European Union: the €150 relief has gone, a flat-rate duty of €3 applies

For decades, a shipment worth less than €150 entering the European Union escaped any customs duty, even though VAT remained due from the first euro. Regulation (EU) 2026/382 of 11 February 2026 ends this relief, considered too favourable to non-European platforms that ship large volumes of individual parcels from China.

Instead, a transitional flat-rate duty of €3 applies per tariff heading declared in the parcel, regardless of the quantity of identical items: a shipment containing two similar T-shirts, a coat and three bottles of shampoo counts as three distinct tariff headings, so €9 in duty. This flat-rate regime came into application on 1 July 2026 and is to remain in force until 1 July 2028, pending the roll-out of the EU Customs Data Hub, which will allow duties proportional to the real value to be calculated automatically.

France had anticipated this move with its own national tax of €2 per item category, which came into force on 1 March 2026, but suspended it on the very day the European duty came into application, so as not to stack two taxation systems on the same shipment.

An additional handling fee, intended to fund customs checks in response to the surge in the number of low-price parcels, has also been announced at Union level for 1 November 2026, on top of the €3 flat-rate duty.