The EU's €150 duty exemption is gone. €3 an item replaced it
From 1 July 2026 the EU charges €3 per item on consignments under €150 instead of relieving them. The measure is in the tariff, with an end date of 1 July 2028.
For years, a parcel arriving in the European Union with an intrinsic value at or under €150 was relieved of customs duty. That relief ended on 1 July 2026. In its place is a flat charge of €3 per item, and the tariff records it as a measure with an end date of 1 July 2028.
Where this comes from
This is not an announcement or a trade-press summary. It is a measure in the tariff, and anyone can read it.
The Northern Ireland Online Tariff — which publishes the EU’s Common External Tariff, because Northern Ireland applies EU customs rules under the Windsor Framework — carries measure type 107, Low-value consignment customs duty, against ERGA OMNES with a component of 3.00. The legal act attached to it is described as the elimination of the threshold-based customs duty relief and introducing a EUR 3 customs duty, and the footnote on the measure reads:
From 1 July 2026 until 1 July 2028, a customs duty of EUR 3 per item in a consignment the intrinsic value of which does not exceed a total of EUR 150 shall apply instead.
Two details in that sentence do most of the work. It is per item, not per consignment — a parcel of five things is charged five times. And the €150 test is on intrinsic value, the price of the goods, excluding shipping.
What did not change
VAT. The EU removed its €22 VAT exemption on 1 July 2021, so import VAT has already applied from the first cent for five years at the member state’s own rate. Nothing about the 2026 change touches that.
The ordinary tariff also still exists. The €3 charge applies instead of the relief on consignments under €150; goods above that threshold are charged at their normal rate as before.
Why it is temporary on paper
The measure carries an end date of 1 July 2028. That is the date the tariff records, and it exists because the €3 charge is a stopgap: it is meant to hold until the wider customs reform that replaces it takes effect. A date in a tariff measure is a real date, but it is also the kind that gets extended, so it is worth checking rather than assuming either way.
Northern Ireland, and what this site does publish
Northern Ireland is charged the EU tariff rather than the UK Global Tariff, so this measure applies there and not in Great Britain. That divergence is real and it is on the relevant category pages here, code by code — Great Britain charges 6% on roasted coffee where Northern Ireland charges 7.5%, for instance.
Tollmark does not yet publish landed-cost figures for Northern Ireland or for EU member states. The duty rates are held and compared; the totals are not published, because Northern Ireland’s relief is denominated in euros on a sterling territory and this site does not convert currencies inside a quote. Working out a total from a rate and an invented exchange rate is exactly the kind of number it refuses to print.
What is published today is Great Britain and Norway, in full, with the instrument and effective date behind every figure.
Figures quoted above were correct on 23 August 2026. Rates change; the pages linked from this guide carry the current ones, refreshed from the source.