UPS 2026 peak season surcharges: every fee and date

UPS published its 2026–27 U.S. peak season demand surcharges on August 26, 2026. They arrive in two waves: size- and handling-triggered fees begin September 27, 2026, and the per-package service fees begin October 25, 2026. Both hit their maximum from November 22 to December 26, 2026, then step back down and end on January 16, 2027. Every amount below is charged per package, on top of the normal transportation charge and any surcharge that already applied.

UPS uses the terms Demand Surcharge, Peak/Demand Surcharge and Peak Surcharge interchangeably; they are the same program.

Per-package demand surcharges by service

These apply from October 25, 2026 through January 16, 2027.

Size and handling demand surcharges

These start four weeks earlier, on September 27, 2026, and run to January 16, 2027. They apply to all U.S. domestic shipments regardless of service.

Note the four-week gap. From September 27 to October 24 a UPS package can carry Additional Handling, Large Package or Over Maximum demand surcharges but no service-level adder at all. If your packaging is right-sized, your first peak dollar is not spent until October 25.

The table above is the schedule for ordinary shippers. It is not the whole program, and this is the part third-party summaries routinely drop. FedEx runs an equivalent programme, so this is not a reason to prefer one carrier; it is a reason to check which schedule you are actually on before you model either.

If you are billed for more than 20,000 packages in any single week after October 2025, UPS moves you onto a separate Higher Volume Shipper schedule for Ground Residential, Ground Saver, Next Day Air Residential and All Other Air Residential packages. Once you cross that aggregate threshold, the higher schedule applies until further notice, across all of those service levels.

On the higher schedule the surcharge is indexed to how far above your own baseline you ship in a given week. Your baseline is your average weekly volume for that service level in June 2026 (May 31 through June 27, 2026). If your average weekly volume from August 30 to September 26, 2026 comes in below 80% of that June figure, UPS uses the later, lower period as your baseline instead.

Amounts shown are for the November 22 to December 26, 2026 maximum window. The October 25 to November 21 and December 27 to January 16 windows use the same tier ladder with lower entry rates: $0.50 rather than $0.75 for the ground services and $1.35 rather than $2.50 for air, with tiers above 105% of baseline unchanged.

Three things follow from this that matter more than the headline numbers:

• The tier applies to every package, not just the excess. If you ship 175% of your baseline in a week on Ground Residential, every Ground Residential package that week is assessed at $2.65, not only the ones above 150%.
• Commercial air is flat. Notice that the two commercial air rows do not scale at all. The volume indexing is aimed at residential e-commerce surges, not at business-to-business freight.
• Your baseline was set in June. There is nothing you can do about it now, but it explains why two shippers with identical December volume can see very different bills. The one that had a slow June is penalised for growing into peak.

Affiliated and related accounts are aggregated at UPS's discretion when the 20,000-package threshold is assessed, so a multi-entity operation should not assume it sits under the line just because no single account does.

FedEx has the same mechanism. Its Demand Residential Delivery Charge uses the same 20,000-package weekly trigger on residential and Ground Economy volume, indexes against a June 1 to 28, 2026 baseline with a two-week lag, and runs $1.70 to $8.00 per package on Ground and Home Delivery and $3.05 to $9.35 on Express. FedEx says it is assessed on top of the ordinary Residential Delivery Charge and that a contracted discount or cap on that charge does not apply to it. The practical consequence is that neither carrier's headline residential number, $0.75 at UPS or $0.80 at FedEx, describes what a fast-growing e-commerce shipper actually pays in December. If you are anywhere near 20,000 residential packages in a week, model both volume schedules, not the flat tables.

Put the two published 2026 schedules side by side and the striking thing is how little separates them.

The windows are a day apart as well: UPS size fees begin September 27 and FedEx September 28; UPS service fees begin October 25 and FedEx October 26; UPS ends January 16 and FedEx January 17.

So the headline fees are within pennies of each other, and choosing a carrier on the surcharge is choosing on the smallest variable in the equation. The decision is the base rate.

Here is the same worked example the 2026 peak surcharge hub uses. A 10 lb package in a 16 × 14 × 12 in box, NYC to Dallas (Zone 5), residential. On June 22, 2026 the ShipWave Parcel Rate Index quoted that exact package at FedEx Ground $18.31, UPS Ground $24.70, USPS Ground Advantage $22.23, commercial rates pulled live on a single day.

• Shipped December 1 on UPS: the Ground Residential demand surcharge is $0.75. The box is well inside Additional Handling thresholds, so nothing else attaches. Total peak cost: $0.75, about 3.0% on that base rate.
• Shipped December 1 on FedEx: $0.80, about 4.4% on its base rate.

The spread between those two carriers on the same box on the same day was $6.39, roughly eight times either peak surcharge. Across the full index the same-box ground spread averaged 129%. That is the honest shape of peak season for a small or mid-size shipper: the surcharge is real and it compounds at volume, but for a normal well-packed parcel it is dwarfed by which carrier you happened to pick.

The two places that stops being true are the volume tiers, where a high-growth residential shipper can be paying $8.00 per package rather than $0.75 at either carrier, and Additional Handling, where a single badly specified carton costs more than fifteen residential adders.

Price your own boxes across all three carriers before the surcharge lands. Start a free ShipWave account and compare USPS, UPS and FedEx side by side. Free, no card.

UPS peak fees split cleanly into two groups, and only one of them responds to anything you do between now and September 27.

Dimension-triggered, and therefore avoidable. Additional Handling at $11.90, the Large Package Surcharge at $117.50 and Over Maximum Limits at $590.00 in the peak window are all triggered by how the package is built: a longest side or second-longest side over threshold, a length-plus-girth total, an actual weight threshold, or packaging that is not fully encased in corrugate. These start September 27, four weeks before the service fees, so the packaging work has the earliest deadline. Check a carton against the criteria with the surcharge checker, read the UPS Additional Handling criteria in full, and confirm how length plus girth is measured before you commit to peak packaging.

One more reason to re-measure this year specifically: USPS moved to a 139 dimensional divisor with round-up on July 12, 2026. Boxes that were dimensionally comfortable in the spring may be billing heavier now on every carrier, and a package that gains a billed inch can also cross a UPS Additional Handling threshold. Re-run your top SKUs through the dimensional weight calculator.

Service-attached, and therefore only re-shoppable. The Ground Residential, Ground Saver and Air adders attach to the service you selected. No packaging change removes them. The only lever is whether that service, on that lane, at that weight, is still the lowest total landed cost with the peak amount applied, and the answer changes by zone and by week. If you are re-shopping economy residential specifically, UPS Ground Saver vs FedEx Ground Economy is the relevant comparison, and both sides now have a published 2026 peak adder: $0.75 on UPS Ground Saver against $4.05 on FedEx Ground Economy in the maximum window. That is the largest single gap between the two carriers' 2026 schedules, and it runs in UPS's favour.

Consolidation is the third lever and the most under-used. Peak fees are charged per package, so two boxes to one address in the peak window pay the residential adder twice, and if either trips Additional Handling the penalty doubles too. Combining orders reduces the count of fees rather than the size of them, which is the only kind of saving that compounds against the volume tiers.

UPS, primary: ups.com/peaksurcharge, the shortlink UPS itself directs shippers to, which resolves to the UPS Demand Surcharges document headed “August 26, 2026 Update.” Read directly on September 3, 2026. Every amount and every date on this page is taken from that document. Where UPS prints a range rather than a single figure, we reproduce the range.

What we deliberately do not print. Some third-party summaries of the August 26 announcement add international surge fees to the 2026–27 peak table. Those do not appear on the UPS demand surcharge document; UPS publishes Surge Emergency Fees as a separate schedule on a separate update cycle. We are not going to merge two documents into one table, so international surge fees are out of scope for this page. Year-over-year percentage comparisons are also omitted: the 2025–26 document has been replaced at its own URL, so we cannot re-read the prior figures on a UPS document, and we will not publish a percentage we cannot source.

Cross-checked against the FedEx figures on our FedEx 2026 peak season surcharge page, which were read on fedex.com on August 25, 2026, and the USPS holiday temporary prices on the 2026 peak surcharge hub.

Rate examples come from the ShipWave Parcel Rate Index, a dated cross-carrier quoted-rate study pulled June 22, 2026. They are quoted commercial rates on one day, not a guarantee. Your rate depends on your origin, dimensions, service and agreement.

UPS states that demand surcharges are subject to change and that demand periods may be extended or otherwise changed, and it asks shippers to check ups.com/peaksurcharge before tendering shipments. This page is updated whenever UPS publishes or amends the schedule, and the modified date at the top moves with it.