The End of EU De Minimis: Guide for Brokers and Forwarders

The EU removed customs duty relief for low-value imports on 1 July 2026. Until 1 July 2028, consignments up to €150 sold through distance sales face a temporary flat customs duty of €3 per tariff-classified item. After that, a new customs architecture takes over: a central EU Customs Data Hub, platform importer liability, and normal duty rates by goods type.

The United States suspended its $800 de minimis exemption in 2025 and, following legal challenge, the Court of International Trade upheld that suspension on 13 August 2026, with a Federal Circuit appeal still possible. The EU has staged its version. A transitional duty is already in force. A product identifier requirement arrives in November. A handling fee follows; the amount is not yet confirmed. A new customs architecture replaces the transitional regime in 2028. For brokers and forwarders clearing into the EU, this is a sequence to plan against rather than a single event to absorb.

The classification-based "per item" charge is where most secondary coverage goes wrong. A consignment of five T-shirts attracts €3 because it contains one tariff-classified item. A consignment of one T-shirt and one watch attracts €6. Classification breadth, not order value, now drives landed cost for multi-category consignments.

The operational consequence is not the €3 itself. It is that tariff classification now determines a duty liability on consignments where, until June 2026, it ordinarily did not. Data quality has acquired a financial consequence it previously lacked.

This guide is aimed at customs brokers, freight forwarders, and logistics operators clearing goods into the EU. Platforms and marketplaces selling into the EU by distance sale have a direct stake in the 2028 platform importer liability provisions covered below.

This guide covers what is in force now, what is confirmed but not yet quantified, and what replaces the transitional regime in 2028. It is a companion to our guide on the end of US de minimis.

General information only, current as at 21 August 2026. Ripple is not a customs broker, and this is not customs, legal or tax advice.

Timeline at a glance

1 July 2026: €150 customs duty relief ends. Temporary €3 flat duty per tariff-classified item begins under Council Regulation (EU) 2026/382. Product identifiers (PIDs) may be declared voluntarily.

1 November 2026: PIDs become mandatory. Customs authorities use them to detect and block unsafe or non-compliant goods.

By 1 November 2026: New EU handling fee on small consignments to begin. A Commission delegated act will set the amount, which is not yet confirmed.

1 July 2028: Temporary €3 duty ends, subject to the EU Customs Data Hub being operational. If it is not, the Commission must propose an extension. Normal customs duty rates apply by goods type and the Data Hub opens for e-commerce.

1 March 2034: Phased rollout brings all movements of goods into the Data Hub.

The November 2026 deadlines are the near-term pressure points. The July 2028 date is conditional, not fixed.

What is in force now

Until 30 June 2026, goods imported into the EU with an intrinsic value up to €150 were relieved of customs duty. Import VAT still applied, as it has to all consignments since the IOSS reform in July 2021, and a customs declaration was still required.

Council Regulation (EU) 2026/382, adopted on 11 February 2026, removed that relief with effect from 1 July 2026 and replaced it with a temporary flat customs duty of €3. The flat rate runs until 1 July 2028, after which normal customs duties apply according to goods type, provided the EU Customs Data Hub is operational by that date. If it is not, the Commission is required to propose an extension of the transitional measure.

Two supporting acts sit underneath the Council Regulation. The Commission adopted the delegated rules on 30 April 2026, published as Delegated Regulation (EU) 2026/1022. The implementing rules were published in the Official Journal on 8 June 2026. The Commission has also issued a guidance document and Q&A for e-commerce operators, the latter described as a living document updated periodically. It is worth re-checking rather than reading once.

Why the relief was removed

The original justification for de minimis was that collecting small amounts of duty cost more than it raised. Two developments removed that argument.

First, digitalisation: electronic data is now available for all imported goods, eliminating the administrative cost rationale. Second, volume: almost 5.9 billion low-value items were shipped directly from third countries to EU consumers in 2025, a figure that includes postal and express consignments across all product types. For context, around 4.6 billion of those were e-commerce parcels valued under €150, with 91% arriving from China. Targeted inspections across the 27 member states during 2025, covering cosmetics, personal protective equipment, food supplements, toys and electronics, found that more than 60% of checked products failed EU standards through missing labels, prohibited ingredients or absent safety documentation.

The reform is therefore not only a revenue measure. It is also a product safety and level-playing-field measure, and that dual purpose explains the product identifier requirement arriving in November.

The €3 is charged per item, and "item" means tariff classification

This is the detail most secondary coverage gets wrong by describing the charge as per parcel or per unit.

The duty applies per item in a consignment based on tariff classification, not quantity. The Commission's guidance provides a worked example: a consignment of five T-shirts attracts €3, because it contains one tariff-classified item. A consignment of one T-shirt and one watch attracts €6.

The Council frames the same rule as a charge per category of goods, with each product type forming one category. Its example: a parcel holding two toys, one wool coat and three bottles of shampoo attracts €9.

The operational consequence of this is significant:

• Classification breadth, not order value, determines landed cost for multi-category consignments.
• A low-value order spread across several product types can attract more duty than a single higher-value item.
• Classification errors that were invisible under the relief become duty exposure.

Low-value consignments already required customs declarations, with the H7 reduced dataset created specifically for them. What has changed is that classification now determines a duty liability where, under the relief, it ordinarily did not. The quality and structure of classification data are materially more important than they were in June 2026.

Scope, exclusions and who pays

The rules apply to distance sales of imported goods: consignments up to €150 sold to consumers from outside the EU. They apply regardless of VAT scheme, so IOSS, special arrangements and standard VAT treatment all fall within scope.

The main exclusion covers goods benefiting from preferential trade agreements or Customs Union measures. That exclusion is conditional, not blanket. It applies only where VAT has not been collected through IOSS and the goods are declared in H1. The same goods can fall inside or outside the flat duty depending on the VAT route used. This needs checking per flow rather than assuming a general preferential carve-out.

On liability, the duty falls on the declarant: the seller or importer of record. In practice that is the IOSS holder, the special arrangements user, or an indirect representative. The Commission is explicit that this is a charge on businesses rather than consumers, with consumers liable only in residual cases where a member state offers a free web-based declaration system for citizens.

For a broker acting as indirect representative, that liability point is the one to read twice.

What arrives next: November 2026

Two measures are confirmed for November 2026. One is a new data requirement; the other is a new fee. They are separate, and conflating them will cause errors in client communications.

Product identifiers become mandatory on 1 November 2026

Product identifiers (PIDs) can be declared voluntarily from 1 July 2026. The intervening months are intended for testing readiness. From 1 November 2026 they are required, and customs authorities will use them to detect and block unsafe or non-compliant goods.

This is a data capture problem rather than a declaration problem. The identifier has to come from the seller, which means it has to be requested, received, validated and carried through to the declaration. Operations that have not started requesting PIDs from clients will be gathering them under pressure in October.

The constraint is upstream, not operational. No processing capability will produce a PID that the seller has not supplied. That work is commercial and needs to start now.

A new EU handling fee: confirmed in principle, amount not set

The Council and Parliament agreed on 26 March 2026 to introduce a handling fee on small consignments sold through distance selling. Customs authorities will collect it to help cover the rising costs of monitoring parcel volumes, and member states are to begin applying it no later than 1 November 2026.

The amount has not been set. It will be determined by Commission delegated act before member states begin applying it. Several figures are circulating in trade press; none is confirmed.

Two points matter for how this is communicated to clients:

• The handling fee is a separate charge from the €3 customs duty. The Commission draws this distinction explicitly. It should not be described as an increase to the €3.
• Until the delegated act is published, no landed cost modelling for the fee is reliable. Build in a placeholder, not a number.

What to do before 1 November 2026

• Start requesting PIDs from sellers and platforms now, not in October.
• Validate that your data capture workflow can receive, store and pass through PID data to the declaration.
• Review client agreements: who is responsible for supplying compliant data, and what happens if it is not provided?
• Monitor the Commission delegated act on the handling fee. The Commission guidance page is updated periodically.

What replaces the transitional regime in 2028

The €3 flat duty is a bridge. The permanent regime behind it is the larger change, and it is worth modelling now rather than treating 2028 as a distant problem.

Under the March 2026 Council and Parliament agreement, the EU Customs Data Hub becomes operational for e-commerce goods on 1 July 2028, with a phased rollout bringing all movements of goods into scope by 1 March 2034. The hub becomes the single online environment for customs data, replacing submission to up to 27 individual national authorities. A new EU Customs Authority, to be located in Lille, will oversee it.

Platforms become the importer

The agreed text treats platforms and those selling into the EU by distance sale as the importer of the goods, responsible for customs formalities and payments rather than the final consumer. A system of financial penalties will apply to e-commerce operators that systematically fail to meet their customs obligations.

This is agreed rather than operative. Technical elements were still being finalised after the political agreement, and the legislation comes into full application twelve months after publication in the Official Journal. Any advice suggesting platform importer liability has already taken effect is premature. The shift is coming; it has not yet arrived.

Trust and check traders

A new category above the existing Authorised Economic Operator (AEO) scheme will allow the most transparent businesses to receive streamlined obligations, including simplified temporary storage and transit procedures. The most reliable operators will be able to release goods into free circulation without active customs intervention.

For anyone currently structuring clearance around port of entry, this is worth modelling early. The operational advantages for compliant, data-rich operators are significant.

What the 2028 shift means in practice

EU customs handled more than 1,370 million items in total in 2024 and collected almost €27 billion in duties. The volume has not gone anywhere.

What changes in 2028 are where the data goes and who is legally responsible for it. A single data environment, platform liability, and normal tariff rates together represent a more fundamental restructuring than the transitional €3 duty. Operations that treat 2026 as preparation rather than a one-off compliance event will be better placed for that transition.

Operational checklist

The following is a working checklist for brokers and forwarders. It is not exhaustive and is not a substitute for advice specific to your operation and client mix.

Now (in force since 1 July 2026)

• Map which client flows use IOSS, special arrangements, standard VAT, postal declarations, and H1. The duty scope and the preferential exclusion both depend on declaration type and VAT route.
• Audit tariff classification breadth at line level across low-value consignments. Multi-category orders now carry a higher duty exposure than single-category orders of equivalent value.
• Review indirect-representative arrangements and client terms. The duty falls on the declarant; ensure your agreements reflect that liability position.
• Update landed cost calculations for clients. Classification breadth, not order value, now drives the duty component.

Before 1 November 2026

• Start requesting PIDs from sellers and platforms. Do not wait until October.
• Validate that your data capture and declaration workflow can receive, store and pass PID data through to the H7 or H6 declaration.
• Agree with clients who is responsible for supplying compliant data, and what remedies apply if it is not provided before the declaration deadline.
• Monitor the Commission delegated act on the handling fee. Until the amount is confirmed, use a placeholder in landed cost models and communicate the uncertainty clearly to clients.
• Do not describe the handling fee as an increase to the €3. They are separate charges.

Planning for 2028

• Build a 2028 migration plan covering the EU Customs Data Hub submission environment and the shift from national authority submission.
• Model the impact of normal tariff rates replacing the €3 flat duty for your highest-volume product categories.
• Monitor the Trust and Check Trader scheme. Operators that qualify will gain material clearance advantages.
• Track the platform importer liability legislation. The political agreement is done; full application follows twelve months after Official Journal publication.
• Note that the 1 July 2028 date is conditional on the Data Hub being operational. If it is not, the Commission must propose an extension. Build contingency into planning assumptions.

Where automation helps, and where it does not

Automation does not resolve a missing product identifier. If the seller has not supplied it, no processing capability will produce one. The PID problem is commercial and has to be solved upstream.

Automation addresses the volume and variation problem underneath. Reading source documents in whatever format they arrive, extracting line-level data, applying classification and procedure logic, and building the declaration structure is repetitive, rules-based work that scales badly by hand. Each of those steps now carries a financial consequence it didn't before July 2026.

Ripple runs this work for customs operations today. At Pentagon Freight Services, Ripple prepares UK CDS entries from commercial documentation, applying commodity, CPC, origin, licence and procedure logic and creating the entry structure for operator checking. The capacity modelling behind that deployment is based on approximately 140 declarations a day at 0.5 to 2 hours of preparation each, equating to up to around 1,400 hours a week and roughly 35 full-time equivalents of weekly capacity.

That is commercial freight entry preparation rather than low-value parcel clearance, and the workflows differ. The constraint underneath is the same: declaration volume rising faster than the team preparing it, and classification data that now has a direct line to duty liability.

The UK is going the same way

The UK sits outside the EU regime and currently retains its own £135 low-value customs duty relief. That relief is also going.

On 13 July 2026, HMRC published a policy paper confirming that the government will remove the £135 customs duty relief and introduce new customs arrangements for low-value imports, with new requirements for data, payments and compliance. Draft legislation was published alongside it as part of the Finance Bill 2026-27 material.

The detailed arrangements are still being developed. For operators clearing into both jurisdictions, the practical position is two divergent regimes on different timetables, with the same direction of travel.

The UK's direction is similar to the EU's, but its reform is separate, its timetable is not yet fixed, and EU rules cannot be used as a proxy for UK clearance requirements. This distinction matters for any client communication or landed cost modelling that covers both markets.

Common questions

How much is the EU de minimis duty? From 1 July 2026, a temporary flat customs duty of €3 applies per tariff-classified item in consignments up to €150. A consignment containing one product type attracts €3 regardless of quantity. A consignment containing three product types attracts €9. The €3 rate runs until 1 July 2028, subject to the EU Customs Data Hub being operational.

When did EU de minimis end? The €150 customs duty relief ended on 30 June 2026. From 1 July 2026, all consignments up to €150 sold through distance sales are subject to the temporary €3 duty under Council Regulation (EU) 2026/382. Import VAT obligations through IOSS or special arrangements remain unchanged.

Is the €3 charged per parcel or per item? Per tariff-classified item, not per parcel. "Item" means a distinct product category based on tariff classification, not a unit count. Five T-shirts in one parcel attract €3. One T-shirt and one watch in the same parcel attract €6. This is the detail most secondary coverage gets wrong.

Who pays the €3, the seller or the customer? The duty falls on the declarant: the seller, importer, or their indirect representative. The Commission is explicit that this is a charge on business, not on consumers. Consumers are liable only in residual cases where a member state offers a free web-based declaration system for citizens. For brokers acting as indirect representatives, the liability position needs to be reflected in client terms.

Does the UK still have £135 de minimis? Yes, as of 21 August 2026. The UK sits outside the EU regime and retains its own £135 customs duty relief. However, HMRC confirmed in a July 2026 policy paper that it will also remove this relief. The detailed arrangements and timetable are still being developed. EU rules do not apply to UK clearance and cannot be used as a proxy.

Primary sources

• Commission guidance and Q&A on the €3 customs duty (8 June 2026, last updated 20 July 2026)
• Council Regulation (EU) 2026/382
• Delegated Regulation (EU) 2026/1022
• Commission Implementing Act, Official Journal, 8 June 2026
• EU customs: Council and Parliament agree on landmark reform (Council of the EU press release, 26 March 2026)
• EU action on the influx of small parcels (Council of the EU, last reviewed 1 July 2026)
• Reforming customs rules for low value imports (HMRC policy paper, 13 July 2026)

Important notice

This guide is provided for general information only. It is not customs, legal, tax or professional advice, and it should not be relied on as a substitute for advice specific to your circumstances.

Ripple is a technology company. We are not a licensed customs broker, customs agent, customs representative or legal adviser, and we do not act in any of those capacities. Nothing here creates an adviser relationship of any kind.

Customs rules change frequently, and several of the measures described are transitional, subject to further legislation, or awaiting implementing detail. The position stated is as we understood it on 21 August 2026 and may have changed since. National authorities may also apply additional or differing requirements.

Before acting, verify the current position against the primary sources listed above, your national customs authority, or a qualified customs or legal adviser. Where our summary differs from official guidance or the legal text, the official position applies.

We have taken reasonable care in preparing this guide but give no warranty as to accuracy or completeness, and accept no liability for any loss arising from reliance on it to the fullest extent permitted by law.

Third-party organisations named are referred to for factual context. Customer results described relate to specific deployments and do not represent outcomes in other operations.