Since 1 July 2026 every parcel you send into the EU worth €150 or less carries a flat customs duty. Most coverage of it is written for freight forwarders. Here is the version for someone shipping a few orders a month.
€3 per item, on any consignment worth €150 or less, from 1 July 2026 until 1 July 2028. The €150 duty-free exemption that existed before is gone.
"Item" does not mean "unit." It means one tariff classification. Five identical T-shirts is one item — €3. A T-shirt and a watch is two items — €6.
You pay it, not your customer. The duty falls on the declarant, which in practice is the seller, the importer, or the IOSS holder.
"€3 per item" reads like €3 per thing in the box. It isn't, and the difference is large enough to change whether EU selling works for you.
The Commission defines an item as goods in a consignment that share the same tariff classification, description and, where applicable, origin. Its own worked example is the clearest statement of it:
5 T-shirts → €3 (1 item)
1 T-shirt + 1 watch → €6 (2 items) European Commission, Access2Markets
So the duty is indifferent to how many units you ship. It cares how many different kinds of thing are in the parcel.
We got this wrong ourselves, in both directions, before checking the definition. The first version of our calculator ignored the duty entirely. The second multiplied €3 by units, which overstates it for anyone selling multiples. The definition was two pages away on the Commission's own site the whole time.
The duty falls on the declarant — the party making the customs declaration. For most small sellers shipping direct to EU consumers that is you, your carrier acting on your behalf, or your IOSS intermediary. It only reaches the buyer in the cases where the buyer is the importer of record, which is unusual in ordinary e-commerce.
Practically: assume it comes out of your margin unless you have specifically arranged otherwise and checked that your carrier agrees.
Here is a wrinkle that can triple your bill and is entirely outside your control.
Customs IT currently applies the €3 per declaration line, not strictly per item as defined. How many lines your parcel becomes depends on which declaration type your carrier files:
On a mixed order of four different products, that is the difference between €3 and €12 — on the same parcel, with the same contents, decided by a choice you never made.
Assuming one product type per order, which is the common case:
| EU orders per month | Items per year | Annual duty |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | 12 | €36 |
| 3 | 36 | €108 |
| 5 | 60 | €180 |
| 6 | 72 | €216 |
| 10 | 120 | €360 |
| 20 | 240 | €720 |
Multiply by the number of different product types in a typical order. Two types doubles every figure in the right-hand column.
Now put that next to the cost everyone actually argues about. A budget Responsible Person service starts around €139 a year; a mid-tier one is about £490.
The duty is flat, so it hurts cheap products disproportionately. Take the profit you make on an order and compare it to €3.
| Your margin | Order value where duty eats all profit |
|---|---|
| 25% | €12.00 |
| 35% | €8.57 |
| 45% | €6.67 |
Below these order values, at these margins, each EU sale loses money before any compliance cost is counted.
This is the part worth sitting with. Below that line, more orders make you poorer. Volume cannot fix it, discounting cannot fix it, and no compliance service can fix it, because the problem is not compliance. If you sell a €7 product at 35% margin, every EU order you take costs you money, and the only remedies are to raise the price or to stop.
Product Identifiers have been voluntary since 1 July 2026 and become mandatory on 1 November. There are four types: S-PID, M-PID, NS-PID and the Y081 code. This is a data requirement rather than a cost, which is exactly the kind of thing a small seller misses until a parcel is held.
And normal product-specific tariffs return. That is not automatically relief: depending on what you sell, the ordinary tariff may be higher than €3. Treat the flat duty as a two-year window with something different on the other side, not as a temporary annoyance that goes away.
When this page was first published, the €2 handling fee was only a proposal. It no longer is. Parliament adopted the customs reform on 16 September, and on 21 September the Commission adopted the delegated regulation setting the fee at €2 per item. Member states will start collecting it by 1 November 2026 at the latest. It is paid by whoever pays the duty, not the buyer, and it applies on top of the €3.
We've written it up separately: the €2 handling fee: what changes on 1 November.
For context rather than comfort: around 5.9 billion low-value items were shipped to EU consumers duty-free in 2025, and Commission inspections found that over 60% of the products checked failed EU standards. The duty is aimed at very high-volume overseas sellers. Small legitimate shops are caught in the same net, which is annoying but does not change what you owe.
Ship or Not? takes your order value, your margin and your EU volume, folds in both the duty and the compliance cost, and tells you where your break-even sits. It will tell you to switch EU sales off if that is the honest answer.
Run the numbersIf the numbers work but the paperwork doesn't appeal, that's what the Compliance Pack is — the GPSR documents done for your actual products, with every obligation cited to its article. And if you have seen anyone suggest marking parcels as gifts to get around the duty, that is worth three minutes before you try it.