Why the US and EU Both Killed De Minimis in the Same Year
For nearly two decades, a single Latin phrase quietly shaped the economics of global e-commerce. “De minimis” — too small to matter — let low-value parcels cross borders duty-free, with barely a glance from customs officers. In the United States, that meant shipments worth $800 or less. In the European Union, it meant parcels worth €150 or less. Both thresholds were built for a world of occasional souvenirs and small business samples, not for a world where a single Chinese platform can ship four million packages a day directly into a consumer’s mailbox.
That world changed abruptly. Within the same twelve-month stretch, both the United States and the European Union effectively dismantled their de minimis regimes. Washington moved first and moved hard, suspending duty-free treatment for every country almost overnight. Brussels followed with its own reform, arriving at the same destination through a slower, more procedural European route. The timing was not a coincidence, and the reasoning, while dressed in different political language on each side of the Atlantic, rhymes more than officials in either capital like to admit. This article unpacks why both blocs pulled the plug in the same year, what actually changed on the ground, and what it means for anyone still shipping low-value goods across borders.
A Loophole Built for a Different Era
De minimis rules were never designed with e-commerce in mind. The US threshold traces back to a 1930s provision meant to spare customs agents the trouble of assessing duty on a tourist’s souvenir or a small gift mailed from abroad. Congress raised the US limit from $200 to $800 in 2015, a change that looked reasonable at the time and turned out to be spectacularly consequential once Shein, Temu, AliExpress, and thousands of smaller drop-shippers realized they could ship almost anything directly to American doorsteps duty-free, one parcel at a time.
The numbers tell the story better than any policy paper. Annual de minimis shipments into the United States grew from roughly 139 million in 2015 to more than 1.36 billion by fiscal year 2024, according to figures cited by US Customs and Border Protection. Europe followed a similar arc. The EU’s Import One-Stop Shop, meant to simplify VAT collection on small parcels, ended up processing around 4.6 billion low-value packages in 2024 alone, with roughly nine out of ten originating in China. What began as an administrative convenience had quietly become the primary gateway for a huge share of global consumer goods trade, largely invisible to the tariff systems that governed everything else.
The US Move: An Executive Order, Not a New Law
Washington’s version of the story is fast-moving and political. President Trump signed Executive Order 14324, “Suspending Duty-Free De Minimis Treatment for All Countries,” on July 30, 2025, effective August 29, 2025. The order built on an earlier, narrower move: de minimis treatment for China and Hong Kong had already been suspended on May 2, 2025, tied explicitly to fentanyl-related trade measures. The August order extended the same logic worldwide, closing what the White House called “a catastrophic loophole” that traffickers and counterfeiters had learned to exploit alongside ordinary retailers.
It is worth noting that Congress had already scheduled the end of de minimis through the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, signed on July 4, 2025, but that statute set a comfortable implementation date of July 1, 2027. The executive order tore up that runway and moved the effective date nearly two years earlier, giving importers, carriers, and postal operators only a few weeks to adjust. Postal shipments received a short grace period, with simplified flat-rate duties available for six months before shifting entirely to standard ad valorem calculation based on each country’s effective tariff rate. By June 24, 2026, US Customs and Border Protection converted the suspension from executive-order policy into a permanent federal regulation, removing any lingering assumption that the change might be temporary.
| Date | US De Minimis Milestone |
| Enga anie 2, 2025 | De minimis suspended for China and Hong Kong shipments |
| Jolay 4, 2025 | One Big Beautiful Bill Act sets a statutory end date of July 1, 2027 |
| Jolay 30, 2025 | Executive Order 14324 signed, suspending de minimis for all countries |
| Aug 29, 2025 | Suspension takes effect worldwide; formal customs entry required for all shipments |
| Mar 1, 2026 | Postal grace period ends; ad valorem duty becomes the only calculation method |
| Jun 24, 2026 | CBP converts the suspension into permanent federal regulation |
The practical effect is stark: every commercial shipment entering the United States, regardless of value, country of origin, or shipping method, now requires formal or informal customs entry, a ten-digit HTS classification, and payment of applicable duties. There is no longer a value threshold under which a parcel simply slips through. For sellers who built entire business models around shipping directly to US consumers at sub-$800 order values, the rule change arrived with almost no transition period.
The EU Move: Slower, but Aimed at the Same Target
Brussels took a more deliberate path, but ended up in a strikingly similar place. The European Council agreed to abolish the €150 customs duty exemption on November 13, 2025, with final legislative approval following on February 11, 2026. The reform originally sat on a slower track, tied to the EU’s broader customs modernization program and the rollout of the EU Customs Data Hub, once projected for 2028. Pressure from member states watching parcel volumes overwhelm their customs systems, and the clear precedent set by Washington months earlier, pushed the EU to compress that timeline and introduce an interim mechanism far sooner.
From July 1, 2026, the EU’s long-standing €150 duty exemption is gone. In its place sits a temporary flat customs duty, generally described as €3, charged per line of the customs declaration based on tariff classification rather than per parcel. A shipment containing two items that share a single HS code triggers one charge; a shipment spanning two different HS codes, such as a swimsuit and a sun hat, triggers two. Import VAT, which had already applied to all EU imports regardless of value since 2021, remains unchanged and continues to stack on top of the new duty. A separate EU-wide handling fee of roughly €2 per parcel was expected to follow around November 2026, alongside mandatory product identifier requirements for cross-border sellers.
Consumer groups largely welcomed the change, framing it as a product-safety measure as much as a revenue one. The European Bureau of European Consumers’ Organisation has argued publicly that cheap, unchecked parcels arriving one at a time made it nearly impossible for regulators to verify that toys, chargers, and cosmetics met EU safety standards, and that shifting importers toward bulk, warehouse-based models would make enforcement realistic again. Trade groups representing fashion and textile exporters, by contrast, have warned that even a modest €3 to €6 charge per order can quietly erode margins on low-priced goods, particularly for smaller brands selling directly to EU consumers.
| Date | EU De Minimis Milestone |
| Nov 13, 2025 | European Council agrees to abolish the €150 exemption |
| Feb 11, 2026 | Final legislative approval granted |
| Jul 1, 2026 | Interim €3 flat duty per declaration line takes effect |
| Nov 1, 2026 | EU-wide handling fee and mandatory product identifiers expected |
| Mid-2028 (target) | EU Customs Data Hub goes live; flat duty replaced by full HS-code tariffs |
Side by Side: Two Different Playbooks, One Shared Destination
Placed next to each other, the US and EU reforms look more like variations on a theme than two unrelated policy stories. Washington leaned on executive authority and national-security framing, moving in weeks. Brussels leaned on multilateral consensus and consumer-protection framing, moving over roughly eight months from council agreement to implementation. But the underlying diagnosis, an exemption designed for trickle-level trade that had become the default channel for a large share of a continent’s imports, was identical in both capitals.
| endri-javatra | Etazonia | vondrona Eraopeanina |
| Old threshold | $800 isan'olona isan'andro | €150 per consignment |
| Legal mechanism | Executive Order 14324, later codified in CBP regulation | European Council and Parliament legislation |
| Daty manankery | August 29, 2025 (all countries) | Jolay 1, 2026 |
| Replacement charge | Standard duties via ad valorem or specific rate | Interim flat €3 duty per declaration line |
| Stated justification | Fentanyl trafficking, tariff evasion, revenue loss | Product safety, fair competition, revenue |
| Full system target | Efa manan-kery | EU Customs Data Hub, targeted mid-2028 |
Why the Same Year? The Forces Both Sides Shared
Three pressures converged on both Washington and Brussels at roughly the same moment. The first was sheer volume. Ultra-fast-fashion and marketplace platforms had scaled direct-to-consumer shipping to a point where customs agencies on both continents were processing billions of low-value parcels a year with only a fraction of the scrutiny applied to a single container of formally entered goods. Neither system was built to handle that scale, and both had effectively become blind spots in national trade enforcement.
The second pressure was competitive fairness. Domestic retailers, whether a mid-sized apparel brand in North Carolina or a household-goods manufacturer in Germany, were paying full duty on every container they imported, while a foreign platform shipping the same category of goods one parcel at a time paid nothing. That asymmetry became politically difficult to defend once it was visible in plain numbers, and lobbying from domestic manufacturing and retail associations pushed the issue onto the agenda in both Washington and Brussels around the same period.
The third pressure, more acute in the US case but present in both, was security and compliance. American officials tied the change explicitly to fentanyl trafficking and the difficulty of screening high volumes of low-scrutiny parcels for concealed contraband. European officials pointed instead to product safety, noting that independent testing repeatedly found items sold through low-value channels failing basic EU safety standards. Different vocabulary, same underlying complaint: an exemption that had outgrown the level of oversight it was ever meant to carry.
What Changed for Sellers and Shoppers
For an ordinary shopper, the visible effect has been a slow creep of extra charges rather than a single dramatic bill. A US consumer ordering from an overseas platform now sees duty calculated and applied at checkout or on delivery, in place of what used to be a duty-free transaction. A shopper in the Netherlands buying skincare from a US brand might now pay an extra €3 to €6 per order depending on how many tariff categories the parcel spans, a modest amount on any single purchase but a real cost once multiplied across a year of regular orders.
For sellers, the change runs much deeper than a line-item fee. Any business that priced its products to sit just under the old thresholds now has to rebuild its landed-cost model from scratch, factor duty into retail pricing, and in many cases register for formal or informal customs entry for the first time. Platforms that built entire supply chains around shipping single units directly from a factory in Guangdong to a customer’s doorstep in Ohio or Lyon are discovering that the old model, fast, cheap, and duty-free, no longer exists in either of their two largest markets simultaneously.
The Logistics Response: Bulk Freight and Forward Warehousing
The most visible operational shift on both sides of the Atlantic has been a pivot away from parcel-by-parcel direct shipping and toward consolidated ocean freight paired with local, in-market fulfillment. Instead of shipping thousands of individual sub-$800 or sub-€150 parcels through express couriers, brands are increasingly importing inventory in bulk, clearing customs once on a full container load, and then fulfilling domestic orders from warehouses already inside the destination market. Duty gets paid once, on the container, rather than thousands of times, on each parcel, and the cost per unit typically falls sharply compared with piecemeal express shipping.
This is exactly the kind of transition where an experienced freight partner earns its keep. Topway Shipping, headquartered in Shenzhen and operating since 2010, has spent more than fifteen years focused specifically on China–US logistics and customs clearance, and its service model maps closely onto what brands now need. Rather than treating first-leg transportation, overseas warehousing, customs clearance, and last-mile delivery as separate problems to be solved with separate vendors, Topway Shipping runs the full chain as one coordinated service, which matters enormously now that every parcel, not just the occasional oversized one, needs a defensible customs record.
For brands moving away from single-parcel shipping and toward bulk import plus local fulfillment, Topway Shipping’s flexible full-container-load and less-than-container-load ocean freight services from China to major ports worldwide offer a practical middle path: businesses that are not yet large enough to fill a container on their own can still consolidate shipments, clear customs efficiently, and route goods into overseas warehousing without absorbing the per-parcel duty burden that now applies to direct express shipments. That combination of first-mile pickup, ocean freight, customs clearance, and warehousing under one provider is precisely the kind of restructuring that logistics analysts have been recommending since the US and EU reforms were announced.
Inona no ho avy
Neither reform is really finished. The EU’s €3 flat duty is explicitly interim, expected to give way to full HS-code-based tariffs once the EU Customs Data Hub becomes operational, with a target date around mid-2028 and a built-in review point by December 2027 in case implementation slips. The United States, for its part, still faces ongoing litigation over the legal basis for some of the underlying IEEPA tariff actions, even as CBP has moved the de minimis suspension itself into permanent regulation. The direction of travel, however, looks settled in both jurisdictions: low-value exemptions are shrinking or disappearing, and the United Kingdom, which currently retains a £135 threshold, has already signaled it expects to phase out its own version by 2029.
What that means practically is that any business still planning around the old assumption, duty-free shipping under a fixed dollar or euro amount, is planning around a rule that effectively no longer exists in the world’s two largest consumer markets. The businesses adapting fastest are the ones treating this as a supply-chain redesign problem rather than a pricing tweak: consolidating shipments, moving inventory closer to the customer, and working with logistics partners who already understand the customs mechanics on both sides of the Pacific.
Famaranana
The US and EU did not coordinate their de minimis reforms, but they arrived at nearly the same conclusion within the same twelve months because they were staring at the same underlying problem: an exemption written for a world of occasional small parcels had become the default channel for billions of dollars of trade, with almost none of the oversight applied to everything else crossing their borders. Washington acted through executive authority and national-security framing in a matter of weeks. Brussels acted through legislative consensus and consumer-protection framing over roughly eight months. Both landed on the same basic outcome: value-based duty-free thresholds are gone or going, replaced by systems that tax and track every parcel, regardless of size. For sellers, shoppers, and logistics providers alike, 2025 and 2026 will likely be remembered as the years the de minimis era quietly came to an end on both sides of the Atlantic.
FAQs
Q: Is the US de minimis exemption completely gone?
A: Yes, for commercial purposes. As of August 29, 2025, duty-free de minimis treatment was suspended for all countries, and on June 24, 2026 US Customs and Border Protection converted that suspension into permanent federal regulation, so every shipment now requires formal or informal customs entry regardless of value.
Q: Did the EU remove the €150 threshold entirely, or just reduce the benefit?
A: The duty exemption itself is gone as of July 1, 2026, replaced by an interim flat €3 duty per declaration line. Import VAT still applies as it has since 2021. A fuller, HS-code-based tariff system is expected once the EU Customs Data Hub launches, targeted for around mid-2028.
Q: Why did both regions act around the same time?
A: Both were responding to explosive growth in low-value parcel volume, mostly from Chinese e-commerce platforms, that had outpaced their customs systems’ ability to screen for safety, security, and duty evasion. The US emphasized fentanyl trafficking and tariff evasion; the EU emphasized product safety and fair competition for domestic retailers.
Q: How should small sellers adjust their shipping strategy?
A: Many are shifting from parcel-by-parcel direct shipping toward consolidated ocean freight and overseas warehousing, paying duty once on a bulk shipment rather than repeatedly on individual parcels. Working with an experienced China–US logistics provider that can handle first-leg transportation, customs clearance, and warehousing together tends to simplify the transition considerably.
Q: Will the UK follow the same path?
A: The UK currently keeps a £135 de minimis threshold for customs duty, but the government has opened a consultation on reforming low-value import rules, and current guidance points toward phasing the exemption out by 2029.
