The $800 de minimis exemption is suspended: what US importers pay now

What changed

For decades a shipment worth no more than $800 could clear US customs free of duty and without a formal entry, under the administrative exemption at 19 U.S.C. 1321. That is over. Goods of China and Hong Kong lost the exemption on 2 May 2025, and every other country of origin lost it on 29 August 2025.

The bigger development for 2026 is what CBP did on 24 June. It published two interim final rules in the Federal Register that suspend the exemption indefinitely: one covering merchandise arriving by every mode other than the international postal network, the other covering mail shipments and creating a new postal informal entry process. The distinction matters more than it looks. Those rules rest on CBP regulatory authority, not on the emergency powers the Supreme Court rejected four months earlier, so when the IEEPA tariffs fell the de minimis suspension did not fall with them.

Low value consignments now need a real entry. Shipments valued at $2,500 or less can generally use informal entry, Type 11, which still requires a CBP Form 3461 filed through ACE carrying the importer of record, the transaction value, and a 10 digit HTSUS code for every item in the box. Above $2,500 you are into formal entry, Type 01, which is also required regardless of value where a shipment is subject to quota or to certain additional duties.

The postal side runs on its own timetable. The new postal informal entry process applies to mail merchandise valued at $2,500 or less, and CBP set a delayed compliance date of 22 October 2026 for it.

The end state is already law. The One Big Beautiful Bill Act repeals the statutory exemption outright from 1 July 2027 and adds civil penalties for misuse, so anyone planning past next summer should assume no threshold exists at all.

Who it affects

• Direct to consumer brands that ship single parcels from an overseas factory or third party warehouse. The economics that made that model work assumed no duty and no filing cost per parcel, and both assumptions are gone.
• Marketplace and dropship sellers whose supplier ships straight to the US buyer. Somebody has to be importer of record on every one of those parcels now, and it is worth deciding who on purpose.
• Anyone who set retail prices in 2024 on a landed cost that excluded duty entirely. Repricing is not optional at this point.
• Subscription box and sampling programmes, where the fixed per parcel filing cost is large relative to the value of what is inside.

A worked cost example

A US brand sells a $180 accessory kit made in Vietnam and ships it one parcel at a time straight from the factory. Before the suspension that parcel entered free. Here is roughly what the same parcel costs to clear today. The duty rate below is illustrative, so confirm your own 10 digit classification before you reprice anything.

That is 27% to 33% of order value on a parcel that used to cost nothing to clear. At this level, consolidating into one bulk entry and holding US inventory usually beats shipping box by box, because the filing cost is charged once instead of once per parcel.

What importers should do

1. 1 Classify every SKU to 10 digits. An informal entry still needs a real HTSUS number, and a guess is a penalty exposure rather than a shortcut.
2. 2 Decide who is importer of record on each parcel and put it in writing with your supplier. Ambiguity here is what leaves parcels sitting at the port while storage accrues.
3. 3 Model bulk import against parcel by parcel for your three highest volume SKUs. The break even arrives far sooner than most sellers expect once filing costs are charged per box.
4. 4 If you ship through international mail, have your postal entry data ready well ahead of 22 October 2026 rather than on the day the compliance date lands.
5. 5 Rebuild retail prices from landed cost rather than from unit cost plus freight, and rebuild them for every origin separately.

Questions importers keep asking

Primary sources

• Federal Register: suspension for modes other than the postal network →
• Federal Register: mail shipments and the postal informal entry process →
• US Customs and Border Protection →

Related changes

What to re-check, and when

This page is about the United States de minimis suspension, and no published instrument names a closing date for the measure itself, so this site records no scheduled end for it: it runs until the authority behind it revokes or amends it, which is a finding about the measure rather than a gap in the record, while any temporary provision sitting alongside it carries its own date in the passage above that describes it, and what is dated below is the reading rather than the measure.

The claims on this page about the United States de minimis suspension were last read on 28 August 2026, against the sources it names, and what to check first is the sentence under this one.

The first thing to re-check here is the 22 October 2026 postal compliance deadline. Everything else on this page is fixed until the statutory repeal takes effect in July 2027.