Temu, Shein and Co: Customs exemption limit to fall as early as 2026
At the meeting of finance ministers, EU member states decided to abolish the 150-euro customs exemption limit two years earlier than planned.
(Image: Ascannio/Shutterstock.com)
The EU finance ministers have decided to abolish the 150-euro customs exemption limit two years earlier than planned. "We are ensuring that duties are paid from the first euro and thus creating a level playing field for European providers and limiting the influx of cheap goods," explained Danish Finance Minister Stephanie Lose on Thursday in Brussels.
Until now, low-value shipments with a value of less than 150 euros were allowed to pass through borders duty-free. This led to a flood of such small shipments into the EU: a total of 4.6 billion of these shipments arrived in the EU in 2024. A considerable proportion of these are from retailers, who offer their goods in Europe via online retail platforms, with 91 percent of shipments coming from China, according to EU data.
While this mass of individual shipments has boosted the logistics industry, for market surveillance authorities, who are supposed to randomly check incoming goods at customs for compliance with regulations, the flood of packages is a denial-of-service attack: they are literally drowning in shipments and can barely fulfill their control mandate.
And state treasuries have so far missed out on massive revenue in this way: according to EU estimates, 65 percent of packages are incorrectly declared. More valuable products are declared as low-value goods, thus circumventing the import sales tax that is actually due. While this may only be a few euros per package, it adds up to a considerable amount with billions of shipments.
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2026 instead of 2028
Originally, the customs exemption limit was supposed to be abolished in 2028; the EU plans to introduce a new, uniform, and fully digital customs declaration system then. However, the finance ministers would rather not wait any longer and decided to abolish the previous customs exemption limit as early as 2026 – a temporary solution is to be found as quickly as possible after today's agreement.
EU Vice-President for Digital and Largest Marketplaces, Henna Virkkunen, stated on Bluesky that she was very satisfied with the agreement reached in the Economic and Financial Affairs Council (Ecofin). It is an "important step towards fair and sustainable e-commerce."
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For consumers in the EU, this means two things in particular: in the future, multiple orders could be delivered more frequently in one package or from EU warehouses. And direct imports from the Far East could become a few percent less attractive in terms of price in the future.
(vbr)
