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Clerical support workers · code 4412

Mail carriers and sorting clerks

Mail carriers and sorting clerks perform sorting, recording, delivery and other duties in connection with mail services from post offices or related organizations, as well as from or within an establishment. Tasks include - (a) performing mail-handling duties in public post offices or privately owned delivery establishments; (b) sorting and delivering mail to private houses and businesses; (c) providing delivery confirmation records when requested by the client; (d) sorting and keeping simple records of incoming and outgoing correspondence and dispatching outgoing mail in various establishments; Examples of the occupations classified here: - Mail clerk - Post carrier - Postman/woman

A good share of the tasks are affected. It ranks 332 of 427 for holding up against AI.

Also known as

  • postman/postwoman
  • mail clerk

Job titles from the EU's ESCO list. Search for any of them on the jobs page and you'll end up here.

59.2
Holds up
against AI Exposed: Gradient 2

AI could take on 40.8 of 100, on average
so it holds up at 100 − 40.8 = 59.2

That's the whole sum, and you can check it against the ILO's study.

57
How hands-on
out of 100

From O*NET, averaged across 5 US jobs

36.4
How fiddly
and cramped

finger skill 41.1 · hand skill 42.5 · cramped spaces 25.6 · averaged

Kind of hands-on work · hands-on 50+ · fiddly under 39.4 Hands-on, less fiddly work

Less fine handwork and fewer cramped spaces than a typical hands-on job. That clears one hurdle for machines. It doesn't mean machines are doing this work yet.

estimated O*NET 31.0 BLS occupational crosswalk chain ISCO-08 to 2010 SOC (Aug 2012, rev. Jun 2015); 2010 to 2018 SOC (Nov 2017); O*NET-SOC 2019 taxonomy data 0.7-work-setting measures chosen by Frey & Osborne (2017) · the grouping is a sorting, not a measurement

What this number leaves out This job rates 57 out of 100 for how hands-on it is. The score above only looks at AI tools, not robots, and for work like this robots are the bigger question.

The tasks behind the score

The score is the average of these. A job is really a bundle of tasks, and an average can hide how uneven that bundle is.

The task AI could do most of scores 56.5, while the average is 40.8. A big gap means some of this job is wide open to AI and some of it barely at all. That's quite different from a job where everything sits somewhere in the middle, even when the averages match.

  1. 56.5

    Providing delivery confirmation records when requested by the client

    Medium
  2. 51

    Sorting and keeping simple records of incoming and outgoing correspondence and dispatching outgoing mail in various establishments

    Medium
  3. 30.5

    Performing mail-handling duties in public post offices or privately owned delivery establishments

    Low
  4. 25

    Sorting and delivering mail to private houses and businesses

    Low

4 tasks · the High to Very Low labels are the ILO's

from the source Working Paper 140, Generative AI and Jobs 2025 index data 0.7-work-setting

Helped, or replaced?

The score above can't tell a tool that makes you faster from one that does the task instead of you. Jobs and Skills Australia looked at those two things separately, and this is their result, matched to this job.

2 Australian jobs match this one, and we've simply averaged them. Treat the numbers as a rough guide.

AI helps you
59.5
AI does it for you
38

Helping wins by 21.5 points.

estimated Our Gen AI Transition (Gen AI Capacity Study) September 2025 detailed data release data 0.7-work-setting matched to Australian jobs 5612, 5614

Compared with similar jobs

There are 29 jobs in the “Clerical support workers” group, averaging 46.1. This one is above that.