EU adds €3 fee per import category

You're on Temu, buying a phone case for €5 and a pair of socks for €3. You click checkout. From Tuesday, that basket shipped from China won't just carry VAT — the consumption tax every EU country charges on purchases. It will also trigger a customs duty, a separate border tariff on imports. The charge isn't a flat €3 per parcel. It's €3 per product category, making your €8 basket roughly €6 more expensive before any platform adjustment.

The EU used to let goods worth under €150 enter without customs duty. That exemption is gone. A new regulation takes effect on 1 July 2026. It introduces a temporary €3 flat charge per tariff line, running until July 2028. The Commission calls it a bridge toward a new customs system that can actually track millions of small parcels. That system isn't ready yet.

Not €3 per parcel — €3 per product code

This is the most misunderstood detail. Customs systems classify every imported good by a product code, a standardized number that groups similar items. The €3 fee attaches to each distinct code in a shipment, not to the parcel itself.

Three identical T-shirts share one code, so they attract a single €3 charge. But a T-shirt, a cap and a phone case fall into three separate codes, and the same parcel costs €9 in customs duties. German consumer guidance confirms this reading.

Because the charge is flat and not proportional to price, it bites harder on cheap goods. On a €90 purchase, €3 barely registers. On the kind of goods that built Shein and Temu — items averaging around €8.82 per early-2025 Polish trade data compiled by Trans.info — a single €3 charge amounts to a 34% surcharge before VAT and delivery.

Why the fix is so blunt

The bluntness matches the scale. Around 5.9 billion low-value items entered the EU in 2025, roughly 98% of all imports by item count, according to trade and logistics data. That's about 16 million parcels a day passing through customs systems designed for container ships, not individual phone cases.

The old exemption also created an uneven contest. EU-based retailers paid full customs duties, met safety rules and collected VAT. Sellers shipping directly from China could undercut them on price because they skipped the border cost entirely. Spanish press has branded the new charge the "tasa Shein." The exemption also left customs with almost no data on what was inside those daily parcels, a gap the new rule narrows by requiring declarations per product code.

Who pays

Legally, the duty falls on the seller or importer. Economically, platforms will likely pass it through via higher checkout prices or delivery fees.

Bargain shoppers who depend on ultra-cheap non-EU platforms lose the most in relative terms. EU retailers gain some competitive ground, but unevenly. Large platforms with warehouses inside the EU skip the charge on goods already stored in Europe. Smaller shops that import from outside the EU still face it.

Shein and Temu still have moves. They could absorb the cost, raise minimum orders, bundle items into fewer product categories, or warehouse inside the EU to avoid the trigger entirely. If they warehouse at scale, the rule reshapes logistics but may not help the small European retailers it was partly designed to protect.

No EU-wide data shows who buys these cheap parcels by income group. The arithmetic is regressive: the fee takes a bigger bite from a €8 basket than from a €90 one. But we can't measure how deeply that burden falls on lower-income households, who may be the most frequent buyers of ultra-cheap imports.

Sweden's customs authority describes the measure as explicitly temporary, a placeholder until a full customs reform arrives in 2028. That reform is supposed to replace flat fees with a digital system that processes parcels individually. Whether that deadline holds, or slips as large IT projects in Brussels often do, will decide whether the cheapest online baskets stay cheap.