USPS send-by dates Dec 17, 18 and 20: one countdown clip per service

For Christmas 2025 the Postal Service recommended these send-by dates in the lower 48: December 17 for USPS Ground Advantage and First-Class Mail, December 18 for Priority Mail, and December 20 for Priority Mail Express. The 2026 dates were not published when this was read, so treat these as last year's pattern and swap in the new dates when USPS posts them. One captioned countdown clip per service is $0.20 per caption job on Sume.

Last year's published dates

USPS announced the 2025 dates on September 17, 2025. Check the USPS holiday shipping page for this year's list before you publish anything.

One clip per service, not one for all

A single clip listing four dates is hard to read at phone size. Make a clip per service, and run each one only to the shoppers whose order uses that service. If you ship everything by Ground Advantage, you need one clip, not four.

Record the base clip once: a parcel on a table, a hand writing the date, a shelf of ready-to-ship items. A single base recording gets cut into the pieces you need with video trim.

Burn the date as a cue

Use video captions with cues, each carrying text, start and end in seconds. A silent clip fails speech-to-text with caption_no_speech, so cues are the correct path, and they let you write exactly "Order by Dec 17 for Christmas delivery" with no transcription step.

When a date changes, resubmit the same cues with a new date. Keep the date in one variable in your script so a rerun cannot leave an old date on one of four files.

A worked schedule

Say your store ships by Ground Advantage and Priority Mail. Two clips cover it. The Ground Advantage clip runs from the first week of December until its date, then comes down. The Priority Mail clip takes over for the one day between the two dates and then also comes down.

Because each clip is a separate file, retiring one is a matter of pausing one ad, not recutting anything. Keep the original base trims, so that next year you resubmit the cues with new dates and pay for the caption jobs only.

If you want the same clip for Alaska, Hawaii, Puerto Rico and the territories, USPS listed a different Ground Advantage date there, one day earlier. That region needs its own cue text, so treat it as a separate clip rather than a note in the small print.

The date is advice, not a guarantee

USPS calls these recommended dates. Its own release says customers should plan to mail and ship early to arrive by December 25. Write "recommended" or "by" in the cue copy and do not promise delivery on a day your carrier does not.

Also check your cut-off against your own handling time. If you need two days to pick and pack, your public cut-off is two days earlier than the USPS date, and the clip should show yours.