The EU's €3 parcel duty: the €150 exemption Brazilian sellers relied on is gone

The €150 duty-free threshold is gone. Since 1 July 2026, any consignment worth up to €150 sent to an EU consumer from outside the bloc carries a flat customs duty of €3 per item, under Regulation (EU) 2026/382. The measure is temporary — it runs until 1 July 2028, after which the normal tariff schedule for each product applies — but for the next two years it is the reality for every Brazilian brand shipping direct to European buyers. The exemption that made low-value cross-border e-commerce all but duty-free has simply been switched off.

The detail that reshapes the maths is “per item”, but the legal item is not necessarily each physical piece. The Commission's 5 October guidance defines it as a customs-declaration line: one or more goods in a consignment sharing the same classification, description and, where required, origin. The €3 duty applies per such line irrespective of the quantity declared on it. The duty is also blind to the VAT route — it applies whether the seller uses IOSS, the special arrangements, or standard import VAT — so there is no scheme that lets a low-value parcel slip through duty-free any more.

This is the customs-duty half of a reform that has been coming for years. The €22 VAT exemption disappeared in 2021; the €150 line was the last remaining relief, and the volume finally forced the issue — the EU counted almost 5.9 billion low-value items arriving in 2025. The flat €3 is explicitly a stopgap: a simple, uniform charge to close the gap until the full customs reform and the definitive tariff treatment of small parcels arrive from mid-2028. Brussels has now set a separate Union handling fee at €2 per customs item, due from 1 November 2026 and not limited to consignments worth €150 or less, so it needs to be modelled on top.

The duty does not travel alone. From 1 November 2026 a product identifier becomes mandatory on low-value consignments — voluntary since 1 July — part of the same package aimed at screening unsafe and non-compliant goods at the border. For a Brazilian seller that means the data discipline behind each shipment matters as much as the €3 itself: parcels that cannot be identified cleanly are the ones that get held.

The rational response is structural, not cosmetic. Because the charge is per item and flat, it punishes the cheap single-item parcel and barely touches a consolidated basket — so bundling orders, raising minimum order values, or holding stock in an EU fulfilment centre and shipping the last leg domestically all change the arithmetic in a way that renegotiating freight cannot. Which of those pays off depends on your average order value, product mix and margin, not on the rule in the abstract.

For most Brazilian direct-to-consumer sellers the €3 is survivable; the risk is discovering it line by line after it has already eroded a quarter's margin on the small-order tail. A short scan models the duty against your actual order profile and weighs whether consolidation or an EU-side fulfilment model is worth it for your goods — so you price the European route on the rule as it now stands, not the one that expired on 30 June.