The EU’s new €3 customs duty: what it means if you sell low-value goods to European customers

If you sell to customers in the EU and your parcels are worth less than €150, the rules changed on 1 July 2026. There is now a €3 customs duty on those goods where before there was nothing. The old duty-free threshold, the one that let small parcels cross the border without a customs charge, has gone.

The good news is that €3 per item is manageable for most sellers. The part worth understanding is how it is worked out, because it catches people out, and what else is arriving behind it. Here is the whole picture.

Until the end of June 2026, goods coming into the EU in consignments worth up to €150 were exempt from customs duty. That exemption, known as de minimis, was brought in years ago to save customs authorities from drowning in paperwork over tiny amounts of money. It made sense when cross-border parcels were a trickle.

They are no longer a trickle. In 2025, almost 5.9 billion low-value items were shipped straight from outside the EU to European consumers without any duty being paid. The EU also ran safety checks across all 27 member states last year and found that more than 60% of the products it inspected, things like cosmetics, supplements, toys and electronics, failed to meet its standards. So the exemption has been scrapped, and a flat €3 duty has taken its place.

This is where it pays to read carefully. The €3 is charged per item, based on what the item is, not per parcel and not per unit. “Item” here means a type of product, sorted by its customs classification.

The EU’s own example makes it clear. Five identical T-shirts in one parcel count as a single item, so the charge is €3. A parcel with one T-shirt and one watch counts as two items, so the charge is €6. The number of units barely matters. What matters is how many different types of product are in the box.

For a seller shipping one product line, this is about as simple as customs gets. For anyone sending mixed baskets, a few different products bundled into one order, the sums are worth checking before you price your postage and handling.

The duty is paid by the declarant, meaning whoever is named on the import declaration. In distance selling that is the seller or importer of the goods, an IOSS holder, a special arrangements user, or an indirect representative acting on their behalf. The European Commission has been explicit that this is a charge on business rather than a tax on consumers, with consumers liable only in residual cases.

Worth checking, then, is who is doing the declaring for you. Plenty of small sellers have a courier, a marketplace or a customs agent acting as their indirect representative, under an arrangement set up by whoever handled shipping. If you cannot name your declarant, you cannot see your duty exposure, and you are relying on somebody else to describe goods you remain liable for.

A few dates are worth putting in the diary. The €3 duty went live on 1 July 2026. Product Identifiers, a traceability code the EU is using to spot unsafe or non-compliant goods, can be added voluntarily now and become mandatory from 1 November 2026. The €3 flat rate is itself temporary. It runs until 1 July 2028, when the EU’s new Customs Data Hub comes online and normal customs tariffs take over, charged according to what each good is.

There is one more thing on the horizon. The EU has proposed a separate handling fee to cover the cost of processing all these declarations. The amount and start date are still being decided, expected around autumn 2026. It is a fee rather than a duty, and it is a second cost to keep an eye on rather than a reason to worry today.

For most small sellers, the €3 is a line on a spreadsheet, not a crisis. The real change is quieter and more permanent. Low-value cross-border e-commerce used to sit largely outside the customs system. Now it sits firmly inside it, duty, data, product codes and all. The days of small parcels slipping across the border unnoticed are behind us.

The sellers who will find this painless are the ones keeping clean, accurate records of what they ship and how it is classified. The ones who treated customs paperwork as an afterthought have a bit of catching up to do. Either way, it is better to know now than to find out at the border.

At ExportDocuments, keeping track of changes like this is the job, so UK exporters can get on with theirs. If you want the customs side handled properly, that is what we are here for.