The EU scraps its €150 customs duty exemption on July 1, charging a flat €3 per product category on every low-value parcel entering the bloc.
How the fee works: The charge applies per tariff heading rather than per parcel, so a phone, charger, and earphones in one box owe €9.
Neither this duty nor the separate customs handling fee expected in November is refundable when a parcel comes back, which stings most in high-return categories like apparel.
The scale is enormous: the EU received 4.6 billion low-value parcels in 2024, 91% of them from China.
The French preview: France introduced its own €2 fee on March 1, and small-parcel declarations at Paris CDG fell 92% within days, from about 500,000 a day to 50,000.
The airport lost about 50 freighter flights in the first week as volumes shifted to Liège, Schiphol, and Frankfurt, Vatry, France's secondary cargo hub, lost 65% of its volume.
The routing discount: Brussels has floated a €0.50 handling-fee rate for parcels routed through an EU warehouse before final delivery.
Temu and Shein are already running that playbook through Belgium, the Netherlands, and Poland, while a DTC brand still shipping 5,000 parcels a month direct, at two tariff headings each, would owe roughly €30,000 a month in new duty.
What's next: The US offers a preview of the volume shock: after Washington imposed tariffs on China last spring and then ended de minimis, China-US air cargo volumes fell by up to 60%, Seko Logistics' airfreight chief told Supply Chain Dive, before platforms rerouted to new markets.
With the EU closing July 1, the UK, which keeps its £135 threshold until around 2029, becomes the last major de minimis market still open.
