Is the $800 de minimis exemption still available?

No. The $800 de minimis exemption was eliminated for goods of Chinese and Hong Kong origin effective May 2, 2025, and then suspended for all other countries effective August 29, 2025. There is no longer a value threshold that lets a shipment enter the United States duty-free simply because it is small. Duty is assessed on the goods regardless of shipment value.

When did de minimis end for China?

May 2, 2025 for goods of Chinese and Hong Kong origin. The exemption was extended to no other origin either, since it was suspended for all remaining countries on August 29, 2025. Shipping through a third country does not restore a $800 duty-free allowance.

Do small parcels from China now pay duty?

Yes. A low value parcel owes the same duty stack as a large shipment of the same goods: the MFN base rate from the HTSUS for its classification, plus Section 301 where that classification is listed. Section 301 rates run 25% for Lists 1, 2 and 3 and 7.5% for List 4A, with higher rates on strategic sectors. Look up your own 10-digit HTS code rather than assuming a flat rate.

Does splitting a shipment into smaller parcels avoid duty?

No. Splitting worked only because it kept each parcel under the $800 de minimis threshold, and that threshold no longer removes duty. Four $500 parcels now owe the same total duty as one $2,000 shipment, while also generating four separate sets of customs entry paperwork. The practice adds cost without reducing duty.

What documents are required now for low value shipments?

Full customs entry documentation is required regardless of shipment value. In practice that means a correct 10-digit HS classification, an accurate declared customs value, a named importer of record and complete commercial documentation for the goods. This is a heavier data requirement than the old de minimis flow, which is why per-parcel administrative work has increased for direct-ship sellers.

Is consolidating cheaper than shipping individual parcels?

It can be, because clearance charges such as broker fees and entry filing are billed per shipment rather than per unit, so one entry incurs that structure once instead of dozens of times. Duty itself does not change, since the same goods owe the same duty either way. The way to check is to multiply your per-entry clearance charges by the number of entries each model produces, add freight, and compare landed cost per unit. Consolidation also adds origin dwell time and requires US-side fulfilment, so it is a structural decision, not only a price one.

De Minimis Import Rules Ended: What China Importers Pay

The $800 de minimis exemption is gone. Here is what replaced it.

A large slice of China-to-US ecommerce used to run on one provision. If a shipment was valued at $800 or less and went to one person on one day, it entered the United States free of duty on a thin set of data. That was Section 321 de minimis, and for a lot of sellers it was load-bearing: ship each order individually out of a Shenzhen warehouse, skip the duty, skip the formal entry, hand the parcel to the customer.

It closed in two steps. Goods of Chinese and Hong Kong origin lost the $800 de minimis exemption on May 2, 2025. The exemption was then suspended for every other country of origin on August 29, 2025. There is no origin left to route around, because the $800 threshold no longer does that work anywhere.

What replaced it is not exotic. A low value shipment from China now owes the same duty that a container of the same goods would owe, and it needs the same customs documentation. Value stopped being a shortcut past either one.

What a low value shipment from China actually owes

Two layers, at minimum.

The base layer is the MFN rate published in the HTSUS against your product’s classification. It is product-specific. A resin phone case and a lithium power bank do not carry the same base rate, and neither does a similar-looking item one subheading over.

The second layer is Section 301. Lists 1, 2 and 3 carry 25%. List 4A carries 7.5%. Strategic sectors carry more, including 100% on electric vehicles and 50% on both solar cells and semiconductors. Section 301 stacks on top of the MFN base rate. It does not replace it, and it does not care how small your parcel is.

So the honest answer to “what is my rate” is: look it up, per product. Find your 10-digit classification in the HTSUS, read the Column 1 General rate, then check whether that subheading appears on a Section 301 list and at what rate. If you want a rough landed figure before you get a broker on the phone, our customs duty calculator will run the arithmetic once you have the classification and the declared value.

There is a second reason not to trust any single “total China tariff percentage” you read, including one published last month. The measures layered on China have been moving on court rulings and expiry dates. The broader IEEPA reciprocal tariffs were struck down in February 2026. A temporary Section 122 global tariff stood in their place and expired around July 24, 2026. A truce arrangement with China runs to November 10, 2026. Any figure that adds all of that into one tidy number is a photograph, not a rate. Verify the current stack against your own HTS code close to the date the goods actually enter.

Federal processing fees sit on top of duty. Those percentages and minimums get adjusted periodically, so pull the current figures from CBP rather than from a blog, and have whoever handles your customs clearance confirm which ones apply to your mode of transport.

Old de minimis flow versus what is required now

Element	Under de minimis (before May 2, 2025)	Now
Duty on a $200 parcel from China	None, if under the $800 threshold	MFN base rate plus Section 301 where the classification applies
Role of shipment value	Value below $800 removed the duty	No duty-free threshold based on value
Documentation	Light data set, manifest-level description usually enough	Full customs entry documentation at any value
HS classification	Rarely the deciding factor on cost	10-digit classification drives the entire duty calculation
Importer of record	Often never consciously decided	Has to be named and has to be someone who accepts the liability
Splitting one order into small parcels	Kept each parcel under the threshold and out of duty	No duty benefit at all; multiplies the number of entries
Main cost driver per order	Parcel freight rate	Duty plus per-entry clearance cost, then freight

What this breaks in a direct-from-China parcel model

Duty became a per-order cost. If your unit economics were built on a duty-free landed cost, every price point in your catalogue is now wrong by the amount of the stack on your HTS code. That is not a rounding error on a 25% list item. Rebuild the landed cost per SKU before you touch anything else, because the rest of the decisions depend on it.

Entry data became a per-parcel job. Full customs documentation is required regardless of value. Five hundred orders means five hundred sets of entry data, each with a classification, a value, a consignee and a party responsible for the duty. Under the old flow that burden barely existed. Now it is administrative work that scales linearly with your order count, and somebody is being paid to do it.

Clearance became a step instead of a formality. More required data elements per shipment means more places where a description, a value or a classification can disagree with itself, and disagreements are what put shipments on hold. A model that assumed near-automatic release at the express hub has to assume real clearance handling now.

Splitting a shipment stopped working. Worth saying plainly, because the habit persists. Breaking a $2,000 order into four $500 parcels used to remove the duty. Today it produces four dutiable shipments, four sets of entry paperwork and four clearance events, carrying exactly the same duty in total as the single shipment would have. Value-based splitting was arbitrage against a threshold that no longer exists.

The structural response: fewer entries, bigger entries

The change most importers are making is to stop presenting Customs with hundreds of individual shipments and start presenting one. Goods get gathered at origin, move as a single freight consignment, clear under one entry, and get broken down to individual customer orders after they are already inside the US.

The logic is not that duty disappears. It does not. The same goods owe the same duty however they travel. What changes is the fixed cost attached to each clearance event. Broker fees, entry filing, security filings on ocean freight and release handling are charged per shipment, not per unit inside it. Fifty entries means paying that structure fifty times. One entry means paying it once, on the same goods.

Run your own version of the comparison rather than trusting a rule of thumb. Take your per-entry clearance charges, multiply by the number of entries each model produces in a month, then add the freight. Parcel pricing and consolidated freight pricing behave differently as volume grows, so ask your forwarder to quote both and compare landed cost per unit rather than headline rate per kilo. Our page on shipping costs from China walks through which charges actually move with volume and which do not.

Be honest about the trade-offs before committing. Consolidation adds dwell time at origin while the shipment is built, which lengthens the gap between a supplier finishing production and a customer receiving the order. It also requires somewhere in the US to hold and pick inventory, so a direct-ship seller effectively takes on a fulfilment layer they did not have. And it means committing to inventory instead of buying per order. For sellers with steady, repeating SKUs that is usually a fair trade. For unpredictable long-tail assortments it is a harder call. A consolidation warehouse at origin exists to make the first half of that trade cheap, but it does not make the inventory decision for you.

The four things every shipment needs now

Correct HS classification. Ten digits, defensible, and you can explain how you got there. Work from the HTSUS itself, and when your product sits between two subheadings, search CBP’s CROSS database for rulings on similar goods before guessing. If it stays genuinely ambiguous and the money is material, a binding ruling is the mechanism that ends the argument in advance.

Accurate customs value. The declared value has to reflect what was actually paid or payable for the goods. Understating value to reduce a duty bill is the one shortcut that turns a cost problem into an enforcement problem, and it is the reason a lot of former de minimis sellers are now having uncomfortable conversations.

A decided importer of record. Someone is legally responsible for the entry and the duty. If you are a China-based seller shipping to US consumers, either you take that role, which means arranging US-side standing and a bond, or your buyer takes it, which means they get a duty bill they did not expect. Decide it deliberately with your broker instead of discovering it at the border.

A decided Incoterm. This is where the duty cost lands commercially. DDP puts it on you and keeps the customer experience clean. DAP puts it on the consignee and protects your margin but produces surprise charges at delivery. Neither is wrong, but the choice has to match how you priced the product. Our breakdown of Incoterms for China imports covers where the handover of cost and risk actually sits in each one.

What is already scheduled to change

Two dated changes affect the mail channel specifically. A new postal entry process for international mail shipments valued at $800 or less took effect on July 24, 2026. Separately, a voluntary electronic process for mail shipments valued at $2,500 or less, referred to as Entry Type 13, begins as a test on September 22, 2026.

If any meaningful part of your volume still moves by post rather than express or freight, the useful question to ask your carrier right now is who files under the new postal process and what data they will need from you to do it. That is a conversation worth having before a shipment is sitting somewhere waiting on it.

Rebuild the landed cost before you rebuild the offer

The de minimis import exemption is not coming back on its own schedule, and the tariff layers stacked above the base rate will keep moving with court dates and expiry dates. The part you control is structural: how many entries you generate, how accurately you classify, who carries the duty, and whether your prices reflect a real landed cost instead of a duty-free one.

If you want a concrete comparison for your own volumes, send us your product descriptions, monthly order count and current shipping method, and we will price consolidated freight with a single entry against what you are running today. Request a quote and we will come back with the classification questions we need answered to make the numbers real.