What replaced the EU's €150 de minimis threshold?

From 1 July 2026 the duty relief for consignments under €150 no longer applies. In its place the EU levies a temporary flat customs duty of €3 per item on low-value imports, a transitional measure running until 1 July 2028, when the EU Customs Data Hub is expected to carry normal tariff classification instead.

Is the €3 charged per parcel or per item?

Per item, not per consignment. A parcel containing four qualifying items carries four charges, which is why consolidated multi-item orders are hit hardest.

No. Import VAT was already due on every consignment regardless of value since the 2021 e-commerce package. IOSS remains the reporting route; what changed in 2026 is customs duty, not VAT.

The €150 exemption is gone: what the €3 flat duty actually changes

Update, 14 August 2026. The handling fee described below as unsettled was agreed by Council and Parliament on 26 March 2026 and applies no later than 1 November 2026, with the level left to a Commission delegated act. What the agreement settled.

Since 2021 the EU has charged import VAT on every consignment, whatever its value. Customs duty was the remaining exemption: consignments with an intrinsic value under €150 entered duty-free. As of today that exemption is gone.

The Commission announced the removal in November 2025 and the Council gave the measure its final green light on 11 February 2026. What applies from 1 July 2026 is a transitional flat customs duty of €3 on low-value imports, running until 1 July 2028 — the point at which the EU Customs Data Hub is expected to make full tariff classification workable at parcel volume.

The number is small; the unit is not

Three euro sounds negligible. The unit of charge is what matters: it applies per item, not per consignment. A €14 phone case is a €17 phone case. A four-item basket of low-value goods carries four charges. For catalogues built on sub-€20 average order values shipped from outside the EU, this is a margin event, not a rounding error.

A separate handling fee, discussed at around €2 per consignment and expected from roughly November 2026, is still being negotiated between the Council and the Parliament. Treat the amount and the date as unsettled until the trilogue closes; treat the existence of some such fee as likely.

The permanent part is the liability

The flat duty expires in 2028. Two changes underneath it do not.

The merchant becomes the customs debtor by default. The old model quietly put the consumer in the frame as importer of record, with the carrier clearing on their behalf and billing them on the doorstep. The new model puts the seller there. Being the debtor means the duty, the penalties for misdeclaration and the audit exposure sit with the business, not the buyer.

Data becomes the entry condition. An expanded dataset for low-value consignments is expected to be required from late 2026 — reporting from several logistics providers points to 1 November 2026, though this is operational guidance rather than a Council date, so verify against your carrier’s published schedule. Whatever the exact day, the substance is not in doubt: item-level detail, correct HS codes and accurate country of origin per line, not per shipment.

What this forces operationally

Landed cost at checkout. With duty on every parcel, delivered-duty-paid pricing stops being a premium option. Duty collected after the fact is a refused delivery.
HS codes as product data. A code guessed once at catalogue level will not survive item-level declaration. It belongs in the SKU record, maintained, with country of origin beside it.
IOSS is still the VAT route, not a duty route. The H7 declaration path remains for low-value goods; it does not exempt you from the new duty.
Consolidation strategy changes. When duty is charged per item, splitting or merging parcels no longer moves the number the way it used to. Model it again.

The wider picture

The EU is not alone. The United States suspended its own de minimis treatment for Chinese-origin goods in May 2025 and extended the suspension globally in August

The United Kingdom is keeping its £135 relief into late 2026, with full removal signalled for later this decade; the detail there — fiscal representation, data level, handling fees — is not settled.

The common direction across all three: the duty-free floor for small parcels was a policy built for a world of occasional gifts, and it is being dismantled in a world of daily direct-to-consumer freight. Nobody is planning to restore it.