special Delivery 1pm overperforms. It is the most expensive Royal Mail product (£8.10 here) and the network treats it as priority. The 98.9 percent rate is consistent with Royal Mail’s published 99 percent SLA. If a brand sells fragile or high-value items, this is the lever to upsell at checkout.
Sibling cards merchants should reference together
On-time delivery is a customer-facing outcome metric. Pair it with these to diagnose root cause:Reconciling against the vendor’s own dashboard
Where to look in Royal Mail’s own portal: Royal Mail Click & Drop → Reports → Delivery Performance. Smaller merchants live in Click & Drop; larger merchants on a Business Account also see Royal Mail Business Account → Performance → Service Performance Report, which is the official monthly SLA report Royal Mail publishes for credit-claim purposes. The closest like-for-like view is All Tracked Services, Last 30 Days, Outbound Only. The Click & Drop report breaks out by service code; toggle Tracked 24 / Tracked 48 / Special Delivery to compare per-tier. Why our number may legitimately differ from Royal Mail’s report:
Cross-connector reconciliation:
Known limitations / merchant FAQs
Royal Mail vs Evri, which should I send with? Different jobs. Royal Mail wins on consumer trust (“the post”), reliability outside peak periods, and small-letter / large-letter rates which Evri does not compete with. Evri wins on per-parcel cost for anything above 1kg, on door-to-door speed in dense urban postcodes, and on ParcelShop drop-off optionality. The healthy DTC pattern is to use both, Royal Mail Tracked 48 as the everyday default for letterbox-friendly items, Evri ParcelShop for chunkier parcels where the cost saving is meaningful. Read this card alongsidehermes_evri.her_otd_rate, and Avg Shipping Cost to see the cost-vs-reliability trade.
What do I do when Royal Mail is on strike?
The CWU industrial action of August 2022 to April 2023 caused multi-day national stoppages; OTD on those days dropped from a typical 96 percent to 50 to 60 percent, and the recovery backlog took 2 to 3 weeks. The playbook: (1) watch the CWU strike calendar and route volume to Evri / DPD / Yodel for known stoppage dates, (2) update checkout copy to set later expectations (“delivery may take an extra 2 to 3 days due to industrial action”), (3) suppress automated “where is my order” emails for the affected window, (4) re-baseline OTD thresholds in Vortex IQ for the strike weeks so you do not get alerted on every reading. Do not re-baseline permanently; reset when service resumes.
Why does the card show 96 percent for Tracked 48 but my customer-service tickets say everyone is complaining?
Three usual reasons. (1) Untracked is the silent majority. If your store is 60 percent Tracked 48 / 40 percent untracked 1st class, the card only sees the 60 percent tracked half. Untracked OTD is meaningfully worse and drives most of the WISMO ticket volume. (2) The 4 percent late tail is concentrated on specific lanes. Highlands & Islands, BFPO, and Channel Islands typically run 6 to 10 points lower than mainland UK; if your customer mix skews to those postcodes the felt experience is worse than the headline. Use OTD by Route to confirm. (3) “Late” in customer-perception terms is “later than I expected”, not “later than Royal Mail’s aim”. Customers anchor on checkout copy, not service codes. Tighten the checkout language and the perception-gap narrows.
Tracked vs untracked, which OTD should I be measuring?
Both, separately. Tracked OTD is the contractual measurement Royal Mail will give service credits against. Untracked OTD is the customer-felt measurement that drives reorder rate and review sentiment. The card’s headline is tracked-only because untracked has no delivered scan; the Untracked Aim Compliance breakdown estimates untracked from the aimed-by date plus customer-confirmed delivery (via ticket / review keywords). Treat the two as separate dials.
My store sends both Royal Mail Tracked 48 AND Special Delivery 1pm. How do I read the aggregate?
The aggregate hides the spread. Tracked 48 will be 96 to 98 percent; Special Delivery 1pm will be 99+ percent. Aggregating gives you a number that hides any drop in either. Always look at the per-service breakdown alongside the aggregate; the per-service is the actionable reading.
Why does the “today” reading bounce around?
Volume. A merchant doing 400 tracked parcels a day has a 0.25 percentage-point step per shipment in the daily reading; a single late delivery moves the dial visibly. Use the rolling 30-day reading for trend, the daily reading only for outage detection. Below 200 daily consignments, the daily reading is too noisy to act on.
My OTD just dropped 8 points this morning, what is the playbook?
In order of likelihood: (1) Check the CWU calendar and Royal Mail service updates (service status), national or regional industrial action accounts for most sudden multi-point drops. (2) Check Exception Rate, a spike in “address invalid” or “held at delivery office” exceptions points to upstream label-data issues, not carrier failure. (3) Check OTD by Route, if the drop is concentrated in 2 or 3 postcodes the issue is local depot disruption; if it is uniform the issue is network-wide. (4) Check Tracked24 Service Day Promise separately, if Tracked 24 holds but Tracked 48 drops, Royal Mail is prioritising the premium tier (normal during peak). (5) Open a ticket with Royal Mail Business Customer Services if (1) to (4) do not explain it, the network has likely had an incident.
How should I plan for Q4 / BFCM / Christmas peak?
Royal Mail’s last-recommended-posting dates are published mid-October each year; expect OTD to drop 3 to 8 points across all tracked services from 1 December to 23 December. Three actions: (1) tighten checkout copy (“order by 18 December for delivery before Christmas, after that delivery is not guaranteed”), (2) shift budget-sensitive volume to Evri or DPD where capacity is less constrained, (3) negotiate Special Delivery 1pm capacity holds with your Royal Mail account team for the 19 to 23 December window if you sell time-sensitive gift items.
Why does Shopify show “shipped” but Royal Mail tracking is empty?
Two-stage handover. Shopify marks the order shipped when the label is generated (fulfilment.created); Royal Mail does not show a tracking event until the parcel hits the first sortation scan (collection or delivery-office handover, typically 2 to 24 hours after label print). If the gap exceeds 48 hours the parcel was probably never handed over (label printed but parcel sat on the warehouse floor), check Collection vs Post-Office Handover Failure Rate.