Until this month, every conversation I had with a cross-border seller ended at the same place. Duty-free entry for low-value parcels had already gone for commercial carriers, everyone accepted that, and then somebody would lower their voice and ask whether the postal channel still worked. It did, in a narrowing sort of way, and a surprising volume of freight quietly moved from express onto post because of it. That door shut on 24 July 2026, which is when de minimis was suspended for international mail as well, and the process replacing it asks things of shippers that the postal channel has never asked before.
I have spent the past 2 weeks going through the new requirements with sellers who move between 300 and 40,000 parcels a month into the United States, and the pattern is consistent. Nobody is surprised that duty is now owed. What catches people is that the paperwork obligation landed on a different party than they expected, and that the entity they were relying on to file is no longer allowed to.
If you want the wider story of how the $800 exemption unwound, we tracked it separately in the guide to where the US de minimis exemption stands. This is narrower and more operational: what the postal entry process requires, who is allowed to file it, what falls outside it, and the two dates in the autumn that decide whether your flow keeps moving.
What actually took effect
Two Federal Register notices published on 24 June 2026 did the work. The first suspended the de minimis exemption for international mail and established the new postal entry process in part 145 of title 19 of the customs regulations, under the statutory authority at section 1321(a)(2)(C) of title 19. Troutman Pepper Locke The second addressed non-postal entry modes. The postal process became effective on 24 July 2026.
The shape of the new regime is straightforward once you separate it from the old one. Eligible mail shipments valued at $2,500 or less, in chapters 1 through 97 of the tariff schedule, move through the postal entry process. They need classification to the full 10-digit level, duty is paid monthly rather than per parcel, and the filer must hold a continuous bond. Merchandise that is not eligible has to go through formal entry or through the new Entry Type 13.
Worth noting what survived. The exemptions for genuine gifts and personal articles remain in place at $100 and $200 respectively. Those are narrow, they are not a commercial channel, and I have already had 2 clients ask whether their B2C flow could be characterised as gifts. It cannot, and attempting it is a misdeclaration rather than a strategy.
The change that reorganises everyone's operation
The provision with the widest practical consequence is not about money. Only parties with the right to make entry under section 143.26(a) of the customs regulations may file, which means the owner or purchaser of the merchandise, or a licensed customs broker designated by the importer or consignee. Troutman Pepper Locke Foreign postal operators and unlicensed third parties are no longer eligible filers.
Sit with that for a moment if your model relied on a foreign post office or an overseas fulfilment partner handling the US side. That arrangement is over, not because it became expensive, but because the party doing it lacks standing. The sellers who have had the roughest fortnight are the ones who discovered this after 24 July rather than before, and whose parcels stopped at the border while they went looking for a broker.
Two structural consequences follow. The first is that you need a broker relationship and a power of attorney in place, and brokers are currently being asked to onboard a large number of small filers at once, which is not a same-week process. The second is that the duty liability has an owner now, and it is you. In the old postal flow, duty was somebody else's administrative detail. Under part 145, it sits with the importer of record, and so does the accuracy of the classification.
Bond, monthly payment, and the plumbing nobody budgeted for
The financial mechanics are where I see the most underestimation. A continuous bond has to be in place through ACE eBond, and monthly duty payment runs through Pay.gov with an ACH debit arrangement that CBP sets up on request. Troutman Pepper Locke
None of that is exotic for an established importer. For a seller who has never filed an entry in their life it is a genuine project, and the sequencing matters, because a bond application depends on an identity and credit review that takes time and the monthly payment setup depends on the bond existing. I have watched this take 5 weeks end to end for a first-time filer who started with nothing, and about 8 days for one whose broker already had them onboarded for air freight.
The monthly cadence has a cash-flow implication that is easy to miss and pleasant when you find it. Duty accrues across the month and settles once, which is materially better for working capital than paying at each parcel. If you are modelling landed cost, the duty is a monthly liability, not a per-shipment disbursement, and that changes the shape of your cash requirement even though the total is the same.
What falls outside the postal process
The exclusions are where flows break, because a single excluded SKU in an otherwise eligible mix stops behaving like the rest. Merchandise outside the postal entry process includes goods subject to antidumping or countervailing duties, quota goods, articles regulated by other government agencies, alcohol and tobacco, and anything classified in chapters 98 or 99. Troutman Pepper Locke Those require formal entry, or Entry Type 13.
Look carefully at the agency-regulated category, because it is much broader than sellers assume. Cosmetics, supplements, medical devices, electronics with radio functions, children's products, and food all touch an agency, and an agency-regulated article needs its own data set at entry regardless of how little the parcel is worth. A $28 supplement bottle can require more filing than a $2,400 machine part.
Entry Type 13 is the mechanism CBP built for this category of low-value shipment that cannot use the postal route. It lets filers submit the entry electronically in ACE instead of through the IMDW spreadsheet process that preceded it, which is a real improvement over transmitting data in a document. CBP deployed it to the ACE certification environment on 24 July 2026 and will deploy it to production on 22 September 2026, under test identifiers INT-057 and CBP-290. U.S. Customs and Border Protection
The word to hold onto is voluntary. Entry Type 13 is a test, participation is elective, and the excluded merchandise still has to enter somehow in the meantime. If your mix contains agency-regulated goods, the answer between now and late September is formal entry, and Entry Type 13 becomes an efficiency question afterwards rather than a rescue.
One distinction inside the excluded category is worth getting right, because it decides whether Entry Type 13 helps you at all. The test is expected to offer a pathway for some agency-regulated goods, which is the large majority of what sellers actually ship in this bracket. It does not extend to merchandise subject to antidumping or countervailing duties, or to quota goods; those stay outside it. So a supplements importer may well have a route through Entry Type 13 from late September, while an importer of a product under an AD/CVD order is looking at formal entry indefinitely and should stop waiting for the test to solve it.
The calendar that matters
| Date | What happens |
|---|---|
| 24 June 2026 | Two Federal Register notices published |
| 24 July 2026 | Postal entry process effective; de minimis gone for mail; Entry Type 13 in ACE certification |
| 22 September 2026 | Entry Type 13 deploys to ACE production |
| 22 October 2026 | Enforcement begins for agency-regulated goods, chapters 98 and 99, and trade-agreement exclusions |
| 1 July 2027 | Statutory elimination of de minimis takes effect |
The date I would circle is 22 October 2026. Troutman Pepper Locke It is the point at which the exclusions stop being a policy statement and start being enforced, and it gives you roughly 12 weeks from today to work out which of your SKUs are affected and how they will enter. Twelve weeks sounds generous until you try to get an accurate agency-regulation answer on 400 product lines from suppliers who have never been asked.
The 2027 date matters for planning of a different kind. The statutory elimination of de minimis arrives on 1 July 2027, which means the current arrangement is not a temporary measure that lapses back to $800. Whatever process you build now is the process you will be running.
What this does to the economics of a cheap parcel
Run the numbers on a low-value order and the conclusion is uncomfortable but clear. The duty itself is often not the problem. On a $40 apparel item, duty at a typical apparel rate is a few dollars, and most sellers can absorb or pass on a few dollars.
The problem is the fixed cost of compliance per line. Classification to 10 digits, brokerage, bond amortisation, and the data work behind an agency-regulated article do not scale down with order value. Below roughly $25 to $30 of merchandise value, in the models I have run this month, the compliance cost per parcel starts to exceed the gross margin on the sale. That is the threshold to find in your own catalogue, because it decides which SKUs still make sense to ship individually.
Two responses actually work, and both are structural rather than clever. Consolidate, so that many orders enter under one entry and the fixed cost divides across them, then fulfil domestically from the consolidated stock. Or hold inventory in the United States, which converts the parcel problem into a freight-and-warehousing problem and takes the customs event off the critical path of a consumer order. The sellers I see handling this best decided months ago which of their catalogue belongs in each model, rather than trying to make every SKU work in one.
Anyone selling into both the United States and Europe now faces the same shape of problem twice, with different mechanics on each side. The European regime charges per declaration line rather than per parcel, which rewards different packing decisions entirely; we set that out in the guide to EU low-value imports and the €3 parcel duty. Optimising for one and assuming it transfers is a reliable way to get the other wrong.
Where I have seen this go wrong already
A few failure patterns have repeated often enough in the past fortnight to be worth naming.
- Classification done at 6 digits. Sellers who had an HS code for international shipping labels assumed it was enough. The requirement is the full 10-digit US line, and the last 4 digits are where the rate lives.
- No power of attorney. The broker is engaged, the bond is applied for, and nobody executed the POA, so the broker cannot file. This is the single most common cause of parcels sitting still.
- Value declared as the price paid to the platform. Marketplace fees and shipping charges belong in or out of dutiable value according to rules that do not match how sellers think about revenue, and getting it wrong understates duty in a way that is easy for CBP to see.
- Returns treated as an afterthought. A returned parcel crossing back is its own customs event, and a re-import of goods previously exported has a documentary path that has to be set up in advance if you want relief on the second crossing.
The 10% surcharge expired on the same day, and was replaced
One part of the cost picture resolved itself on exactly the date the postal process began, and it is easy to miss because the two things moved in opposite directions.
The 10% surcharge that had been imposed under section 122 of the Trade Act of 1974 expired on 24 July 2026, hitting the statutory 150-day limit that section 122 carries, and it was not renewed. For affected origins the immediate effect is a reversion to ordinary most-favoured-nation rates, which for Indian goods that had been paying the surcharge means 10 percentage points off the duty.
Do not bank the saving yet. The administration has moved to imposing duties under section 301 of the same act instead, with a 10% tariff announced on imports from 60 economies including India, so for many origins the relief is offset rather than real. The mechanics of that shift, and why the legal basis matters to how long a rate can last, are set out in our Section 122 to Section 301 importer playbook.
The practical lesson for a landed-cost model is about durability rather than arithmetic. Section 122 came with a clock written into the statute, which is why it lapsed on schedule. A section 301 action does not expire the same way. If you are modelling 2027, treat the current rate as more durable than the one it replaced, and confirm the origin-by-origin position rather than applying one number across a catalogue. The obligation to file and to pay ordinary duty never depended on either measure.
What to do in the next eight weeks
If you move parcels into the United States and have not yet rebuilt the process, the order of work is fairly clear.
Confirm first that you have a filer who is legally allowed to act, which means a licensed broker with an executed power of attorney, or your own capability as owner or purchaser of the goods. Everything else waits on that. Then get the continuous bond application moving through ACE eBond and the ACH arrangement set up for monthly payment, allowing for the review time rather than assuming a week.
In parallel, classify your catalogue to 10 digits properly and sort it into the eligible mass and the exclusions, giving particular attention to anything an agency regulates. That sorting exercise is what the 22 October date is really asking for, and the answer for the excluded lines will be formal entry until Entry Type 13 reaches production on 22 September.
Then do the margin arithmetic per SKU rather than across the catalogue as a whole, and be prepared to move the cheapest lines into consolidation or domestic inventory. The uncomfortable finding in almost every model I have run is that a portion of the catalogue no longer supports individual cross-border fulfilment at all, and it is better to identify that portion deliberately than to discover it in a quarter of margin.
This is general information for trade and logistics professionals, not legal advice. Entry requirements, classification, and valuation turn on specific facts and should be confirmed with a licensed customs broker or qualified customs counsel.