The EU Now Charges by the Item, Not the Parcel — and Ten Euros Can Cost Fifteen

AI Summary

The EU abolished the €150 customs duty relief on 1 July 2026 and replaced it with €3 per item. From 1 November 2026 a €2 Union handling fee applies per item, including above €150. Both are non-refundable and both fall on the declarant, not the consumer.

The mechanism is the story. A charge per parcel scales with the parcel. A charge per item scales with the basket — which means the cheapest multi-item basket carries the highest charge as a share of its value.

On the worked example a national customs authority published, a ten-euro parcel holding three items carries fifteen euros in charges. The goods cost less than the paperwork.

What happened

Two instruments, four months apart, and they stack.

The first stage removed the relief that made low-value consignments duty-free into the Union. In its place, a flat €3 applies per item in a consignment whose intrinsic value does not exceed €150. It is a temporary measure with a stated end date of 1 July 2028.

The second stage is a different kind of charge, and its reach is wider than the relief it follows. The Union handling fee in Article 20(2) of the new Union Customs Code is collected per item for handling a release-for-free-circulation request where the goods are sold in distance sales. Its amount was set by delegated act at €2 per item. It applies to e-commerce consignments including those above €150, which never had the relief in the first place, and Dutch Customs states the fee is charged per declaration line. Article 20(6) makes it non-refundable.

The Irish Revenue Commissioners published the worked example that makes the arithmetic concrete: a package with a total value of €10 containing a pen, a notebook and a key ring. Because the package holds three distinct items, it carries €9 in customs duty since 1 July 2026 and a further €6 in handling fee from 1 November 2026 — €15 in charges on €10 of goods, plus VAT.

Per item — the unit the charge is levied on. The EU measures define it as a distinct item within a consignment, so a parcel of three goods is three chargeable units and a parcel of one good is one, at the same rates. The consequence runs opposite to an ad valorem duty: a percentage falls hardest on expensive goods, a per-item charge falls hardest on cheap ones.

Why now

The scope limit is narrower than the coverage suggests. Article 2 of Regulation (EU) 2026/382 applies the €3 duty where the importation is exempt from VAT under Article 143(1)(ca) of the VAT Directive, or where the goods are in a postal consignment. That is a condition, not a description of all e-commerce. Several English summaries describe the measure as covering goods “regardless of VAT scheme”, which obscures the test that decides whether it reaches a given shipment. Sellers should check the condition against their own declaration route rather than against a summary.

The liability sits with you, and it is settled monthly. The delegated regulation operationalising the duty places responsibility for paying the €3 first and foremost on the declarant — the platforms and sellers, or the carrier or agent declaring the goods — with the consumer only residually. Article 20(5) requires the debtor to pay the handling fee at least once a month to the customs authorities, at the moment of payment of the customs debt. A charge settled monthly against a customs debt is a working-capital item and, for many declarants, a guarantee obligation, not a line on a consumer receipt.

And non-refundable cuts a habit. A returned item reverses a sale. Article 20(6) states the fee is non-refundable, and the Irish guidance confirms the €3 is also non-refundable unless the goods are faulty. For a seller whose returns rate is material, the charge survives the return while the revenue does not.

One item remains genuinely open. The final Official Journal number of the delegated act setting the fee amount had not been assigned when Dutch Customs last updated its guidance on 29 September 2026. The €2 amount itself is verified from the draft delegated act and from the Irish, Dutch and Czech customs authorities independently.

So what

Here is how the charge scales. The €3 and €2 amounts are the published figures; item count and value are inputs, and VAT is excluded so the comparison stays clean.

Four conclusions, and the last one is the one that changes pricing.

The cheapest baskets are taxed hardest. A €10 basket of three items carries charges at 150% of the value of the goods. A €140 single item carries 3.6%. Fourteen times the value, one fifteenth of the charge ratio. Any product strategy built on low-ticket, multi-item baskets into the EU now has a cost structure that looks nothing like an ad valorem tariff.

Item count is a lever, and it is not the seller’s to pull alone. Consolidating three items into one listing does not change the number of distinct items in the consignment. Splitting a €140 order into two shipments does not help either — it doubles the fee. The only genuine lever is fewer distinct items per consignment, which is a merchandising decision as much as a logistics one.

The fee is not a de minimis replacement; it is a new charge on everything. Above €150 the €3 duty stops, but the €2 fee continues at €2 per item. A €300 single-item shipment pays €2, which is trivial. The same €300 spread across ten items pays €20. The charge tracks item count at every value level, including the ones that were never relieved.

And the return does not unwind it. For a seller with a 20% return rate, one fifth of shipments carry a charge that survives the refund of the goods. That is a permanent margin item on the returned population, not a working-capital timing difference.

So model it per item, not per parcel. Every landed-cost model built on a parcel-level threshold now understates the charge on exactly the orders that were previously cheapest to serve. Three moves: recompute your EU landed cost with the charge applied per distinct item rather than per consignment; check your declaration route against the Article 2 condition rather than against trade-press summaries; and treat the monthly settlement as a treasury item with a guarantee implication, because that is how the regulation describes it.

For you

• Sellers shipping low-ticket multi-item baskets into the EU: this is the group whose unit economics changed most. A €10 three-item order that previously cleared duty-free now carries €15 in charges before VAT. The decision is whether to raise the minimum order value, bundle into a single distinct item, or absorb it — and the arithmetic favours the first two.
• Sellers using IOSS: check the declaration route against Article 2’s condition, which turns on VAT exemption under Article 143(1)(ca) or postal consignment. A summary that says the duty applies regardless of scheme does not settle the question for your shipment, and the condition is the part that decides it.
• Sellers with high return rates: ring-fence the non-refundable charge. It is €5 per item in the two-stage steady state and it does not come back when the goods do, so the returns provision needs to include it rather than assume the charges reverse with the sale.
• Anyone acting as declarant or using a carrier who declares: confirm in writing who is liable and how the monthly settlement is funded. The regulation puts the obligation on the declarant first, and a monthly customs debt is a cash-flow and guarantee question rather than a per-order cost.

The data point

FAQ

Has the €150 exemption been abolished or replaced?

Replaced, and the distinction matters for planning. Council Regulation (EU) 2026/382 deleted the customs duty relief that applied to consignments whose intrinsic value did not exceed €150, and substituted a flat duty of €3 per item for consignments within that threshold. So the relief is gone and a charge stands in its place, with a stated sunset of 1 July 2028. Above €150 the €3 duty does not apply, because it only ever substituted for the relief. The separate Union handling fee does apply above €150.

How is the charge calculated on a mixed basket?

Per distinct item, at a flat rate, not on the value. A consignment containing a pen, a notebook and a key ring is three items, so it carries three times the per-item duty and three times the per-item fee regardless of what each item cost. Dutch Customs states the fee is charged per declaration line, which is the practical unit on the entry. This is why the charge as a share of value rises sharply as basket value falls, and why a cheap multi-item basket carries a higher effective rate than an expensive single item.

Who actually pays the €3 and the €2?

The declarant, in the first instance. The delegated regulation operationalising the €3 duty states that responsibility for paying it properly upon arrival lies first and foremost with the declarant — meaning the platforms and sellers, or the carrier or agent declaring the goods — and only residually with other persons including the consumer. The handling fee follows the same logic and is payable to the customs authorities at least once a month, at the moment the customs debt is paid. For a seller, that means the charge is a cost of the declaration route rather than a cost the consumer absorbs by default.

Does anything come back if the customer returns the goods?

The handling fee does not. Article 20(6) of Regulation (EU) 2026/2108 states that the Union handling fee is non-refundable, and the Irish Revenue Commissioners confirm in their guidance that the fee is not refunded even where the goods are faulty. The €3 customs duty is also non-refundable unless the goods are faulty. For any seller with a meaningful returns rate, that makes the charge a permanent cost on the returned population, and it belongs in the returns provision rather than in a working-capital forecast.

The point

Two charges, two dates, and one design decision that changes the arithmetic: the EU levies per item rather than per parcel. That single choice turns a low-value exemption into a charge that bites hardest at the bottom of the basket range, applies above the old threshold as well as below it, survives a return, and lands on the declarant monthly. The €15-on-€10 example is not an edge case; it is the transparent consequence of a flat rate applied to the smallest possible unit.