The UK £135 duty relief is going. What replaces it has not been decided.

Legislated, and not yet in force

The removal of the £135 relief

A parcel arriving in the United Kingdom with a consignment value at or under £135 pays no customs duty today, under section 5 of the United Kingdom Customs Tariff: Reliefs from Import Duty. HMRC published a policy paper and draft legislation on 13 July 2026 that withdraws it and hands HMRC and the Treasury the power to put a different set of arrangements in its place. The Act being amended is the Taxation (Cross-border Trade) Act 2018.

The paper gives the commencement in one sentence, and the qualifier at the end of that sentence is the part a summary tends to drop:

The measure will come into force on such day as the Treasury may by regulations made by statutory instrument appoint by October 2028 at the latest.

HMRC, "Reforming the customs treatment of low value imports into the UK", policy paper published 13 July 2026

Read it as a ceiling rather than a schedule. The Treasury has undertaken to appoint a day and it has undertaken not to leave that day later than a stated month, which is why this site says the relief goes by October 2028 at the latest and never that duty starts falling due in that month. The difference matters to anybody pricing a shipment: one of those readings leaves two years of the current position untouched and the other quietly ends it on a date nobody has appointed.

Undetermined, and printed nowhere

What a low value consignment will cost

Nothing in the paper and nothing in the draft states the rate below £135, and nothing indicates whether the charge would be a flat amount per consignment or the ordinary tariff rate for the commodity code. Those two produce very different answers on the same parcel, and nothing published so far gives a reader any basis for choosing between them.

So no figure appears on this page. That is the finding rather than a gap in it: the reform hands the detail to secondary legislation and public notices that have not been written, so a number circulating today cannot have been read off a British source, because there is not one to read it off. Price a shipment under the rates that do exist →

The European Union answered the same question a different way, and the contrast is useful. Brussels replaced its own relief with a flat charge written into the regulation that abolished it, so the amount was knowable on the day of the announcement. Westminster has separated the two, which buys flexibility and leaves every importer below the threshold planning against an unpriced change. What the EU charges instead →

One threshold, two taxes, and only one of them is moving

£135 is the boundary for two entirely separate charges, and a reader who hears that the £135 relief is going will reasonably assume both of them move. Only the customs duty relief is in this measure.

A consignment at or under the threshold already carries import VAT, and this measure leaves that alone. What is different about it is where the tax is collected: at checkout, by an overseas seller or by the marketplace that hosted the sale, both of which register with HMRC to do it, rather than by the carrier at the frontier. The United Kingdom runs no equivalent of the EU Import One Stop Shop, so an EU registration reaches none of this.

Whether that VAT should move to the border alongside the customs change is a separate question the government is still assessing. Nothing in this measure decides it, and nothing published so far decides it either. Two reviews running beside each other is how a seller ends up preparing for one change and being handed two, so the honest thing a page can do is name them apart and say which one has legislation attached to it. The rest of the UK import position →

What to re-check, and when

This page is about the removal of the UK GBP 135 duty relief, and the measure behind it has an end this site records: UK GBP 135 low value import duty relief, and its legislated removal, which runs out by October 2028 at the latest, on HMRC policy paper "Reforming the customs treatment of low value imports into the UK", 13 July 2026, Detailed proposal, Operative date; 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 removal of the UK GBP 135 duty relief were last read on 2 September 2026, against the sources it names, and what to check first is the sentence under this one.

Two things, and neither of them is the calendar. The first is a commencement statutory instrument being made: the moment one exists there is a date, and everything on this page about a pending start becomes history instead. The second is the rate below £135, which arrives in secondary legislation or a public notice rather than in the Act, and which this site will publish with the instrument that set it and not before. The build stops on its own once the outer deadline is reached, because a page describing an unresolved position cannot be right after the position has had to resolve.