Liège: The Belgian air-cargo hub that handles a large share of Europe’s inbound e-commerce has spent the summer applying a new parcel duty, and freight agents there now price consignments the customs authorities once waved through. Since 1 July 2026 the European Union charges a flat three euros on goods worth 150 euros or less arriving from outside the bloc, ending an exemption that shaped online retail for two decades.

The Council removed the 150-euro customs duty threshold and replaced it with a temporary flat charge under Council Regulation (EU) 2026/382. Finance and customs ministers agreed the outline in December, and the Commission published the legal text and guidance in June, weeks before traders had to apply it. The Commission set out its reasoning in a note on removing the 150 euro exemption.

The mechanics matter more than the headline number. The three euros attaches to each item type rather than each parcel, and customs officers read the six-digit tariff heading to decide what counts as a type. Ten identical cotton shirts in one box trigger one charge. Five cotton shirts and five wool shirts trigger two. Logistics operators who built their pricing around consignments rather than classifications have had to rebuild it around commodity codes.

Brussels frames the change as a competition fix. European retailers pay duty on the same goods that arrived duty-free when a consumer ordered them directly from a warehouse in Asia, and roughly four and a half billion low-value packages crossed the frontier in a single year. The Commission argued in its announcement on the three euro customs duty that the gap distorted the single market and starved customs authorities of the data they need to police product safety.

The measure carries an expiry date. It runs until 1 July 2028, when the EU Customs Data Hub is meant to take over and ordinary tariff classification will apply to every consignment regardless of value. That deadline assumes the wider customs reform the Commission tabled in 2023 clears the Council and Parliament in time, and negotiators have not yet closed the file. The Commission set out the temporary character of the levy in its guidance on the flat fee.

A second charge is queuing behind it. Member states have discussed a two-euro customs handling fee applied per parcel rather than per item type, and officials expect that debate to run into November. Postal operators warn that two fees with two different bases will confuse consumers who see one delivery notice and two unexplained lines on it.

Retail associations across the bloc broadly welcome the parcel duty and complain about the timing. Traders received the legal text in June for a July start, which left almost no room to reprogramme declaration software. Customs brokers in Belgium, the Netherlands and Poland absorbed the difference, and smaller ones say the compliance cost per shipment now exceeds the duty itself.

Whether the charge changes behaviour is a separate question. Three euros on a five-euro item bites; three euros on a 120-euro item does not. The platforms that prompted the reform sell across that whole range, and they will adjust their basket sizes long before 2028 arrives.