Is There Mail Today? Martin Luther King Jr. Day USPS, Post Office Closed, No Delivery

postal service warehouse sorting
Packages are seen as they are sorted at the U.S. Postal service's Royal Palm Processing and Distribution Center on December 17, 2018, in Opa Locka, Florida. Joe Raedle/Getty Images

There will be no mail delivery Monday due to the fact that it's a national holiday in honor of the civil rights activist and minister Martin Luther King Jr. MLK Jr. Day is federal holiday meaning the United States Postal Service, as well other government offices, won't be open and there won't be normal day-to-day mail delivery.

The lack of mail delivery has nothing to do with the partial government shutdown or any lack of funding. Other government services, like National parks, TSA and museums, were impacted by the shutdown but not the mail service.

There are 10 days a year during that the USPS does not deliver, aside from Sundays and the occasional day of mourning in the event of the death of a sitting or former president. Those 10 holidays are New Year's Day, Martin Luther King, Jr. Day, President's Day, Memorial Day, Independence Day, Labor Day, Columbus Day, Veterans Day, Thanksgiving and Christmas.

During the holidays and Sundays, customers can't bring any mail or packages to ship to a branch and even the mail they drop in a USPS blue box won't be picked up that day. For Martin Luther King Jr. Day there is no mail delivery and branches are closed but the they will be open the Saturday before. Blue box collections also are scheduled to resume the following Tuesday.

Martin Luther King Jr. Day has been a public holiday since 1983. It was signed into law by President Ronald Raegan at the time.

"The day (and federal holiday) is declared each year via Presidential Proclamation and is in honor of the birthday of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. The first proclamation of Martin Luther King, Jr. Day was also by Ronald Reagan just over two years later," according to the Library of Congress.

It took 15 years for the holiday to come to be, the first time the holiday was proposed was in 1968 following MLK's assassination. There was a nearly successful attempt to make his birthday a federal holiday again in 1979 that just barely missed passing as a holiday. When it eventually passed in 1983 after a heated debate it was decided that it would be celebrated on the third Monday in January rather than on his actual birthday, January 15, each year. The bill passed in the Senate on October 19 and then President Raegan signed it two weeks later, according to Senate records.​

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Nina was a breaking news reporter. She previously worked at Business Insider, The Boston Globe, and Boston.com.

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