De minimis is the customs rule that let low-value shipments enter a country duty-free below a set threshold. For much of the last decade it made cross-border ecommerce operationally simple: small parcels could ship internationally without duties, customs collection, or formal entries. In 2026 that changed on both sides of the Atlantic, and the change reaches the daily operations of any brand that ships across borders.
What changed in 2026
In the United States, Customs and Border Protection issued interim final rules that indefinitely suspended the de minimis exemption for merchandise arriving through all modes other than the international postal network, alongside a parallel suspension and new informal entry process for mail shipments. These followed an earlier executive action suspending duty-free de minimis treatment for all countries. In practice, the long-standing $800 duty-free allowance for low-value imports no longer applies as it did, and low-value parcels are now subject to duties and formal handling.
In the European Union, the bloc moved to remove its 150-euro customs duty exemption threshold as of 2026, as part of a broader customs reform aimed at the volume of low-value ecommerce parcels entering the EU. The effect parallels the US change: duties apply to a far wider set of low-value orders than before.
The specific rules differ by country and continue to evolve. What matters operationally is the shared direction: duty-free treatment for small international parcels is narrowing, and the work that de minimis used to let brands skip is now in scope for many more orders.
What it means for your operations
The change lands in four places.
Duties and taxes now apply to orders that used to ship free of them, which raises the delivered cost of cross-border and forces a decision about who pays.
That decision, whether the customer pays landed cost at checkout or receives a bill on delivery, becomes a real one for every affected order. Collecting at checkout requires an accurate landed-cost calculation in the cart. Leaving it to delivery risks refused parcels, because a surprise duty bill is one of the fastest ways to lose a sale after it has already been placed.
Customs handling increases. More orders need correct product classification and formal or informal entry, which adds steps and data requirements to fulfillment that low-value parcels did not carry before.
And routing economics shift. When duties raise the cost of shipping into a region from outside it, fulfilling from in-region stock where possible becomes more attractive, which turns cross-border cost management into a routing decision.
What to do about it
The durable response is to handle duties and landed cost in your order flow rather than as a fixed set of per-country rules or a standalone checkout add-on.
Calculate landed cost in real time, from the origin the order will actually ship from and the destination’s current rules, so the figure the customer sees matches the parcel that arrives. Collect it at checkout where you can, since shoppers strongly prefer seeing the full cost up front. Route with duties in mind, favoring in-region fulfillment where it lowers cost and clears customs faster. And keep the calculation inputs configurable, because trade policy in 2026 is active and today’s thresholds are not guaranteed to be next quarter’s.
An order operations layer does this by making the inventory, routing, and landed-cost decisions together, in real time, as each order arrives, so a policy change becomes an update to the inputs rather than a rebuild of your checkout and fulfillment logic. For the mechanics of running international orders this way, see Cross-Border Order Operations After De Minimis, and for the underlying concept, What Is Landed Cost?
Frequently Asked Questions
De minimis is a customs rule that allows shipments below a set value to enter a country duty-free, without the duties and formal customs handling that higher-value imports require. It made low-value cross-border ecommerce operationally simple, because small parcels could ship internationally without duty calculation or collection.
In 2026, the United States indefinitely suspended the de minimis exemption for imports, ending the duty-free treatment that previously applied to low-value parcels, and the European Union moved to remove its 150-euro customs duty exemption threshold. The shared effect is that duties and formal customs handling now apply to far more low-value international orders than before.
The 2026 de minimis changes affect ecommerce brands by adding duties, taxes, and customs handling to international orders that used to ship free of them. Brands now have to decide whether customers pay landed cost at checkout or on delivery, classify products for customs on more orders, and reconsider where they fulfill from to manage duty costs.
Customers generally prefer to pay duties at checkout as part of a clear landed-cost total, because unexpected fees on delivery are a leading cause of abandoned orders and refused parcels. Collecting at checkout requires calculating landed cost accurately in real time, based on where the order ships from and the destination’s rules.
Brands can prepare for ongoing de minimis and tariff changes by handling duties and landed cost in their order operations rather than in fixed per-country rules, calculating landed cost in real time, collecting it at checkout, routing with duty costs in mind, and keeping the calculation inputs configurable so a policy change is an update rather than a rebuild.
