The EU de minimis exemption is gone. On 1 July 2026 the €150 customs duty relief was abolished and a temporary flat duty of €3 per item took its place, under Council Regulation (EU) 2026/382. The number that forced the change is easy to see: 5.9 billion low-value parcels entered the EU in 2025, up from 1.4 billion in 2022, and 91% of the sub-€150 e-commerce shipments arriving in 2024 came from China. This guide covers what the EU de minimis removal changes for importers and sellers, what the €3 duty actually applies to, what is still coming in 2028, and how to work out whether your landed cost model still holds.
The 30-second version
- The €150 customs duty exemption ended 1 July 2026. It is not coming back.
- A transitional €3 flat duty per item now applies to qualifying consignments valued at €150 or less.
- The €3 rate runs until 1 July 2028, when normal classification-based duty takes over via the EU Customs Data Hub.
- VAT never went away. It has applied to every consignment since the €22 VAT relief ended in 2021.
- A separate EU-wide handling fee is proposed but not adopted. Amount and start date were still to be decided as of autumn 2026.
What replaced the EU de minimis exemption?
A flat €3 customs duty per item on consignments valued at €150 or less. It is deliberately crude. Rather than classify billions of parcels to eight digits, member states agreed a single figure that can be collected at scale while the permanent system is built, per the Commission's announcement of the measure and the Council agreement in December 2025.
Where that leaves the thresholds:
| Consignment value | Before 1 July 2026 | Now |
|---|---|---|
| Up to €150 | Duty —, VAT ✓ | Duty €3 flat, VAT ✓ |
| Above €150 | Duty by classification ✓, VAT ✓ | Unchanged |
| From 1 July 2028 | n/a | Duty by classification at all values |
The €3 is a duty, not a service charge, and it sits on top of import VAT and whatever the carrier bills for clearance. On a €12 phone case the effective duty rate is 25%. On a €140 jacket it is roughly 2%. That asymmetry is the whole point of a flat fee, and it lands hardest on exactly the ultra-low-value flow the measure was aimed at.
Why did the EU scrap the €150 threshold?
Volume. Low-value imports went from 1.4 billion items in 2022 to 2.3 billion in 2023, 4.6 billion in 2024, which is about 12 million parcels a day, and almost 5.9 billion in 2025, per the European Parliament's briefing on low-value imports. Some 91% of sub-€150 e-commerce shipments in 2024 originated in China.
Two problems came with that curve. Customs capacity could not inspect a meaningful share of it, and EU sellers paying duty on bulk imports were competing with direct-to-consumer parcels that paid none. Undervaluation and consignment splitting made both worse.
What happens in 2028?
The €3 flat duty is explicitly transitional. From 1 July 2028, or mid-2028 in the Commission's own phrasing, the EU Customs Data Hub is expected to carry the functionality for calculating duty on e-commerce transactions, and parcels revert to normal classification-based rates. The same reform creates an EU Customs Authority sitting on top of national administrations, per the Commission's e-commerce customs notice.
That is the part worth planning for. A flat €3 is easy to model. Classification-based duty on every parcel means every SKU needs a defensible commodity code, and the marketplaces that become deemed importers will push that requirement back down to sellers. Anyone still guessing codes from a supplier's invoice description has two years to fix it. Start with how HS codes work and how to find the right one.
The €3 duty is the easy part. Classification on 5.9 billion parcels a year is the change that will actually reorganise cross-border e-commerce.
What should importers do about it now?
Four things, in order of how much money they save.
- Reprice the low-value tail. Anything you sell into the EU below roughly €20 has just taken a duty hit in double-digit percentage terms. Some SKUs no longer work as direct-to-consumer parcels.
- Compare parcel economics against bulk. Consolidating into a full container and clearing once, then fulfilling from an EU warehouse, avoids a €3 charge repeated thousands of times. That maths flipped on 1 July for a lot of catalogues. FCL versus LCL is the first fork in that decision.
- Fix classification early. You will need it in 2028 anyway, and correct codes often reveal a lower duty rate than the one your broker defaults to.
- Get your EORI and representation right. Non-EU sellers acting as importer of record need an EU establishment or an indirect representative. See the EORI number guide.
One consumer-goods seller ran this exercise in July and found the answer was neither "absorb it" nor "raise prices". They moved eleven SKUs to bulk import with EU fulfilment, left the rest as parcels, and came out roughly flat. The work was in knowing which eleven.
How ShipScout helps
Deciding between parcels and bulk means knowing what bulk actually looks like: who supplies your category into the EU, in what volumes, and at what frequency. ShipScout turns 11B+ shipment records across 240+ countries into that view:
- Search your product or HS code with EU destinations and see the real container-level flows behind your category.
- Find consolidation-ready suppliers already shipping full loads into Rotterdam, Hamburg or Antwerp, and read the Netherlands gateway picture alongside it.
- Benchmark your landed cost against what comparable importers are moving, so pricing decisions rest on flows rather than on a carrier quote.
- Verify new counterparties before you shift volume to them.
The exemption is gone and the 2028 rules are already drafted. Start a free trial and rebuild your EU sourcing model on actual shipment data.
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