Importing from China to the EU

Most coverage of the 2021 reform was about tax. The formalities line is the one that changed how goods physically move.

Before, the Commission notes, postal consignments not exceeding EUR 150 could be declared for free circulation without a formal customs declaration, and the same facility applied to non-postal consignments not exceeding EUR 22.

After, *"an import declaration will be required for all goods entering the EU, regardless of their value."* That is not a threshold being lowered; it is a category — undeclared low-value traffic — being abolished.

What that means operationally is data. A declaration needs a description, a value, a commodity code and an origin, for every consignment, in a system. A seller whose product data was good enough for a shipping label is frequently not ready for that, and the discovery usually happens at the border rather than in a planning meeting.

And it is the same movement the United States made four years later in one step. Two of the world's largest consumer markets have now concluded that undeclared low-value imports are a problem, and both have answered it with a declaration requirement rather than with a smaller number.

For consignments not exceeding EUR 150, the Commission describes two collection methods, and which one applies decides where the VAT lands.

The Import One Stop Shop. IOSS was created *"to simplify the declaration and payment of VAT for distance sales of low value goods not exceeding 150€ imported from third territories or third countries."* The seller or marketplace registers, charges the buyer's national VAT at the point of sale, and declares it centrally. And the Commission states the consequence plainly: in the case of IOSS, the VAT at import is exempt — not because no VAT is due, but because it was already collected at the sale.

The special arrangements, where IOSS is not used. Then the VAT is collected on import instead, typically by the declarant presenting the goods — in practice the postal operator or courier — and passed on to the recipient, usually with a handling fee attached.

The practical failure this creates is being charged twice, and it is common. If VAT was charged at checkout under IOSS but the IOSS identification number is not communicated correctly on the customs declaration, the goods can be assessed for import VAT as well. So the useful habit is to keep the checkout receipt showing VAT was charged, and to ask the seller whether they are IOSS-registered before ordering — because recovering a double charge afterwards is possible and tedious, and avoiding it is neither.

No VAT rates are published here. VAT is set by each member state, IOSS charges the rate of the customer's country, and a table of rates in a guide is out of date the first time one changes.

The 2021 reform dealt with VAT and left the customs-duty relief for consignments not exceeding EUR 150 in place. That is what is now changing.

What the Commission published. A news item dated 13 November 2025, titled *"150 EUR customs duty exemption threshold to be removed as of 2026"*, records that parcels valued below EUR 150 sent from a third country to a consumer in the EU are at present exempted from customs duties.

What this page does and does not say. It reports the announcement and its date, because a reader planning a business needs to know it exists. It does not assert that the change has taken effect, on what date, or in what final form — that is exactly the kind of detail that moves during implementation, and asserting it would repeat the error this whole cluster is written against.

What follows regardless. Six destinations in this cluster have now narrowed or removed low-value relief, and the EU announcement is the seventh movement in the same direction. A model that depends on parcels arriving duty-free is a model with somebody else's policy inside it. Price without the relief; treat any you get as upside.

And note which half moves first. VAT went in 2021; duty is going later. That sequencing is worth understanding because the two behave differently for a business: VAT is generally recoverable by a registered business, and duty never is. The half that is arriving now is the half that is a permanent cost.

You, or an EU company you control, are the importer, and the accuracy of the declaration belongs to that party.

Your commodity code and your origin decide the duty, and now they have to be right on everything rather than on containers only.

And conformity is a completely separate question from tax — genuinely separate, with its own regulators and its own timescale. Whether your product may be placed on the EU market at all, who must be established in the Union to answer for it, and what documentation has to exist before the first unit ships are decided by product legislation rather than by customs. Those have their own pages and they are the ones to read before production, because unlike a declaration they cannot be arranged in a week.

The commonest expensive mistake on this route is sequencing. A business solves the tax question first because it is concrete and urgent, and meets the conformity question after the goods are made — at which point the options are all bad. Settle conformity before production; settle tax before shipping.