The news
DHL Express has started selling Heavy Weight Express in the US. The service moves pieces up to 2,200 pounds and shipments up to 6,600 pounds on DHL’s own express air network, door to door, with customs handled by DHL, according to the release.
The customer DHL describes is a manufacturer with a line down, a life-sciences firm with a fixed ship date, or a tech company launching on a set day. Greg Hewitt, who runs DHL Express in the US, tied it to “new tariffs, shifting trade rules, and tighter supply chains.”
The service launched worldwide in May at the same limits, 1,000 kilograms a piece and 3,000 a shipment. The US launch followed four months later.
Know more
Heavy Weight Express is DHL’s regular express product with the weight ceiling raised and a dedicated desk on top. DHL runs its own aircraft, hubs, gateways, customs clearance and delivery vehicles, so the shipment stays with one carrier from pickup to the receiver’s dock. There is no handoff to a commercial airline’s belly space or a forwarder’s truck.
The new part is the desk. Each shipment gets a named team that owns the case and tracks exceptions before they turn into a missed delivery.
DHL named six jobs for it: keeping a production line running, launching a product on an immovable date, cutting inventory buffers by moving parts faster, large procurement shipments, freight with special handling rules, and multi-site supply chains that move parts between plants. The industries are technology, automotive, machinery, life sciences, pharma and energy.
DHL does not run a domestic ground network in the US, so the service is for freight moving across a border.
The pattern
DHL is the third big parcel carrier this year to build toward freight that pays by weight and urgency rather than by the doorstep.
UPS: put about $50 million into time-definite heavy air freight between the US and Mexico in May, with a 300-person team. It bought Andlauer, a Canadian healthcare carrier, for $1.6 billion in November. It finished cutting its Amazon volume by more than half from 2024 levels in the second quarter.
FedEx: stood up a life-sciences unit in June, then sold FedEx Supply Chain to CMA CGM for $1.4 billion in July. CEO Raj Subramaniam said the company would focus on “high-value verticals, including healthcare, automotive, aerospace and data centers.” Ground Economy volume, its cheapest home-delivery product, fell about 5% in the same quarter, a decline FedEx expects to continue.
The rate cards: UPS raised its top peak residential surcharge 25%, to $0.75 a package, and FedEx raised its own 23%, to $0.80. Their additional-handling, large-package and oversize fees rose 8% to 10%, per the carriers’ schedules.
Amazon moved 6.7 billion US packages in 2025, more than USPS, per ShipMatrix. Amazon and the smaller carriers together handled 39% of US parcels, up from 15% in 2019. UPS’s share fell to 19% from 29% over the same stretch.
Amazon opened its vans, warehouses and a 26-terminal LTL network to any business this year. Amazon Shipping charges no residential surcharge. Walmart’s GoLocal has run more than 30 million deliveries for Home Depot, Sally Beauty and 1-800-Flowers. OnTrac launched two tiers in January priced up to 30% under the national carriers, and UniUni’s US volume grew more than tenfold from 2024 to 2025, per Supply Chain Dive.
For a shipper building a 2027 bid, the carrier list now splits by freight type. Heavy, regulated and time-critical freight has three carriers building for it. Two-pound parcels to homes have Amazon, Walmart and the regionals pricing for it. The integrators are pricing against it.
The counter
UPS tried to shed cheap home delivery once already and reversed inside a year. It pulled SurePost off USPS in January 2025 and ran the packages on its own trucks. Volume fell 32.7% by the third quarter. Thin routes cost UPS $85 million more than planned in one quarter. By October, it had a deal to hand the last mile back to USPS.
FedEx still takes residential volume where it pays. It signed a multi-year deal in May 2025 to deliver Amazon’s large residential packages. Amazon is moving into freight, through its LTL network, at the same time it takes parcels.
What’s next
FedEx usually posts its 2027 general rate increase in September and UPS in the fall. If residential fees again rise faster than heavy and handling fees, the 2026 peak card is the new baseline, not a one-year fix. For DHL, the first sign will be whether it publishes a Heavy Weight rate card or keeps pricing it shipment by shipment.
