The numbers you are exposed to.
Cotton, power, wages, customs thresholds, and what the research houses claim this market is worth. Each figure carries the source that states it, the period it is stated for, and the day we last read it there — because a number can be perfectly current and four months old at the same time.
15 figures · 11 sources · re-read on the cadence the source publishes, never faster
Input costs
What a shop's materials, power, hours and parcels cost, from the statistical services and the rulemakings that publish them. Two dates on every figure: the period the source states it for, and the day we last read it there.
- Cotton, global benchmarkIMF global benchmark, monthly average of the Cotlook A index
- Cotton, US spotBase quality — colour 41, leaf 4, staple 34; average of designated marketsSix cents under the world benchmark — different thing, not a contradiction.
- Polyester fibre, US producer pricesProducer price index for manufactured fibres — an index, never a price per kiloNo free spot price for polyester exists. This is the movement, not the cost.
- Electricity, US industrialAverage retail price, industrial sector, all states
- Electricity, EU non-householdRange across member states, from Finland at the low end to Ireland at the highA range, never an average we computed. A press in Dublin and one in Helsinki are not in the same business.
- Labour cost, US private industryEmployment Cost Index, compensation costs, private industry
- Labour cost, euro areaHourly labour cost index; the EU as a whole moved +3.6%
- USPS dimensional weight divisorDomestic Priority Mail Express, Priority Mail, USPS Ground Advantage and Parcel Select, retail and commercial; length, width and height each rounded up to a whole inch before the divisionThe number that decides what a POD parcel is billed as, and the one figure here that is set by a rulemaking rather than measured by a statistical office. A lower divisor bills a box as heavier, so a single tee in a carton sized for a case pays for the air. The rule states both halves: the divisor itself, and the rounding change that goes with it, "Round up ... each measurement to the nearest whole inch". Carrier surcharge tables at UPS, DHL and FedEx are the natural neighbours for this cell and all three refuse our fetcher, so this is the only parcel figure here that can be re-read at its source. Read through federalregister.gov/api/v1, because the HTML answers a script with a CAPTCHA that points at the API.139 cubic inches per pound, over 1,728 cu inas of 2026-07-12 read 2026-08-31 event-drivenfederalregister.gov →
What crosses a border
The thresholds that decide whether a parcel clears customs untouched or arrives with a bill. Both of these moved in the last year, and one of them has no date yet — which is itself the finding.
- US de minimis (Section 321)CBP interim final rule under 19 U.S.C. 1321(b); duty-free entry for shipments at or under $800 no longer appliesThe legal footing changed and the outcome did not. This cell used to cite Executive Order 14324. On 20 February 2026 the Supreme Court held in Learning Resources, Inc. v. Trump that IEEPA does not authorise those tariffs, and E.O. 14389 terminated the duties imposed under it that same day. CBP then moved the suspension onto its own authority: two interim final rules of 24 June 2026 write an indefinite suspension into 19 CFR, this one for every mode other than the post (effective 24 June) and 2026-12669 for mail (effective 24 July). A shop that planned around the executive order being struck down is planning around the wrong document. The page a reader opens is HTML; the machine re-reads federalregister.gov/api/v1/documents/2026-12670.json, which returns effective_on as a field rather than as prose.Suspended indefinitely, all countriesas of 2026-06-24 read 2026-08-31 event-drivenfederalregister.gov →
- EU EUR 150 customs-duty exemptionAnnounced for removal; no date has been fixedThere is no figure here because there is no date yet. The Commission has said the threshold goes, and has not said when. A shop planning around a removal in 2026 is planning around an intention.
What the market is said to be worth
Market sizing is the least reliable number in this trade and the most repeated. We print the estimates side by side, with who published each one, rather than picking the figure that flatters the story.
- POD market, one house's estimatePrecedence Research, print-on-demand market$12.96B → $118.85B 2025 → 2035, 24.8% CAGRas of 2025 read 2026-08-31 semi-annualprecedenceresearch.com →
- POD market, another house's estimateMordor Intelligence, print-on-demand marketTwo houses, similar growth rates, and a 2031-vs-2035 gap of more than $70B. Both cannot be describing the same market the same way. Neither publishes the definition it counted, which is why no headline on this site rests on either.$15.19B → $46.43B 2026 → 2031, 25.05% CAGRas of 2026 read 2026-08-31 semi-annualmordorintelligence.com →
What compliance costs
Fees and thresholds a shop pays or clears because of where it ships, not because of what it prints. These are published by the regulator on a stated schedule, which is the only reason they can sit in a table like this one.
- UK pEPR base fee, plasticPackaging Extended Producer Responsibility base fee for plastic packaging, charged to obligated producers on the tonnage they supply. Poly mailers and the film around a folded garment are the exposure here.The period comes from the page: "This document provides base fees for year 1 (2025 to 2026)" and "PackUK will use this data and the above listed costs to calculate and release base fees for 2026 to 2027". The cadence does not. A stem search for "annu" across the whole document returns zero, and so do "scheme year" and "each year"; calling it annual on the strength of two consecutive periods would be an inference, and inferred cadence is the thing this gate exists to refuse. It is annual because the statute says so: regulation 60 of SI 2024/1332 is headed "Liability of producers to pay annual disposal and administration fees". Value and cadence are sourced to different documents, which is the honest description of this figure rather than a weakness in it. Two cautions for whoever re-reads this. Modulation by recyclability arrives for 2026, so the successor table is not like-for-like. And strip the markup first: the material and the rate sit in separate table cells, so a search for "Plastic 423" in the raw HTML returns nothing while the figure is plainly there.
- UK pEPR base fee, paper and cardThe same scheme, for the corrugated box and the card insert. Paper is the cheapest common material in the table and plastic is the dearest of the two a parcel usually contains.Read the two fees together rather than singly. The scheme prices the packaging decision, so swapping a poly mailer for card moves the bill by the difference between these two rows on every tonne shipped. Cadence is sourced to regulation 60 of SI 2024/1332 rather than to the fee page, for the reason set out in the plastic row above.
- UK pEPR large-producer thresholdBoth limbs must be met before a producer pays: turnover over GBP 2,000,000 and more than 50 tonnes of packaging supplied. Above GBP 1,000,000 and 25 tonnes a producer registers and reports without paying the fee.This is the row that decides whether the two above apply at all, and for most shops the answer is that they do not. Fifty tonnes of packaging is on the order of a million parcels a year. The turnover limb is the one a growing shop crosses first, and it is the tonnage limb that keeps it out of scope, so a shop watching only its revenue is watching the wrong half. The regulation dates the test off audited accounts and off year Y-2 tonnage, so exposure arrives two years after the volume does. Marked event-driven rather than annual: the thresholds sit in the instrument and change only when it is amended, unlike the fees above.
How this table is kept
A figure is only here if our own fetcher can retrieve the literal value from the page cited — the same script the verifier runs, with the same honest user agent. That rule kept the carrier fuel surcharges out: they change weekly and they are the number a shop feels most, and not one of the three carriers will let us read it. A number we cannot re-read is a number that goes wrong without telling anyone.
Machine throughput is not here either. Those figures are claims, they live in the verdict register, and they are re-checked there. Two places for one number is two places that can disagree.