A Royal Mail postie with five years on the round has laid out the five things he wishes someone had told him before starting at Royal Mail.
The man behind YouTube channel Real Life Income has put together a survival guide for new starters, and it reads less like careers advice and more like a heads-up from someone who has already done the hard bit.
None of his points are complicated.
All of them are the sort of thing that only becomes obvious once you are already three weeks in and wondering what you have signed up for.
Here are the five.
1. Expect The Job To Be Seriously Physical
The first one is the one most new starters underestimate.
“You can expect to walk up to 4 to 5 hours a day on your shift,” he says, and that is before you factor in stairs, heavy bags on your back, and the parcels.
On a full round, that can work out at close to ten miles on foot.
“When I first started, I didn’t expect it to be as physical as it is,” he admits.
His advice is not to pack it in after the first few days, because the body does adjust.
“After a while, you do get used to it. It does take you some time, probably about two to three weeks into the job you start to get used to how the physicality is going to be.”
He also points out something older posties will recognise, which is that the job used to be mostly letters and is now anything but.
“I would always think to myself, oh, this must be the easiest job, all they do is just put letters through doors. But now the job has advanced and it asks you to do more and more stuff on your route.”
2. Expect To Be Confused When First Starting at Royal Mail
The second tip is that nobody walks in and picks it up on day one.
From the outside, the job looks like you grab some letters, grab some parcels, and head out.
From the inside, there is a lot that has to happen before you ever leave the office.
Mail has to be sorted properly, parcels have to be sorted, special deliveries accounted for, and the PDA has to be fully charged (because the devices do die out on the round).
Even the routes themselves are not always logical.
“There’s going to be places where on the frame it will say that an address is in a certain place and when you get there, it’s not there. It might be around the corner, it might be upstairs or it might be in the back.”
Royal Mail will try to put someone with you on your first few tries on a new walk, but staffing being what it is, sometimes you just get sent out alone and left to work it out.
The good news is that most routes click into place after two or three attempts.
“Once you get the hang of it, you’ll see that it is quite easy once you know.”
3. You Deliver In Any Weather
The third one sounds obvious until you are standing in an office at 6am watching the snow come down.
Real Life Income’s first day at his first office happened to be during a heavy snowfall, ankle deep.
“Once I got to the office, I kind of asked the management, are we meant to take the stuff out? Are we going home? And they just looked at me like I was crazy.”
The answer, in short, is that you are going out.
Rain, snow, ice, heatwave, all of it.
Royal Mail will issue some basic kit to help, including spikes for ice, but the assumption is that the mail goes out as normal.
The one exception he mentions is extreme heat, with offices generally sending people home once temperatures push past the mid thirties.
Everything short of that is just a normal shift with worse conditions.
4. The Whole Place Runs On Seniority
The fourth tip is the one new starters rarely see coming.
Royal Mail offices run on a seniority system, which means the posties who have been there longest get first pick of the walks.
That also means new starters get whatever is left over, which tends to be the longer rounds, the flats, the blocks with broken buzzers, and the routes that chew up the legs.
“People who have been there the longest get the best walks, and the people that have just started have to deal with essentially the crap walks in the beginning.”
The only way up the pecking order is waiting for people above you to leave.
In his case, a wave of departures of around 15 or 16 people over a three or four month stretch pushed him onto a far more manageable walk.
“Now I’m on a walk that is much more favourable to me, and one that I understand a lot more.”
So the system is quietly stacked against new starters twice over, handing them the hardest routes at exactly the moment they are least equipped to handle them.
Stick it out, and you climb the ladder every time someone else gets off.
5. Expect A Lot Of Parcels, Especially At Christmas
The fifth point is volume.
Most people outside the job still picture posties pushing letters through doors.
The reality in 2026 is that a standard round can include a hundred or more parcels, and certain days of the week are noticeably heavier than others.
“Wednesday and Thursday are your heaviest days,” he says.
Then there is Christmas, which is its own category entirely.
“Over Christmas time, your walk can get up to the five-hour mark because of the amount of volume of letters and parcels that you need to deliver.”
He describes the most recent peak as the busiest he has worked through in five years.
“Your body is going to be definitely aching after each shift.”
His advice is to push through and clear the walk, because a round left undone today lands back on someone (often you) tomorrow.
Three Bonus Tips From A Five-Year Veteran
Before signing off, Real Life Income throws in three extra bits of advice that arguably matter more than any of the five above.
Don’t Expect Anyone to Hold Your Hand
The other posties in the office have their own walks to sort and their own vans to load, and they do not have the time to spoon-feed a new starter through every detail.
“Take it upon yourself to learn the walk to your best ability. Even when you’re on the walk, try and figure out ways in which you can cut the walk down or make it a bit easier for yourself.”
Initiative gets you further than waiting to be taught.
Track Your Own Overtime
This one is blunt and important.
“Make sure that you’re always tracking it and writing it down, because sometimes there’s so much staff in the office, managers can forget.”
If the office forgets, the payslip forgets, and if the payslip forgets, you are chasing it yourself.
Write down every extra minute you do.
Speak Up When the Workload is Not Realistic.
The last tip is the one new starters are often too nervous to use.
If the day’s mail and parcels genuinely cannot be delivered inside the shift, the sensible move is to tell the manager before you leave the office, not after.
“There are some days where it is too much, so they can give you help or get someone to give you a hand as well.”
Going out with more than you can physically deliver just turns into failed deliveries, which turns into another problem the next day.
Say something early and politely, and a manager can either redistribute the load or make the call themselves.
The Honest Version Of The Job
None of what Real Life Income says is designed to put anyone off.
It is an honest list from someone who has stuck the job out for five years, and who clearly still turns up and does the round.
But it is also a reminder that the job is not what the outside world thinks it is.
It is miles on your feet, parcels on your back, weather you cannot pick, a pecking order you cannot skip, and volumes that quietly climb every year.
Anyone signing up for their first 30 days would do well to watch the full video before their first shift.
And anyone still thinking of the postie job as “just letters” has not been paying attention for about a decade.
You can watch the full video here:
