EU’s €2 parcel fee awaits clearance

The European Commission has set a new handling fee of €2 for every distinct item in a low-value parcel sent directly to an EU buyer from outside the bloc (Council transmission). The fee comes on top of the €3 customs duty already charged per item (Regulation 2026/382). Brussels expects collection to start on 1 November, but the fee is not yet legally ready to collect.

What one parcel costs

Customs counts goods by "item", also called a customs line: goods in one parcel that share the same tariff classification and description. Two identical cotton T-shirts form a single item, so they cost €3 in duty plus €2 in fee, or €5 rather than €10 (Commission guidance).

A mixed order costs more. A T-shirt and a watch are two items, so duty comes to €6 and the new fee adds €4, a total of €10 in EU charges before VAT (value-added tax, the EU's sales tax) or delivery (Regulation 2026/382, Council transmission).

Because the charge is fixed, it weighs most on the cheapest goods. In a study published in December 2025, French customs estimated that nearly 800 million e-commerce articles a year reached France in small parcels, and that half were worth under €3.40 (French customs study). For goods that cheap, a €2 fee per item comes close to the price of the product itself.

Decided, but not yet in force

The fee was created by Regulation 2026/2108, a change to the EU customs code adopted on 16 September that left the amount to the Commission (EU customs code). The Council records receiving the Commission's act fixing the €2 on 21 September (Council transmission). When the European Parliament voted for the fee, its size was still open (To Brief).

Three steps remain. First, Parliament and the Council (the member states' ministers) have 30 days to object, though both can clear the act early by formally saying they won't (EU customs code). The act must then appear in the Official Journal, the EU's legal gazette. Finally, collection can start only ten days after publication (EU customs code).

The Commission's guidance of 5 October still described the act as under scrutiny and called 1 November "expected" (Commission guidance). On 16 October, EU sources told a French outlet they did not expect an objection (Connexion France). That is a forecast, not a clearance.

Who ends up paying

Customs bills the importer, normally the seller, the platform or a customs agent. The law states that the consumer should not be the one billed (EU customs code). Sellers can still raise prices to recover the cost. Poland's customs authority warns that the existing €3 duty may show up in product or shipping prices (Polish customs authority). Nobody has measured how much of a fee that has not yet started will reach shoppers.

Sellers also have a way around the per-item charges. A company that imports stock in bulk and clears customs before any customer orders pays ordinary duties once, at that stage. Later deliveries from its EU warehouse are not parcel imports, so the per-item duty and fee do not apply.

The €3 duty has already changed how goods are declared. In the Netherlands, e-commerce declaration lines in August and September were about 70% below a year earlier. Lines on standard import declarations, the paperwork used for ordinary commercial shipments, rose 43% (Dutch Customs). According to Rzeczpospolita, Poland's finance ministry found that e-commerce declarations halved from June to July, with no significant immediate rise in business-to-business imports.

These figures count customs paperwork, not purchases, and they cover different periods. They cannot show how much trade has moved into EU warehouses and how much has simply stopped. The design of the fee is clearer than its effects so far. It charges most on cheap, mixed orders shipped one parcel per customer, and it favours sellers that can afford to import stock before customers order.