Who gets the money from my stamp when I mail a letter or a postcard (via Mailform or Docupost for example) from the UK to the USA or vice versa? If it’s the UK, how does the airline or the postman in the US profit on my letter? Also, Are they obliged to deliver it for free once it reaches the other country because they receive no direct payment from me? How can international mail help recipient countries make money?
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The post office in the country of origin *of purchase* buys the stamps for *x* dollars and they sell them for *y* dollars. The post office where you buy the stamp realizes the profit
IIRC most ‘regular’ postal services (ie US postal) are government funded, so they’re pretty well taken care of. All the value added things they do (selling packaging material etc) is just extra
International postage regulations are overseen by a UN agency (although countries of the world established postage cooperation long before the UN existed).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Universal_Postal_Union
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In the case of standard letters, it is true that every letter is delivered free of charge by the receiving country.
The sending postal service keeps all of the money.
However, some countries send vastly more mail than they receive, which is unfair to the receiving country — they have to process all the incoming mail but received none of the revenue.
So there is an international agreement where between country pairs, the country that sent more mail has to compensate the receiving country by a specified amount. This is called [terminal dues](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Universal_Postal_Union#Terminal_dues).
For example, due to e-commerce China currently send much more mail to the US than the opposite flow, so China Post has to pay terminal dues to the US Postal Service.
**TL;DR**: the terminal dues arrangement has been tweaked many times since it was in was introduced in 1969 but the concept remains basically the same:
* Each country keeps all of the postage revenue, but they compensate each other when there are volume imbalances.
Most national mail services have an arrangement with the other countries where they handle incoming mail for no charge. They usually find that the costs on both sides balance out so there is no point in cross charging.
This is (or was) also the case for roaming mobile charging. If you temporarily move out of the area covered by your phone network and connect to a different provider (e.g. on holiday) , then you keep paying your original provider and the other network doesn’t charge. I used to work for BT, Vodafone and EE and we never transferred charges between companies. Somebody worked out that the costs generally balanced out and doing the paperwork would just incur an admin cost that wasnt necessary.
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Whomever you bought the stamp from earns the profit.
When it comes to international post, most countries have reciprocal agreements – we agree to accept post from other countries postal systems, and in return they accept post from ours.
In some cases where there is a large imbalance in the amount of mail being sent, there can be additional fees paid by one postal system to another, so they will effectively earn a certain percentage of the postage on an envelope.
Check out this super relevant episode of Planet Money: https://www.npr.org/sections/money/2018/08/01/634737852/episode-857-the-postal-illuminati
It is the story of a person discovering and standing up to the UPU.
The Universal Postal Union is part of the United Nations, and it’s made up of representatives from the Postal Services of 192 countries.
What the UPU has created is almost like a reverse trade barrier. And this is true for virtually every country in the world. There is often an incentive to buy something that ships from another country instead of your own.
The quick answer is that your postage pays your local postal service, but they subcontract the destination postal service. Every country pair has their own arrangement, and typically theres only one actual cash transfer direction since that’s the direction more mail is going.
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