An apparatus and a method for sorting articles, in particular flat mail items. The sorting plant has a feed transport path, a lead-away transport path, a plurality of connecting transport paths, a plurality of storage regions, and a sorting plan. Each connecting transport path branches off from the feed transport path and issues into the lead-away transport path. The feed transport path or the lead-away transport path is configured as a storage transport path which contains the storage regions, in the form of a sequence of successive storage regions. The sorting plan assigns a storage region, to each possible feature value of a sorting feature. The sorting plant selects a storage region for each article, using the sorting plan and as a function of the measured feature value. When the sorting plant has selected for a first article a first storage region and for a following second article a second storage region which comes after the first storage region in the sequence, the sorting plant temporarily stores the first article in the first storage region and transports the second article, using the overtaking transport path, past the first article stored in the first storage region to the second storage region.