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Inside the Last U.S. Postal Facility That Reads Illegible Handwriting

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Last update: June 2026

Most mail in the U.S. is sorted entirely by machine. But a small fraction of letters every day still defeat even the best optical character recognition (OCR) software, and when that happens, there’s exactly one place in the country built to handle it.

The Last Remote Encoding Center

At their peak in the late 1990s, USPS operated 55 Remote Encoding Centers (RECs) around the country — facilities staffed by people whose job was to read addresses that scanning equipment couldn’t decipher. As OCR technology improved and the volume of handwritten mail declined, those facilities closed one by one. By 2014, only the original REC, in Salt Lake City, was still standing.

It’s still the only one today. In April 2024, the Salt Lake City REC marked 30 years in operation, staffed by more than 730 employees working around the clock, every day of the year, processing roughly 2.3 million address images daily. According to USPS’s own published data, the center examined over 841 million images of poorly written addresses in fiscal year 2025 alone.

CBS News visited the facility in 2025 and got a sense of the scale involved directly from USPS staff. A senior USPS manager at the Salt Lake City distribution center told CBS that around three million letters move through their machines every day, and roughly 75,000 of those need to be kicked over to the REC because their addresses are too difficult for the equipment to read. The center’s operations manager noted that the facility processed about a billion pieces of mail over the course of a year, with individual data conversion operators — known internally as “keyers” — getting through roughly 900 pieces an hour.

Why This Still Matters for Document Handling

The Remote Encoding Center is essentially what document scanning vendors do at massive scale: pair automated OCR with human review for anything the software can’t confidently read. That’s the same basic approach behind processing handwritten forms, old records, and other messy documents in any organization — automation handles the high-confidence cases, and trained staff handle the exceptions.

For businesses dealing with their own backlog of handwritten or hard-to-read paper records — old client files, handwritten forms, historical archives — the same principle applies. Pure OCR rarely gets everything right on the first pass, and a process that combines automated capture with human verification tends to produce far more accurate, usable data than software alone.

Getting Started

Tab Service Company’s data entry and data capture services are built around that same combination of automated recognition and human review, including for handwritten and otherwise difficult-to-read documents. Document scanning services handle the bulk conversion of paper records into digital, searchable files, and a digital mailroom setup can apply the same capture process to incoming mail as it arrives, rather than after it’s piled up.

Bottom Line

Even with decades of advances in OCR, there’s still a small but real category of mail and documents that machines can’t fully handle on their own — which is exactly why the Salt Lake City REC still exists, processing hundreds of millions of images a year. If your organization has a backlog of handwritten or hard-to-read paper records that need to be captured accurately, contact Tab Service Company to talk through what that would look like.

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