FedEx Money-Back Guarantee (and UPS): What's Still Covered

Both carriers still advertise a money-back guarantee. Almost nobody shipping today is covered by the version they remember. The guarantees came back in 2021 for a short list of overnight and express services, and they never came back for Ground. On top of that, many negotiated contracts waive the guarantee entirely, so a shipper can use a covered service, watch a shipment arrive late, and still have no refund coming. This guide covers what is actually guaranteed today, what a refund pays, and how to file inside the deadline.

The short answer

• FedEx’s money-back guarantee is active today for its overnight services, FedEx 2Day A.M., and a few related express services. Everything else, including FedEx Ground and FedEx 2Day, is suspended.
• The UPS Service Guarantee is active today for UPS Next Day Air services, UPS 2nd Day Air A.M., and UPS Worldwide Express services. UPS Ground, UPS 3 Day Select, and standard UPS 2nd Day Air are not covered.
• A refund pays the transportation charges of the late shipment only. Neither carrier refunds surcharges or accessorials; UPS’s terms name the fuel surcharge expressly.
• The claim window is 15 calendar days for both carriers, but the clocks start on different dates. FedEx counts from the invoice date. UPS counts from the scheduled delivery date. Mixing those two up is an easy way to lose a valid claim.
• If your carrier contract waives guarantee rights, none of the above matters. Check the contract first.

Guarantee status today

Status checked October 18, 2026, against each carrier’s own published terms. Rechecked before every peak season.

FedEx, covered: FedEx First Overnight, FedEx Priority Overnight, FedEx Standard Overnight, FedEx 2Day A.M., the Overnight Extra Hours variants of those services, and named FedEx international services.

FedEx, not covered: everything else, including FedEx 2Day, FedEx Express Saver, FedEx Ground, FedEx Home Delivery, and FedEx Ground Economy. The guarantee is suspended for these services until further notice.

UPS, covered: UPS Next Day Air Early, UPS Next Day Air, UPS Next Day Air Saver, UPS 2nd Day Air A.M., and UPS Worldwide Express services. To be plain about the one that confuses people: UPS 2nd Day Air A.M. is covered today.

UPS, not covered: everything else, including UPS Ground, UPS Ground Saver, UPS 3 Day Select, and standard UPS 2nd Day Air. The guarantee remains suspended for all UPS shipments and services not listed above.

How we got here

Before 2020, the guarantees covered ground and express services alike, so a late Ground shipment earned the same refund of its transportation charges as a late overnight one, and late-delivery refunds were a routine part of parcel auditing. In March 2020, both carriers suspended the guarantees as pandemic volume hit their networks: FedEx suspended its global money-back guarantee on March 24, 2020, and UPS suspended its Service Guarantee the same day for U.S.-origin shipments and on March 26, 2020 for all other origins.

The guarantees returned a year later, in a much smaller form. UPS reinstated its Service Guarantee on April 5, 2021, for Next Day Air services and Worldwide Express services only. FedEx reinstated its money-back guarantee on April 6, 2021, for First Overnight, Priority Overnight, Standard Overnight, and a few international priority services, for U.S. payors. Ground services were left out by both carriers, and they are still left out. That is the part that matters most: the largest part of most shippers’ volume has had no guarantee since 2020.

Since then, the covered list has grown slightly, and FedEx has suspended the guarantee once more. FedEx suspended the guarantee for shipments on or after December 1, 2025, citing the temporary reduction in fleet capacity while MD-11 safety reviews are underway, together with anticipated seasonal volume. The guarantee came back for domestic services on January 13, 2026 (First Overnight, Priority Overnight, Standard Overnight, 2Day A.M., and the Extra Hours versions of those services) and for international services on February 12, 2026, which is the effective date the current policy carries.

FedEx: what the money-back guarantee covers now

FedEx’s guarantee today covers First Overnight, Priority Overnight, Standard Overnight, 2Day A.M., the Overnight Extra Hours variants, and named FedEx international services. If a covered shipment arrives after its published commitment time, the shipper can claim a refund of that shipment’s transportation charges.

Three limits decide whether the money shows up:

• Transportation charges only. The refund covers the shipping charge for the late shipment. Surcharges and other fees are not refunded, so the residential delivery charge, address corrections, and every other accessorial on the invoice stay paid.
• The claim clock runs from the invoice date. A refund request must reach FedEx within 15 calendar days of the invoice date. If you paid by credit card, cash, or check at the time of shipping, the clock runs from the ship date instead. Shippers who wait for the delivery scan, then wait for the invoice, then route the claim internally, run out of days faster than they expect.
• Peak season moves the line. FedEx extends commitment times by roughly 90 minutes in peak windows, which moves the line a late claim is measured against: a delivery that counts as on time in December might have been late in March. The December 2025 suspension described above was a separate step, tied to a specific fleet safety review, not a standing peak-season practice.

UPS: what the Service Guarantee covers now

The UPS Service Guarantee today covers Next Day Air Early, Next Day Air, Next Day Air Saver, 2nd Day Air A.M., and the listed Worldwide Express services. The 2nd Day Air A.M. coverage is the detail most summaries get wrong: the morning service is covered, the standard 2nd Day Air service is not.

Three UPS quirks are worth knowing:

• Next Day Air Saver is guaranteed to the end of the day. Its commitment is 11:59 p.m., not the afternoon time on the label. A Saver shipment delivered at 9 p.m. is on time under the guarantee, however the recipient felt about it.
• Next Day Air residential commitments run to noon, not 10:30 a.m. Since October 18, 2021, and until further notice, a Next Day Air shipment to a residential address with a typical commitment of 10:30 a.m. carries a commitment of 12:00 p.m. instead, and the guarantee is measured against noon. A residential delivery at 11 a.m. is on time, even though the same shipment to a business address would be late.
• The claim clock runs from the scheduled delivery date. UPS must be notified within 15 calendar days of the scheduled delivery date to request a guaranteed service refund. That is a different, usually earlier, deadline than FedEx’s invoice-based clock. A team that files both carriers’ claims on one schedule will miss UPS claims while FedEx claims are still valid.

UPS refunds the transportation charges of the late shipment only, and its terms say so in so many words: transportation charges do not include other fees or charges UPS assesses, fuel surcharges among them. And like FedEx, UPS suspends the guarantee for services it has not reinstated: Ground, Ground Saver, 3 Day Select, and standard 2nd Day Air shipments have no guarantee to claim against.

What the guarantee is worth: an illustrative example

Illustrative example. A shipper with $1,000,000 in annual parcel spend, at two levels of guaranteed air volume.

Assumes 4% of guaranteed shipments arrive late. For context, ShipMatrix measured carrier-wide on-time performance in December 2025 at 95.3% (FedEx) and 97.2% (UPS), all services combined. December is the hardest month, and FedEx’s guarantee was suspended during it.

The refund covers the transportation charges of the late shipments only, so these figures are ceilings, not promises.

• 5% of spend on guaranteed air ($50,000): about $2,000 a year in guarantee refunds, at most.
• 30% of spend on guaranteed air ($300,000): about $12,000 a year, at most.
• Contract waives the guarantee: $0, at either level.

Sensitivity: at the measured December 2025 extremes (2.8% and 4.7% late), the same math gives roughly $1,400 to $2,350 at 5% air and $8,400 to $14,100 at 30% air.

Read the 5% case honestly: about $2,000 on $1,000,000 of spend is 0.2% of the total. For a mostly Ground shipper, the guarantee is a small line item, and the bigger recovery is usually in other billing errors, which is what a parcel audit looks for. The guarantee matters most to air-heavy shippers, and only when their contract has not waived it.

The waiver problem

The least visible line in a negotiated carrier agreement is the one that gives the guarantee away. Carriers often ask for, and shippers often sign, a waiver of money-back guarantee rights as part of a discount package.

That makes the guarantee a contract question before it is an auditing question. When a carrier agreement comes up for review, the waiver belongs on the list of terms being weighed against the discounts on offer, next to the other give-backs that never show up on an invoice. If nobody at your company can say whether your agreement waives the guarantee, that is the answer to find before the next late shipment, not after. Our Carrier Contract Optimization service treats it as one of the terms worth examining at renewal.

When a guaranteed shipment arrives late: the filing checklist

Every step below is in the carriers’ published terms. The work is not complicated; it is just unforgiving about dates.

For either carrier:

1. Confirm the service is on the covered list above, and that your contract does not waive guarantee rights. If either fails, there is no claim.
2. Confirm the delivery actually missed the commitment. Compare the delivery time in tracking against the published commitment for that service, and remember the UPS Next Day Air Saver commitment is end of day, and the UPS Next Day Air residential commitment is noon where the 10:30 a.m. extension applies.
3. Note the exclusions. Late deliveries caused by events outside the carrier’s control, such as severe weather or an incorrect address supplied by the shipper, are not refundable under the published terms.
4. File inside the window anyway, even if the amount is small. Claims filed late are denied on the deadline alone, whatever the merits.

FedEx:

1. Start the clock at the invoice date, or the ship date if you paid by credit card, cash, or check.
2. Request the refund within 15 calendar days of that date.
3. File through FedEx Billing Online by disputing the invoice charge, or call 1.800.GoFedEx (1.800.463.3339) and request a money-back guarantee refund for the shipment.
4. The refund, when approved, covers the shipment’s transportation charges and is applied as a credit or refund to the paying account.

UPS:

1. Check the package exclusions. Under section 54 of the UPS Tariff, the Service Guarantee does not apply to any package subject to a Large Package Surcharge or Additional Handling, to any package over the maximum size or weight limits, or to any shipment that contains such a package.
2. Start the clock at the scheduled delivery date shown for the shipment.
3. Notify UPS within 15 calendar days of that date.
4. Request the guaranteed service refund through the UPS Billing Center at ups.com, or call 1.800.PICK.UPS (1.800.742.5877).
5. The refund, when approved, covers the shipment’s transportation charges.

If late shipments are a pattern rather than an exception, the same invoice review that catches them also catches the other fees billed in error. The parcel audit guide’s late-delivery section walks through how that review works, or you can have the claims filed for you.

Sources: FedEx U.S. Service Guide (effective January 5, 2026) and its money-back guarantee policy (effective February 12, 2026); UPS Service Guarantee page and UPS Tariff/Terms and Conditions of Service (effective April 17, 2026); all checked October 2026. ShipMatrix peak-season on-time performance release, January 2026; Supply Chain Dive, April 2020.