rrecs explained

1. From minutes to evaluated hours to pay

Official

RRECS times everything you do, in minutes. Six delivery days of that adds up to your base hours. Base hours plus your route class (H, J, or K) give you evaluated hours, and evaluated hours set your pay.

Between full evaluations, base hours don't just sit still: base hours = current weekly evaluation + adjustment factor. The weekly evaluation updates continuously from your daily counts. The adjustment factor covers small route changes so nobody has to remap the route every time something shifts. More on that in section 6.

Want that as an actual paycheck number? The paycheck verifier already has the pay tables built in.

2. Why one missed scan barely matters, but a habit does

Official

Most RRECS counts are averaged over 52 weeks, so your evaluation reflects a full year of mail, not one bad day.

That's why one missed scan barely matters and a habit does. Miss it once and it's spread across 52 weeks, so it barely moves the average. Miss it every day, every week, and the average drops by the full amount.

Say you deliver a large parcel to the door but scan it as delivered to the mailbox instead. The door delivery is worth 3.63 minutes, the mailbox delivery 0.4038, so that one wrong scan costs you 3.22 minutes. Do it once and it's about 0.06 minutes a week once it's averaged in. Do it five times a week, every week, and that's 16.11 minutes a week, gone.

Two things skip the straight 52-week average. Random letters, and the locally worked part of random flats, come from a two-week mail count instead. The DPS percentage also uses 52-week averages, but it only gets recalculated twice a year.

3. Volume factor

Unofficial

The volume factor is a single number for your route: minutes per address. Add up every standard that scales with mail volume, divide by the route's address count, and that's it. Add or remove addresses later and the adjustment is just that number times however many changed.

The contract leans on it too. Under Article 9.2.C.10, an interim adjustment equals (box allowance plus volume factor) times the boxes added or removed since your last evaluation, plus the change in miles times the mileage factor.

Where to find yours

It's on the Route Evaluation Report the Postal Service gives the union, and in vacant-route bid notices.

What isn't published

None of the documents say which standards are volume related. Don't assume parcels are in there, and don't assume they're left out.

What individual pieces are worth

You can still compare one piece of mail to another, even without the official list. Each row below is built from the standards in the last column.

A mailbox parcel is worth about 35 DPS letters, and a door parcel about 310. What that adds up to depends on how many of each your route actually gets.

One wrinkle: the guide contradicts itself here. S036 is 0.1671 in its chart and 0.1617 in its own text; this table uses the chart number (0.3984 if you use the text value instead). The guide's own door-parcel example also rounds each piece to a tenth of a second and lands on 3.62 minutes. Add the same standards up without rounding and you get 3.6261.

4. Coverage factor

Unofficial

Most RRECS standards pay you per address served. If every eligible address counted regardless of whether you actually served it, the evaluation would pay for work that never happened. Coverage is the fix: an estimate of how many addresses you actually served each day.

How it's calculated is still being negotiated. One thing is already settled: any day your route gets credit for a boxholder or walk-sequenced mailing, that day counts as 100% coverage. Those credits come from four scans: LETTERSBOXHOLDER, FLATSBOXHOLDER, LETTERSWSS and FLATSWSS.

Here's what we actually know about how coverage gets measured. This comes from an internal USPS update, not the guide or the contract:

• Daily coverage is averaged over a full year and used to calculate box service time. It doesn't touch dismounts or collection compartments.
• Regular boxes (curbside, other and sidewalk share one figure). For single-post curbside boxes: a stop counts if a GPS breadcrumb is found near the mailstop you plotted on your route map. No breadcrumbs that day? It falls back to whether Informed Visibility shows a mail piece for that address.
• Centralized boxes (CBU and centralized): Informed Visibility only, no breadcrumbs. An address counts if the data shows mail for it. Example: 400 addresses with 300 having mail is 75% coverage that day.
• A RADAR report shows regular and central box coverage daily, for the previous day, with about a three-day lag.

What a 100% day is worth

This is an illustration, not a published figure. Take 600 curb boxes on a two-bundle route. Box time at full coverage is 600 × 0.2027 = 121.6 minutes a day; at 70% coverage it's 85.1. A day at 100% is worth about 36.5 more minutes than a day at 70%. Coverage is averaged over a year, so one 100% day alone barely moves anything. What actually shows up is a 100% day every week, worth about 36.5 minutes a week. That assumes box time scales in a straight line with coverage, which is our assumption, not a published formula.

What's still unclear

How close a breadcrumb has to be to count, how boxes sharing one post get handled, how other and sidewalk boxes are measured, and whether this method is even what's used for evaluations.

5. Bundle types and the DPS rules

Official

Your route falls into one-bundle, two-bundle, or three-bundle, depending on the DPS mail it gets: no DPS mail is one-bundle, DPS letters only is two-bundle, DPS letters and flats is three-bundle. Every box type has its own standard for each level.

Take curb boxes as the example:

A few DPS rules worth knowing:

• DPS letters only count as DPS when the route is certified and gets more than 400 pieces that day. Under 400, the day counts as cased DPS instead, at S009 (0.0294 minutes a piece).
• Two DPS runs in a day? The casing standard applies to the smaller one.
• Address verification (S144 for letters, S145 for flats) applies to every letter and flat except boxholders, on top of box time.

6. The adjustment factor and its ten items

Official

Routes don't get remapped every time something small changes. Mapping takes weeks of GPS data, so the adjustment factor (AF) covers the gap instead.

AF is recalculated when any of these change:

1. Route miles
2. Regular boxes
3. Central boxes
4. Dismounts
5. Dismount distances
6. Inter-unit mail, low volume
7. Inter-unit mail, high volume
8. Collection points (blue boxes)
9. Collection compartments
10. Mail volume, calculated when regular or centralized boxes change, using the volume factor from section 3

AF changes each pay period by the net effect of all ten, running as a total since your route was last mapped. How often base hours reset, and what triggers a reset, is still being negotiated.

The contract has its own separate trigger: once your evaluation shifts by a full hour (60 minutes) or more, the Postal Service has to promptly fix both the evaluation and the pay.

7. Actual-time items

Official

Some activities vary too much route to route to get an engineered standard, so RRECS just times what you actually do: loading the vehicle, end-of-shift duties, Express Mail deviations, and safety and service talks.

The first three are timed with scans:

• Loading the vehicle: STARTLOADVEH to ENDLOADVEH.
• End of shift: RETURN2DU to PMCASING, or to CLOCKOUT if you're done for the day.
• Express deviations: STARTDEVIATION to ENDDEVIATION.

You get credited the average of your own recorded days over 52 weeks. Your recorded time already includes normal interruptions, so the only extra allowance on top is 3.23% for personal time. End-of-shift gets none at all.

8. Drive time

Official

RRECS builds drive time out of intervals, the distance from one mailstop, traffic control point, or turn to the next. Each interval gets a speed pulled from a 47-range drive speed matrix: short hops are slow, long stretches are fast.

A few examples, computed straight from the matrix:

• A 50 ft interval is 50 × 0.00153 = 0.0765 minutes, about 4.6 seconds a day or 27.5 seconds a week.
• A mile with no stops is one 5,280 ft interval: 1.53 minutes a day, 9.19 a week.
• A mile with a stop every 100 ft is 53 intervals: 6.78 minutes a day, 40.7 a week.
• A mile with a stop every 528 ft is 10 intervals: 3.54 minutes a day, 21.23 a week.

For comparison, the old system gave every route mile a flat 12 minutes a week, no matter how it was driven.

Traffic control points work the same way, credited per mapped occurrence, once a day. Three stop signs is 3 × 6 = 18 passes at 0.0499 minutes each, or 0.8982 minutes, about 54 seconds a week.