The €150 de minimis ends 1 July: your real problem isn’t the €3, it’s product data.

What actually changes on 1 July

Until now, goods worth €150 or less entered the EU free of customs duty under the “de minimis” threshold. From 1 July 2026 that exemption is gone — and this is enacted law, not a proposal: the Council gave its final green light on 11 February 2026, and the European Commission published the legal text and guidance on 8 June 2026. In its place comes a temporary flat customs duty of €3 per item, in force until 1 July 2028, when the EU’s e-commerce Customs Data Hub is due to take over.

The scale of what is being formalised

This is not a niche adjustment. In 2024, around 4.6 billion low-value parcels (under €150) entered the EU — roughly 91% of them from China. Every one of those parcels now moves from a duty-free shortcut into the formal declaration channel. The administrative surface of EU e-commerce imports is being rebuilt around data, at a volume that doubled from 2023 (2.3 billion) and kept climbing through 2025.

The real subject: product data, not the tariff

A formal declaration needs structured, pre-arrival electronic data: a precise product description (generic labels like “accessories” become a liability), a customs classification code (HS), and accurate seller and buyer information. To be clear, this pre-arrival requirement is not new — it already runs through the EU’s Import Control System 2 (ICS2). What the end of de minimis does is pull every low-value parcel fully into that regime, instead of waving it past.

And the bar rises again on 1 November 2026: each declaration line will have to carry up to three product identifiers — the SKU (merchant article number), the manufacturer’s product identifier, and a standardised identifier (GTIN/EAN/UPC). The first two are always mandatory; the standardised one is required wherever it exists. Generic descriptions stop being acceptable; products have to be identified, not just named.

Why this goes beyond your freight forwarder

Here is the distinction worth holding onto — the one that separates an informed brand from the customs-fee noise. The €3 and the HS code are customs questions: your broker handles them at the border. But the data those filings depend on — what the product actually is, what it is made of, which market it is entering — is product-compliance data. The same identifiers and descriptions that clear customs are what market-surveillance authorities use to decide whether a product is allowed to be sold at all.

As every parcel becomes a formal, identified line of data, surveillance on what enters the single market only intensifies. Classifying correctly, describing precisely, and linking each product to the obligations that apply to it per market stops being back-office hygiene and becomes the condition for selling. That mapping — product to applicable regulation, across markets, kept current — is exactly Cleo’s terrain.

Two ways to read 1 July