Today marks exactly two months since the EU’s flat €3 customs duty on small parcels took effect. Long enough for the first hard numbers to come in from customs authorities and carriers — and long enough to notice that most coverage still confuses this measure with a second one that hasn’t even started yet.

Two charges, not one

The European Commission’s own guidance is explicit on this point, because the confusion is common enough that it built a dedicated FAQ entry around it: the €3 customs duty (in force since 1 July 2026) and the Union Handling Fee (proposed, amount and start date still to be determined, expected in the autumn) are two separate measures, both applied to businesses, not consumers.

The €3 duty is a customs duty under Council Regulation (EU) 2026/382. It applies per tariff sub-heading — in practice, per distinct HS code — contained in a consignment worth €150 or less, not per parcel. The Council’s own worked example: a parcel with one silk blouse and two wool blouses contains two distinct tariff categories, so €6 is due, not €3. It is collected from the declarant — the IOSS holder, the platform, or their indirect representative — and only in residual cases from the consumer directly. It runs until 1 July 2028, when the EU Customs Data Hub is due to take over and ordinary customs tariffs apply by product classification instead.

The Union Handling Fee is not a customs duty at all. It is a proposed charge to cover the cost of processing these consignments through customs, still under discussion, with neither its amount nor its exact start date settled as of this writing. If you’ve seen a figure quoted for it, treat it with more caution than the €3 duty, which is law.

What the first eight weeks actually show

The numbers that have come in since 1 July are more striking than the mechanism itself.

French customs figures cited by the French economy ministry in late August put the fall in small parcels imported into the EU at 30% to 40% since the duty took effect. Broken down by platform, sales volumes between June and July slumped 50% at Temu and 37% at AliExpress, while Shein held up comparatively better at -15%, helped by a new Polish warehouse due to open at the end of 2025 that lets it absorb part of the duty’s impact structurally rather than passing it through.

Carriers are seeing the same shift from a different angle. Maersk’s latest logistics update reported low-value air cargo imports into Europe down almost 33% year on year. Liège Airport — Europe’s largest air cargo hub for this category — recorded e-commerce parcel volumes down 24% year on year in July and 41% compared with June 2026 alone, while parcels valued above €150 rose 10% over the same period, a clear signal that volume is shifting toward higher-value, lower-frequency shipments rather than simply disappearing. Dimerco’s Asia-Pacific freight report goes further: carriers are withdrawing freighters from the routes that used to carry this traffic, and the capacity freed up is already being absorbed by AI and semiconductor shipments instead.

The caution worth adding

None of this proves a permanent shift yet, and the reporting making these numbers public is careful to say so. The EU is not the first to run this experiment: when the United States removed its own de minimis exemption in August 2025, China-to-US e-commerce air cargo fell from roughly 110,000 to 35,000 tonnes a month — before starting to normalise from around May 2026. Two months of EU data is a first data point, not a trend line.

What looks more durable than the volume numbers themselves is the structural response already visible: platforms with the means to do so are moving inventory into EU-based warehouses rather than accepting the per-shipment cost indefinitely. That is a supply-chain decision, not a temporary dip, and it is the detail worth watching more closely than the headline percentage.

What to watch next

Two dates matter more than the numbers above, going forward. Product identifiers become mandatory on 1 November 2026, tightening the traceability side of this reform independently of the duty itself. And the Union Handling Fee — still undated, still unpriced — is the measure to actually watch for, not the one that’s already being reported as if it were in force.

Sources: European Commission, Taxation and Customs Union — guidance on the temporary flat fee; Council of the EU, press release, 11 February 2026; Euronews, 27 August 2026, citing French customs and economy ministry figures; American Journal of Transportation, 19 August 2026, citing Maersk, Liège Airport and Dimerco data.