News ·
De minimis is over - the small-parcel cost stack has to be rebuilt
The "keep the value low enough and it ships duty-free" route that a whole generation of cross-border selling was built on was closed in two steps during 2025. What has to be recalculated is not just the duty line, but the whole landed cost.
A route that had been open for years
The exemption was the load-bearing wall of the small-parcel model: keep the declared value under the threshold and the parcel goes straight to the buyer, with no duty and far less customs handling. It did not close on a single day. It was tightened in two steps during 2025.
- From 2 May 2025, the exemption was withdrawn first for low-value parcels from mainland China and Hong Kong;
- From 29 August 2025, it was suspended for low-value commercial parcels worldwide;
- In law (OBBBA), it is permanently repealed from 1 July 2027.
Moving on mainland China and Hong Kong first carved out the single largest flow of parcels; extending it worldwide removed "ship from somewhere else" as a workaround. US Customs said it had collected more than $1 billion in duties on over 246 million low-value shipments, and the rate on parcels from China reached 90% at one point. That scale tells you what was stopped was not a marginal slice but a main road.
What was actually rewritten is the cost structure
For sellers who ship small parcels direct to consumers, this is not "a bit more duty". The line that used to sit at nearly zero on a quote now has to be rebuilt from scratch. Before you touch the retail price, work out where the money actually goes.
There are only four blocks: goods, duty, freight, other. Duty used to be hidden behind the exemption, so sellers competed on who declared the lowest value; now that block is back, and the competition is over who arranges customs and tax most clearly. On the same quote, who carries each of the four blocks can change the answer completely.
Who clears customs, and who carries the liability, belongs in writing
With the exemption gone, the importer of record, the tax number and the declaration duty can no longer be left to the forwarder's all-in handling by default. Three things should be written down: who declares, on what basis, and who absorbs the cost if rates or fees move.
Low-value parcels with understated prices are the exposed ones: a finding of false declaration sends the duty and the late-payment bill back to the importer. Writing the responsibility into the clause up front is far cheaper than arguing about it afterwards, and for the importer it turns an uncontrollable cost into a budgetable one.
Three things buying teams can do now
First, split your current SKUs into "ships direct" and "clears properly", and deal with the ones that depended on the exemption first. Second, put duty and clearance fees into quote comparisons instead of staring at the goods value, or a low-value quote will mislead you. Third, add a duty-change price adjustment clause to long-term contracts and agree now how the next change will be handled.
To walk your own purchasing process through first, start with the free checklist; for a specific category, get in touch.