UPS shifts RFID package labeling to shippers

The News

UPS expects shippers to put its RFID labels on 6 million packages a day at their own sites in 2027, about double today’s volume.

CEO Carol Tomé said on the third-quarter call that UPS has set up RFID labeling at 315 shipper locations, including Ingram Micro and a high-end jeweler.
The labels reduce “the amount of confusion over missed pickups and that sort of thing,” Tomé said.

The details

The label goes on at the shipper’s packing station, so the UPS truck reads it automatically at pickup. Every UPS package car in the US carries an RFID reader. A package labeled at the dock shows up in UPS’s system the moment it is loaded, with no driver scan.

That pickup scan can come “hours earlier” in some cases, said Michael Yoshida, UPS vice president of product innovation and strategy.
UPS is rolling out label printing for shippers through 2026 and 2027.

The shipper sites are the newest piece of a rollout that already puts an RFID label on every UPS package in the US. Most of those labels still go on after UPS picks up the package. The 3 million labeled at shipper sites are about a fifth of the 15.6 million packages UPS moved each day in the US in the third quarter.

All 5,500 The UPS Store locations label every package, about 1.3 million a day.
UPS has readers in about 1,000 package buildings. It says the system removes nearly 20 million manual scans a day by its workers.
Misloads — packages put on the wrong truck — fell 70%. The labels cost a few cents each.

One of those shipper sites, Ingram Micro’s Texas warehouse, shows what the work looks like on the shipper’s side. The warehouse puts a UPS RFID label on every package bound for UPS. That one site handles more than 28% of Ingram Micro’s UPS volume. Other Ingram sites will follow.

Ingram Micro moved its parcel business from FedEx to UPS a few years ago, mainly because of the RFID work.
“The focus is really getting the right data structures,” said Bill Ross, Ingram Micro’s executive vice president of global operations and engineering, “so that we can layer AI over top of that.”

The same labels feed UPS’s push to run more of its network on machines. UPS expects nearly 70% of its packages to move through an automated process in the fourth quarter, up from 66.5% at the end of 2025. Its automated buildings handle a package for 28% less than its older ones, Tomé said in January.

UPS had 127 automated buildings at the start of the year and planned to add 24 in 2026.
Large retailers like the labels because they “have inbound visibility to what’s hitting their docks,” said Matt Guffey, UPS’s chief commercial and strategy officer.

Worth noting

UPS added about 800,000 RFID-labeled pickups a day in one quarter. Shipper sites labeled 2.2 million packages a day at the time of UPS’s July call, and about 3 million by its October call. Reaching 6 million in 2027 takes another 3 million a day. UPS is also ahead of the automation goal it gave in February, when it expected 68% of US volume to run through automated buildings this year.