Postman and Mail Guard Vacancies by Circle: LDCE vs GDS in 2026

There is no all-India vacancy figure for Postman and Mail Guard. Each Postal Circle counts its own posts, splits them between the MTS LDCE and the GDS exam, and publishes the table with its notification or, sometimes, only after the exam. This guide gathers the four 2026 tables we could read in full — West Bengal, Tamil Nadu, Uttarakhand and Himachal Pradesh — and explains the carry-forward rules that decide how many posts a circle has to offer in the first place.

The split rule is in our recruitment rules and eligibility guide: half the posts by LDCE from MTS of the circle, half by the competitive exam limited to GDS of the circle, with unfilled LDCE posts moving to GDS. What follows is how that rule looks in real tables.

Official circle tables; the four-circle total is our arithmetic and is not an all-India figure.

In all four circles the LDCE side is a little larger than the GDS side, not an exact half (our reading). Two things push it that way. Circles split vacancies division by division, and an odd number in a division cannot be halved. And compassionate-appointment and sports-quota posts, where a circle shows them, come off the GDS side: in West Bengal the 67 GDS Postman posts became 61 after 3 compassionate and 3 sports posts, while the 77 LDCE Postman posts were untouched.

Two details in this table are worth noticing. The LDCE side, a promotion, has no OBC or EWS column; the GDS side, which the rules treat as direct recruitment, carries OBC and EWS as well. Odisha’s 2026 LDCE result, in the same way, applies the UR qualifying mark to OBC and EWS candidates. And the Mail Guard count is 9, not 5: 5 is only the Mail Guard LDCE column.

The Tamil Nadu memo is often quoted as 366 Postman and Mail Guard posts. 366 is Postman alone; the Mail Guard table on its third page adds 10, for 376 (our sum). Uttarakhand’s final figures are dated 03.09.2026, almost two months after the written exam of 12.07.2026 (our arithmetic).

The pattern is the same each time: posts the departmental exams could not fill in one year are rolled into a later year, rather than lost. For a candidate this has two consequences. A circle’s 2026 figure is not a measure of how many Postmen retired in 2026; it includes posts left over from 2025. And the 2024 letter shows the Directorate is prepared to hand unfilled posts to the SSC, which is the open market, if the departmental routes keep failing to fill them.

Circle tables also move within a year. Karnataka issued an addendum on 10.09.2026 and a corrigendum on 17.09.2026 to its provisional 2026 Postman vacancies, after the DEST of 30.08.2026: one hearing-impaired backlog vacancy of 2024 at Bengaluru GPO had been shown under the GDS exam instead of the LDCE, and PwBD candidates were allowed to revise their options by 21.09.2026. Assam’s result of 28.09.2026 left 2 SC Postman posts unfilled for want of eligible candidates and kept 1 UR post at Guwahati unfilled after a horizontal vacancy found no candidate. Posts like these are what the next year’s carry-forward letter collects.

The division-by-division rows matter more than the circle total. You are placed by rank against the divisions you listed, so a division with no vacancy in your category is a preference that cannot be met. Our allotment guide shows how that plays out, including candidates who ranked high enough but had listed only divisions that were already full.