€3
customs duty per item since 1 July 2026
1
mandatory product identifiers deadline
12%
duty as percentage of a €25 item price
Key takeaways
- The EU 3 euro customs duty applies per item on low value parcels since 1 July 2026.
- Remote Fulfilment prices exclude the duty in Seller Central but include it in the final customer price.
- FBM sellers pay the duty via carrier invoices, not Amazon fee reports.
- Product identifiers in customs declarations become mandatory from 1 November 2026.
- EU-stored inventory is exempt from this duty; only direct imports from outside the EU are charged.
The EU 3 euro customs duty on low value parcels reaches Amazon sellers on every consignment that crosses the EU border, and it has been live since 1 July 2026. There is no threshold left to fall under and no grace period left to use. If you ship into the EU from outside it, the duty is already sitting on your cost line. The only open question is whether you can see it.
What the EU 3 euro customs duty actually charges
The EU removed the 150 euro customs duty relief and replaced it with a temporary flat charge. According to the European Commission announcement, the duty is 3 euros and it applies per item rather than per parcel. The count follows the tariff classification: five identical t-shirts in one box are charged once, a t-shirt plus a watch is charged twice.
The scope is distance sales to EU consumers, in consignments valued at 150 euros or less, arriving from outside the EU. The guidance and legal text published by DG TAXUD sets the end of the temporary regime at 1 July 2028, when normal tariff rates take over.
Goods already stored inside the EU when the order is placed are not affected, because that shipment is domestic. That is the single most important sentence for anyone running Pan-EU FBA. A bulk import into an EU fulfilment centre was never a low value consignment, and the parcel that leaves that centre never crosses a border. If your EU volume is stored in the EU, this duty is not your problem. If any part of it ships direct from outside, it is.
This was not a surprise. The Council agreed the start date on 12 December 2025, more than six months before the charge began.
Who declares and pays the duty on low value consignments
The declarant pays. In practice that is the seller, the importer, the IOSS holder, or their indirect representative. Only in exceptional cases does the consumer pay at delivery. Goods declared under IOSS are still in scope: the flat fee replaced the relief, it did not create a new exemption.
That design is deliberate. The EU wanted the cost inside the price rather than waiting at the door as a surprise. For an Amazon seller, it splits cleanly in two, and the two halves behave very differently.
Where the cost hides: Remote Fulfilment versus FBM
Amazon answered the mechanics directly in the Seller Central forums, and the answer is worth reading twice.
On Remote Fulfilment, Amazon adds the 3 euros to the customer-facing price and calculates VAT on the higher amount. Seller Central displays prices without the duty. The final price the shopper sees comes from the Revenue Calculator.
Read that again, because it is the part that costs money quietly. The number on your pricing screen is not the number on the detail page. Every competitiveness check you ran from the Seller Central price grid since July compared your pre-duty price against a rival who may be selling from inside the EU at a genuine post-duty price. On a 25 euro item, 3 euros is twelve percent of the price and, for a lot of catalogues, most of the contribution margin.
On FBM the flow is the opposite. Amazon asks sellers to supply the carrier with ASIN details and to ship under a Delivered Duty Paid model using the Amazon IOSS number, so the customer is not charged on arrival. The authorised carrier then invoices you for the import duties and passes them to EU customs. The cost lands on a carrier invoice, not on your Amazon fee report, which is exactly the kind of cost that never makes it into a per-ASIN margin calculation.
Amazon is explicit that this is not an Amazon fee. It is an EU customs charge that Amazon is passing through. That distinction matters for how you account for it, and it means there is no fee report line to reconcile against.
The 1 November product identifier deadline
The date that belongs in your calendar today is not 1 July. It is 1 November 2026.
Product identifiers in the customs declaration have been voluntary since the duty started. From 1 November 2026 they are mandatory, to support traceability and safety checks on incoming parcels. That is three weeks before Black Friday week, on the parcels you will be shipping in the highest volume of the year, through a customs process you do not want to be debugging in late November.
If your carrier or customs broker handles the declaration, the question to ask this week is a short one: are product identifiers already being submitted on our declarations, and if not, what do you need from us before 1 November. The answer takes an email. Finding out in December takes considerably longer.
This is the same pattern as every other EU obligation that has landed on sellers in the last two years. The regulator publishes months ahead, the marketplace mentions it once, and the enforcement date arrives without a second reminder. It played out the same way with the EU packaging rules that already bind in 2026 and with the country-by-country EPR registration checks that went wide in August.
What to check this week
Four things, in order of how much they can cost you.
First, confirm in your own account how the duty appears. Open the Revenue Calculator for two or three representative ASINs and compare the final customer price against what the Seller Central price grid shows. If they differ, every pricing decision made from the grid since July needs revisiting.
Second, count your tariff lines. Because the charge follows the tariff classification rather than the parcel, a mixed bundle is not one charge. If you sell multipacks or variety packs that cross classifications, price them against the real count.
Third, separate your EU volume by origin. Units stored in the EU are unaffected. Units shipped direct from outside are not. If you have been reading one blended EU margin number, split it.
Fourth, settle the product identifier question with your carrier before 1 November, and check that your EU responsible person and compliance data is consistent across the same shipments, because customs and marketplace compliance are increasingly reading the same fields. If you have not revisited that since the rules tightened, start with the EU responsible person requirement and what Amazon now actually checks.
The principle underneath all of this outlives the 3 euro figure, which expires in 2028 anyway. A cost that does not appear on the screen you check every day is not a small cost. It is an invisible one, and invisible costs get priced at zero until someone reconciles the bank.
Sources
- Amazon Seller Central Europe - Guidance Needed For 3 Euro EU Customs Duty for Low-Value Imports from 1 July 2026 (respuesta de KJ_Amazon) sellercentral-europe.amazon.com
- Comision Europea - Ensuring fairness and safety: 3 euro customs duty for low-value parcels (29 de junio de 2026) commission.europa.eu
- Comision Europea DG TAXUD - Guidance and legal text on temporary flat fee on low-value imports (8 de junio de 2026) taxation-customs.ec.europa.eu
- Consejo de la UE - Council agrees to levy customs duty on small parcels as of 1 July 2026 (12 de diciembre de 2025) consilium.europa.eu
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