The €17 failed delivery: everyone cites it, nobody shows the math

Julien Crétin — Mon, 13 Apr 2026 10:00:00 GMT

Search for "cost of a failed delivery" and you find the same figure everywhere: somewhere between €15 and €20 per failed order. It shows up in industry reports, logistics blogs, carrier decks. Sometimes €17, sometimes €18, sometimes just "around €17." The number circulates freely.

What never appears alongside it is a breakdown.

We rebuilt the estimate from scratch, line by line, with explicit assumptions, for a realistic urban B2C context in Europe in 2026. And we modeled two scenarios, because not all failed deliveries end the same way.

Two paths after a failed first attempt

When a delivery attempt fails, operators have two main options:

Redeliver to the home address. Schedule a second attempt, slot it into a future route, try again.

Redirect to a pickup point (PUDO/locker). Drop the parcel at a nearby relay point, a staffed shop or an automated locker, and notify the recipient to collect at their convenience.

The second path is growing fast. Out-of-home delivery networks in Europe now exceed 500,000 points. In France alone, the three main networks (Pickup, Mondial Relay, Relais Colis) cover over 37,000 relay points. Redirecting to a PUDO is no longer a fallback; in many operations it is the default response to a failed first attempt.

The cost profiles of these two paths are meaningfully different. We modeled both.

The model

Component 1 - On-site failure cost (both scenarios)

Before any decision about what happens next, a failed stop already costs something. The driver arrived, attempted delivery, documented the failure, and departed. That time is gone regardless of what follows.

Item	Assumption	Cost
On-site time (approach + attempt + departure)	8 min @ €17/h	€2.27
Recipient call attempt	2.5 min @ €17/h (~60% of failures)	€0.43
Subtotal		€2.70

The call is not systematic - carriers typically place it when the address is unclear or the recipient was expected to be home. We estimate it occurs in roughly 60% of failed attempts.

Component 2A - Redelivery to home address

The package gets slotted back into a future route. The marginal cost is the detour: the extra time and distance to work that stop back into an existing run. Not a dedicated trip, just the incremental cost of squeezing it in.

Item	Assumption	Cost
Driver time (detour + stop)	12 min @ €17/h	€3.40
Fuel	3 km @ €0.18/km	€0.54
Vehicle depreciation	3 km @ €0.12/km	€0.36
Subtotal		€4.30

12 minutes and 3 km reflect a marginal detour within a dense urban route. In peri-urban or rural contexts, these figures are significantly higher.

Component 2B - Redirect to pickup point

The driver diverts to the nearest relay point on the same or next run. A PUDO stop is fast: 1.5-2 minutes vs 6-7 minutes for a residential delivery, because consolidation means multiple parcels per stop. Detour distance is short in a dense urban network.

There is also a cost that most estimates miss: the commission paid by the carrier to the merchant hosting the relay point. In France, this runs €0.30-€0.50 per parcel depending on the network (Mondial Relay, Pickup, Relais Colis). Small, but real, and exactly the kind of line item that gets lost when a figure is simply quoted without a breakdown.

Item	Assumption	Cost
Driver time (detour + PUDO drop)	7 min @ €17/h	€1.98
Fuel	1.5 km @ €0.18/km	€0.27
Vehicle depreciation	1.5 km @ €0.12/km	€0.18
Merchant commission	€0.40	€0.40
Subtotal		€2.83

Component 3 - Route disruption

This is the component that almost never appears in cost estimates, and the one we think matters most.

A failed stop does not happen in isolation. The driver spent time on-site. In a tightly scheduled urban run of 20-30 stops, that time ripples downstream. The nature of this disruption, and who absorbs the cost, depends on the operator's model.

For operators with salaried drivers, the disruption translates into route lengthening. Time lost accumulates across the week and can contribute to crossing the overtime threshold: in France, 39 hours under the transport collective agreement, with a 25% premium beyond that. The marginal cost is real but diffuse: it rarely maps cleanly to a single failed stop.

For operators using subcontracted drivers on a daily or per-route flat fee, which represents the majority of last-mile operations in France for networks such as Amazon, Chronopost, or DHL, the disruption does not generate overtime. It generates a margin loss: if a subcontractor completes 18 stops instead of 20 due to time lost on a failure, they deliver less for the same flat fee. The cost is real, but it sits with the subcontractor rather than the network operator. Operators on this model can calibrate the disruption cost by dividing their daily flat rate by the number of planned stops.

A third case: markets with precise delivery slots. In the UK, Germany, and increasingly in premium services across Europe, recipients select a 1-2 hour window at checkout. In this context, a failed stop is not just a time loss; it is a missed contractual commitment, and SLA-based contracts can trigger financial penalties: a cost that does not appear in any per-failed-delivery model, but is very real at scale. We do not include it in our central estimate, but operators on slot-based markets should factor it in.

In all three cases, dispatch rescheduling remains a fixed cost: someone must handle the failed stop, reassign it, and notify the recipient.

There is no published benchmark for the cascade effect specifically. We modeled it conservatively and flag it as an assumption operators should calibrate against their own route data.

Item	Assumption	Redelivery	PUDO redirect
Cascade delay on following stops	3 stops × 4 min @ €17/h	€3.40	€1.70
Dispatch rescheduling	10 min @ €15/h	€2.50	€1.25
Subtotal		€5.90	€2.95

The €17/h figure is an approximation of the real operational cost in both salaried and subcontracted models - marginal hourly cost for salaried drivers, opportunity cost per undelivered stop for flat-fee subcontractors.

Route disruption accounts for roughly 40% of the total cost in the redelivery scenario, and it is the component most directly amplified by address quality issues.

Component 4 - Customer support contact

In 2026, most platforms automatically notify recipients of a failed attempt and offer self-service rescheduling. The majority of failures do not generate a human support contact. But a meaningful share do: particularly when the address is genuinely unresolvable, the automated flow breaks down, or the delay exceeds the customer's tolerance.

Industry data on post-failure contact rates shows that well-optimized operators with proactive SMS/WhatsApp notifications see human contact rates around 15%. Average operators without strong visibility tooling can exceed 40%. We use 30% as a central estimate.

For PUDO redirects, the contact rate drops significantly: the recipient gets an automatic notification, the package is safe, and there is nothing to escalate.

Item	Redelivery	PUDO redirect
Human contact rate	30%	10%
Cost per contact (internal dispatch or support)	€8	€8
Subtotal	€2.40	€0.80

The full picture

Component	Redelivery	PUDO redirect
1. On-site failure	€2.70	€2.70
2. Resolution path	€4.30	€2.83
3. Route disruption	€5.90	€2.95
4. Customer support	€2.40	€0.80
Total	€15.30	€9.28

With a low-high range across assumptions:

Scenario	Low	Central	High
Redelivery	€11.00	€15.30	€19.60
PUDO redirect	€6.50	€9.28	€12.10

Our central redelivery estimate of €15.30 sits within the €15-€20 range commonly cited in industry reports: a useful sanity check. But where those figures are self-reported averages with no decomposition, this model shows where the money goes. Route disruption is the largest single component, and it is almost entirely invisible in standard last-mile cost reporting.

The PUDO path at €9.28 is meaningfully cheaper - not because the logistics are simpler, but because the cascade is shorter and the customer contact rate drops. The merchant commission is real but minor.

What this means for geocoding quality

The model above assumes a generic failed delivery: recipient absent, address found, no particular navigation issue. In practice, not all failures are equal.

When a failure is caused by a bad geocode: the driver is routed to the wrong area, cannot locate the address, and spends additional time on-site trying to find it. Two things happen. First, the on-site time (Component 1) increases. Second, and more importantly, the route disruption (Component 3) is amplified: more time lost on that stop means a larger downstream cascade.

Various industry studies estimate that between 20% and 25% of delivery failures trace back to incorrect or unresolvable address data. Applied to the redelivery scenario:

An operator running 50,000 deliveries/month at an 8% failure rate:

~4,000 failed deliveries per month
~900 of those attributable to address or geocoding issues
At €15.30 per failure: ~€13,800/month in avoidable cost

The cost of running those same 50,000 addresses through a quality geocoding pipeline before dispatch: typically €20-€180, depending on provider mix and cascading strategy.

A note on what this model does not include

Two cost categories are deliberately excluded:

Customer churn. A failed delivery affects repurchase intent: research consistently shows 20-25% of recipients do not reorder after a poor delivery experience. This is a real and significant cost, but it falls primarily on the retailer, not the carrier. An e-commerce operator building this model for their own operation should add it.

Return-to-depot logistics. When a package cannot be delivered and is not redirected to a PUDO point, it must be returned to the depot or sender. We have not modeled this, as handling varies significantly by operator and contract structure.

Both exclusions make the estimates above conservative.

The figures above apply to dense urban B2C operations in a European context. Peri-urban and rural contexts change the calculus significantly: longer detours, fewer PUDO options, higher cascade costs per failed stop. We will publish separate models for both.

Coordable helps logistics and operations teams build multi-provider geocoding pipelines that surface address issues before dispatch, not after. See how it works.

Sources and assumptions

Driver hourly wage (€17/h fully loaded) - Median gross wage for delivery drivers in France: €12-€13/h (Indeed, Glassdoor, JOBTransport, 2025; CCN Transport routier logistique, driver pay scale as of May 1, 2025: €11.91-€19.27/h). Employer social contributions: average rate ~30% of gross wage in 2025, range 25-42% depending on company size and applicable exemptions (Urssaf / Staffmatch, 2025). Estimated fully loaded cost: €12.50/h x 1.30 = €16.25/h, rounded to €17/h.
Fuel cost (€0.18/km) - Average diesel price in France, annual average 2025: €1.6186/L (prixdubaril.com / French Ministry of Ecological Transition, January 2026). Light commercial vehicle urban fuel consumption: 11L/100km. Fuel cost: €1.62 x 0.11 = €0.178/km, rounded to €0.18/km.
Vehicle depreciation (€0.12/km) - French fiscal mileage allowance 2024-2025 (BOFiP, BOI-BAREME-000003), depreciation/maintenance component excluding fuel, light commercial vehicle.
PUDO stop time (1.5-2 min vs 6-7 min residential) - Parcelhive, Last-Mile Delivery Economics: Save 50% with Lockers, 2025.
PUDO merchant commission (€0.30-€0.50/parcel) - Published rates from Pickup (Groupe La Poste), Mondial Relay, Relais Colis, 2025. Central value: €0.40.
Out-of-home delivery network size (500,000+ points in Europe) - nShift, EU Parcel Locker Growth in 2025, 2025.
Address-related failure rate (20-25%) - Composite estimate, last-mile industry studies 2021-2024.
Human contact rate on failed deliveries (15-40%) - WISMOlabs, What Is WISMO? Definition, Meaning & Rate Benchmarks, 2025.
Dispatch/support agent wage (€15/h fully loaded) - Estimate by analogy with CCN Transport routier, administrative/operational roles. Gross wage ~€12/h, fully loaded cost ~€15/h.
First-attempt failure rate (8%) - Composite estimate, last-mile industry reports 2021-2025.
Cascade delay assumption (3 stops x 4 min) - Internal estimate, no published benchmark identified. Conservative assumption for a dense urban route of 20-30 stops.

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