EU €150 duty relief abolished: what importers pay now

The €150 customs duty relief on low value consignments no longer exists. It was abolished across the EU on 1 July 2026 by Council Regulation (EU) 2026/382, alongside matching amendments to the Union Customs Code delegated and implementing acts. Nothing entering the EU is duty free by virtue of its value any more. What replaced it: A temporary flat customs duty of €3 applies to consignments with an intrinsic value of €150 or less that reach EU customers through distance selling. It is charged per item rather than per parcel, and "item" means a distinct type of good identified by its tariff classification, not each unit in the box. How that works out in practice: Five identical T-shirts in one parcel count as a single item and attract €3. One T-shirt plus one watch counts as two items and attracts €6. Twenty copies of the same phone case is still one item at €3. Quantity does not move the charge. Variety does. Who is actually billed: The declarant owes the duty. In practice that is the seller, the importer, the holder of an Import One Stop Shop registration, a user of the special arrangements, or an indirect representative acting for one of them. The charge was not designed to be collected from the shopper at the door, and only in exceptional cases does liability reach the consumer. Consignments above €150: Nothing changed for these. They are classified in the ordinary way and pay the Common Customs Tariff rate attached to their commodity code, which for most manufactured goods falls between 0% and 12%. VAT is a separate question: Import VAT has been due on every consignment regardless of value since July 2021, and that is untouched. The €150 ceiling for using the Import One Stop Shop to account for VAT also still stands. Only the duty relief was withdrawn, so a seller can sit inside IOSS for VAT purposes and still owe €3 of customs duty on the same parcel. Product identifiers: A product identifier could be declared voluntarily from 1 July 2026 and becomes mandatory on 1 November 2026. Add the field to your customs data feed now rather than in the final week of October. What happens in 2028: The €3 charge is explicitly temporary and is legislated to run until 1 July 2028. After that, low value consignments fall under normal duty rates, which means the cost stops being a flat fee and starts depending on what the goods are. A €40 parcel of cotton T-shirts and a €40 parcel of jewellery will not cost the same to clear. One thing that has not happened: The per parcel handling fee discussed alongside the wider EU customs reform is a separate proposal and is not this measure. Treat any announcement about a handling fee as pending rather than in force until the legal text lands. What sellers should do now: Reprice on the basis that every EU bound parcel carries duty. Clean up your classification data, because the €3 charge is counted off the classifications in the consignment rather than off its value. If you ship mixed baskets, expect the charge to scale with the variety of an order, which is the opposite of how a value threshold behaved.

What to re-check, and when

This page is about the abolition of the EU EUR 150 duty relief, and the measure behind it has an end this site records: EU EUR 3 low value consignment customs duty, which runs until 1 July 2028, on Council Regulation (EU) 2026/382, Article 2; that date is held in the data layer rather than typed here, and the build fails on it rather than letting this page go on describing the measure as current.

The claims on this page about the abolition of the EU EUR 150 duty relief were last read on 28 August 2026, against the sources it names, and what to check first is the sentence under this one.

Two things to re-check here before the numbers are used: whether the €3 charge is still running on its scheduled path to 1 July 2028, and whether the separate per parcel handling fee has moved from proposal to legal text.