% of Tracked24 / 1st-class consignments delivered next working day - the contracted Royal Mail premium-service promise.
At a glance
Share of Royal Mail Tracked 24 and 1st Class consignments that arrived at the addressee on the next working day after dispatch. This is Royal Mail’s contracted premium-service promise: handed over today, delivered tomorrow (Mon to Sat, excluding Sundays and bank holidays). The card isolates the next-day promise from the broader On-Time Delivery Rate, because the Tracked 24 contract carries a tighter SLA, a higher service-credit ceiling, and a more visible customer promise on the merchant’s PDP and checkout copy.
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 beauty brand, around 980 Tracked 24 consignments per week (premium next-day on items £25+), additional Tracked 48 volume not in scope here. Reading taken at 09:00 BST on 12 Mar 26 for the trailing 30 days (10 Feb 26 to 11 Mar 26).
The card reads 95.4 percent on the dial, the alert at
<95% is just clear. Five things to notice:
- Tracked 24 (TPN24) at 95.5 percent is the dial. It is 91 percent of next-day volume; the headline tracks it directly. Royal Mail’s published SLA floor is 93 percent; this account is comfortably above the floor but only just above the operational alert. A 1-point dip flips amber.
- TPS24 (Signature) overperforms at 97.5 percent. Signature-required consignments get prioritised in Royal Mail’s network because the delivery flow is more constrained (driver must hand over, not letterbox). Smaller volume, higher reliability. If the brand sells fragile or high-value items, push customers to the Signature uplift at checkout.
- 1st Class untracked at 87.1 percent looks bad but is not part of the contractual SLA. Royal Mail’s 1st Class is “aim-only” (next working day intended, not guaranteed). The 87 percent here is roughly in line with Royal Mail’s published 1st Class aim performance (~85 to 90 percent steady-state). It pulls the aggregate down but does not create a service-credit conversation.
- The 194 misses (out of 4,200 next-day consignments) are the customer-experience loss. Each is a customer who paid the Tracked 24 uplift at checkout (typically £4.50 to £5.50) and got the parcel a day late. Most do not complain; a small share generate WISMO tickets. The bigger downstream cost is the marketing damage when “next-day delivery” copy on the PDP loses credibility.
- The “rate suddenly degraded” debug case. During the 2022-2023 CWU industrial action this card would have read 60 to 75 percent on affected weeks (full national strike days dropped it to 30 to 45 percent). The pattern was strikes, not network breakage. Today (2026), the post-strike recovery has been complete since spring 2024; expect 95+ percent steady-state for any account in the South of England, 92 to 95 percent for the Midlands and North, and 85 to 92 percent for Highlands and Islands.
Sibling cards merchants should reference together
The Tracked 24 SLA is the premium-tier sub-slice of overall delivery performance. Pair it with these:Reconciling against the vendor’s own dashboard
Where to look in Royal Mail’s own portal: Royal Mail Click & Drop → Reports → Delivery Performance, filter by Service = Tracked 24. For Business Account customers, Royal Mail Business Account → Performance → Service Performance Report, the official monthly SLA report Royal Mail publishes for service-credit purposes. The closest like-for-like view is Tracked 24, Last 30 Days, Outbound Only. Royal Mail’s portal also exposes the per-account credit-claim eligibility view; that figure aligns with this card minus any aim-only 1st Class slice. Why our number may legitimately differ from Royal Mail’s portal:
Internal identity (within Royal Mail):
royal_mail_tracked24_sla ⊆ roy_otd_rate (filtered to next-day services). The Tracked 24 SLA rate is a tighter sub-slice of the aggregate OTD; if the two diverge by more than 5 points, check whether Royal Mail is prioritising one tier over another (rare, but happens during peak).
Cross-connector reconciliation:
Documentation cross-reference (other UK premium next-day services). Premium next-day SLA cards exist on most UK shipping connectors but with different definitions. Use only for documentation navigation.
apc.apc_nextday_9am_sla(premium time-definite)dpd.dpd_predict_slot_accuracy(premium 1-hour window)