If you thought Britain had reached peak parcel…just wait for Christmas this year. New independent research – commissioned by FedEx and conducted by Effigy Consulting – has found that the 2024 festive season is set to be the busiest ever in the UK for parcel deliveries, with 1.29 billion of them set to land on door steps in the lead up to Christmas.
This marks a whopping 10.9% increase from last year – that’s over 100 million more parcels than the Christmas run-up in 2023, and bigger than pre-pandemic. It also makes the UK the parcel delivery capital of Europe, edging out Germany (1.08bn deliveries) and well ahead of France in third place (524m).
In fact, there will be approximately as many deliveries this festive season in the UK as there will be in France, Spain and Italy combined and they will account for over a fifth (21%) of all European deliveries.
Table one: Peak deliveries by key European countries
Country | 2024 Peak | 2023 Peak | Percentage change |
United Kingdom | 1,296,064,523 | 1,169,010,583 | +10.9% |
Republic of Ireland | 45,020,794 | 41,744,842 | +7.8% |
Germany | 1,085,103,925 | 1,030,477,633 | +5.3% |
France | 524,737,091 | 500,612,692 | +4.8% |
Poland | 456,083,267 | 399,335,959 | +14.2% |
Spain | 417,263,891 | 376,607,578 | +10.8% |
Italy | 365,072,858 | 337,516,289 | +8.2% |
Netherlands | 226,550,720 | 210,323,032 | +7.7% |
BeLux | 109,932,420 | 102,139,359 | +7.6% |
Rest of EU | 1,697,812,883 | 1,539,705,212 | +10.3% |
