Liège: The cargo sheds beside the runway here handle a share of the roughly four and a half billion low-value parcels that cross into the European Union every year, most of them ordered on a phone and shipped from outside the bloc. From 1 November 2026 at the latest, each of those consignments will carry an extra charge that nobody can yet quantify.

Negotiators from the Council and the European Parliament agreed in March to create a customs handling fee on small consignments sold through distance selling. The fee sits alongside a separate decision, finalised in February, to scrap the 150-euro duty relief threshold and apply a flat three-euro customs duty to parcels below that value from 1 July 2026. Two instruments, two timetables, one target.

The design choice that matters most is who writes the cheque. Legislators specified that the handling fee falls on whichever party already owes the other customs charges. Under the reform, that party is the platform or the distance seller, not the person who opened the app. The drafting is deliberate. Officials wanted to avoid a repeat of the confusion that followed earlier VAT changes, when courier firms billed recipients at the door for sums they had never anticipated.

What legislators did not do is name a number. They handed that to the Commission, which must adopt a delegated act setting the level of the fee before member states begin collecting it. Delegated acts carry a scrutiny period for Parliament and Council, so the drafting cannot slip much further if the November date is to hold. Customs administrations need lead time to configure declaration systems, and postal operators need longer still.

The number itself will decide whether the fee changes behaviour or merely raises revenue. Set it low, at a euro or two, and it covers a fraction of the inspection burden that national administrations now shoulder. Set it high, and it functions as a barrier to the direct-to-consumer model that has reshaped European retail in five years. Finance ministries and internal market officials read those options differently, which is one reason the figure has not appeared.

Both charges arrive before the wider customs overhaul does. The reform package that legislators agreed in March builds a central EU Customs Data Hub and a new EU Customs Authority, but those structures phase in across the next decade. The parcel measures were carved out and accelerated precisely because the volume problem would not wait for the architecture.

That sequencing creates an awkward interval. For at least two years, member states will collect a duty and a fee on hundreds of millions of consignments using twenty-seven national systems that were never built for the task, and without the shared data layer that would let them target inspections properly. Traders will comply with rules whose enforcement varies by port of entry.