What is the difference between hub-and-spoke and point-to-point?

Point-to-point runs direct between every pair of locations; hub-and-spoke sends everything through a hub. Ten sites need 45 direct lanes but only 9 spokes to one hub.

How many packages does UPS Worldport handle?

416,000 packages and documents an hour, in a 5.2 million square foot facility in Louisville, according to UPS's air operations facts of June 2026.

Why do carriers use hub-and-spoke networks?

Consolidating flows at a hub lets them run fewer, fuller links and capture economies of density. The price is extra handling and time through the hub.

Term

Hub-and-spoke network

A hub-and-spoke network routes freight from many origins through a central hub, where it is sorted and consolidated onto fewer, fuller links to its destinations, instead of running direct between every pair of points. It needs fewer links and earns economies of scale at the hub, at the cost of extra handling and delay.

Also called hub and spoke, hub-and-spoke model, hub network, hub-and-spoke vs point-to-point, sortation hubUpdated 14 October 2026

Three of the largest hubs

Hub	Throughput	Size
UPS Worldport, Louisville	416,000 packages and documents an hour	5.2 million sq ft, 300 acres, 125 aircraft parking positions, 360 inbound and outbound flights
FedEx World Hub, Memphis	Capability to process 484,000 packages an hour	940 acres, 171 aircraft gates, 84 miles of conveyor belt, 13,000 team members
UPS, Cologne/Bonn	190,000 packages and documents an hour	613,563 sq ft

UPS air operations facts, 30 June 2026; FedEx newsroom, 30 October 2024

A 2024 paper in Mathematics puts the trade-off plainly: against a point-to-point network, hub-and-spoke uses fewer links and exploits scale economies on consolidated flows between and at hubs, but the inevitable delays through hubs are always a concern. In its case, hub-and-spoke saved more than 14.1% of total cost a year.

Worked example: ten sites

Direct links between every pair: 10 × 9 ÷ 2 = 45 lanes · one site as the hub: 9 spokes · UPS Worldport at 416,000 an hour ≈ 116 packages a second; FedEx Memphis at 484,000 ≈ 134

Arithmetic on the published figures; the ten-site network is illustrative.

When point-to-point wins

A 2021 study of container shipping in the Asian Journal of Shipping and Logistics found hub-and-spoke networks cost-effective through economies of density, but point-to-point can cost less when cargo demand, bunker prices, vessel size or shippers' value of time change: high cargo demand pushes towards direct services, bigger vessels towards hubs.

The mistake people make

Assuming the hub is always cheaper. It wins on thin, scattered flows; on a lane with enough volume to fill trucks or ships on its own, a direct service skips the hub's extra handling and delay — the condition the 2021 study found pushing networks back to point-to-point.

FAQ