UPS keeps a Letter rate in its own published rate guide for all three Next Day Air speeds. We have never seen one of those rows appear in a live checkout on this site, so on 2026-08-30 we ran a true letter — a single signed page, 4 oz, well under the eight-ounce line — through our own quote engine to check, then went and read what UPS itself prints for the same product.
Type your own envelope's weight and route to see which five services actually come back.
A single signed contract page in a document envelope, measured at 9 × 6 × 0.1 in and 4 oz — under half the eight-ounce line the Letter rate depends on — went through our production checkout from Newark, NJ 07102 to Seattle, WA 98101. All five rates it returned are below, unedited.
| Carrier | Service | Price | Window |
|---|---|---|---|
| USPS | Ground Advantage | $8.46 | 4-5 business days |
| FedEx | Ground Economy | $10.48 | 9-10 business days |
| USPS | Priority Mail | $14.40 | 3-4 business days |
| UPS | 3 Day Select | $16.32 | 3-4 business days |
| UPS | 2nd Day Air | $16.37 | 2-3 business days |
No Next Day Air row, at a weight that qualifies for the Letter rate specifically. Our checkout surfaces the best-value services for whatever you type in, and at 4 oz the field filled up with cheaper options before any overnight tier could compete. That is a fact about what our engine returns, not proof UPS declined to offer next-day service on this lane.
UPS's own 2026 Rate & Service Guide, downloaded from ups.com and read 2026-08-30, carries a dedicated Letter row at the top of each of its three Next Day Air zone tables. These are the numbers a live checkout on this site has never returned, printed exactly as UPS lists them, from its nearest contiguous-48 zone band to its farthest.
| Service | Contiguous-48 zones | Nearest zone | Farthest zone |
|---|---|---|---|
| UPS Next Day Air Saver | 132 to 138 | 36.00 USD | 66.89 USD |
| UPS Next Day Air | 102 to 108 | 37.30 USD | 71.47 USD |
| UPS Next Day Air Early | 102 to 108 | 67.30 USD | 101.47 USD |
Even the cheapest of the three, Next Day Air Saver's 36.00 USD nearest-zone Letter rate, is more than four times our live checkout's $8.46 winner for the same 4 oz envelope. That gap is the whole reason the row never surfaces: our engine is built to show what actually wins on price, and for a document this light, an overnight air tier essentially never does.
These are UPS's own zone-chart numbers, not a specific ZIP-to-ZIP quote, and your route maps to a zone through UPS's own lookup rather than through any distance math we could safely round for you here. Two things worth knowing about the table. Each Next Day Air speed uses its own zone numbering — 102 through 108 for Next Day Air and Next Day Air Early, 132 through 138 for Saver — so the bands line up by distance, not by number. And the U.S. 48 charts for Next Day Air and Early carry extra zones past the contiguous states, which UPS labels in its own footnote: zone 124 is metro Alaska and Hawaii, 125 is Puerto Rico, 126 is remote Alaska and Hawaii. Those rows run higher (Next Day Air reaches 90.77 USD at zone 126) and are left out above so the range you read is a contiguous-48 range. UPS also labels this a Daily Rate, meaning it applies to shippers with a scheduled pickup or an account rather than a posted walk-in counter price, so a UPS Store visit for the same envelope could land on a different number.
UPS's guide says what an account holder pays for a specific zone. Our checkout says what actually wins once every service is compared for your exact envelope. Neither is wrong; they are measuring different things.
Of UPS's own three overnight speeds, Next Day Air Saver's published Letter rate comes in under Next Day Air at both ends of the contiguous-48 range, by 1.30 USD at the nearest band and 4.58 USD at the farthest. Early is the priciest by a wide margin, for a morning commitment most document shipments do not need.
None of this argues against paying for overnight when a signature genuinely has to be somewhere tomorrow morning. It argues for knowing the premium before you pay it, which a published zone table gives you and a guess does not.
UPS's own Daily Rate & Service Guide, read on ups.com 2026-08-30, lists a Letter rate of 37.30 to 71.47 USD for UPS Next Day Air across the contiguous-48 zone bands, 36.00 to 66.89 USD for Next Day Air Saver, and 67.30 to 101.47 USD for Next Day Air Early. None of the three has ever appeared as a live checkout price on this site, including a true letter-weight test we ran the same day.
We quoted a 4 oz single-page document envelope, well under the eight-ounce line, from Newark, NJ to Seattle, WA on 2026-08-30. Five rates came back, topping out at $16.37 for UPS 2nd Day Air. Our checkout returns the best-value services for a given parcel, and UPS's own published Next Day Air Letter rate for that lane's zone sits well above every service that did return.
Per UPS's 2026 Rate & Service Guide, read on ups.com 2026-08-30: the Letter rate applies only to documents, correspondence and electronic media that do not exceed eight ounces and are sent in a UPS Express Envelope. Past eight ounces the guide is blunt about what happens next, in its own words: UPS Express Envelopes exceeding eight ounces are subject to the rate corresponding to the weight of the UPS Express Envelope. There is no intermediate band; the envelope is simply rated as a package of that weight.
Not necessarily. UPS's own site describes these as Daily Rates for customers with a scheduled pickup or an account, not a posted counter price. A walk-in UPS Store visit can price differently from the account rate published in the guide.