A year on from the end of US de minimis treatment for Chinese goods, the change has done what tariffs rarely do so visibly: it reshaped a whole shipping model almost overnight. The $800 duty-free threshold ended for China and Hong Kong origin goods on May 2, 2025 under Executive Order 14256, and for all other origins on August 29, 2025. For any exporter who built volume on small-parcel direct-to-consumer shipping, 2026 is the first full year of operating without the loophole.

The Scale of the Shift

The numbers are striking. By the second quarter of 2026, the volume of sub-$800 parcels entering the US had fallen by roughly 54% — on the order of 740 million parcels a year disappearing from the customs flow within months of full elimination, per Universal Postal Union data cited in trade reporting. Before the change, an estimated four million parcels arrived daily from China under the exemption. Now every parcel requires a formal customs entry, with HTS classification, country-of-origin verification, and full duty payment.

One point that caught many off guard: when the Supreme Court invalidated the IEEPA-based reciprocal tariffs in February 2026, some assumed de minimis elimination would be reversed along with them. It was not — the de minimis suspension rested on separate executive action and was explicitly maintained.

What It Costs Now

For a low-value parcel that once cleared free, the new math is sobering. Beyond the underlying duty, each parcel now carries roughly $4–$25 in entry, broker, and bond costs, plus 2–5 days of added transit for entry processing. For a representative garment that previously entered duty-free, stacked duties plus the merchandise processing fee can push total duty toward $100 before broker fees — landed cost can roughly double.

How Exporters Have Adapted

The response has sorted exporters by volume:

  • Consolidate into bulk. Brands above roughly a few thousand units per quarter increasingly ship in bulk to a US warehouse, clear once as a single formal entry, and fulfill domestically. This removes per-parcel customs friction and cuts delivery time to 1–3 days — at the cost of holding inventory and the cash-flow hit that comes with it.
  • Absorb formal entry on direct shipping. Some continue direct-from-China shipping but now pay full formal-entry costs per parcel — viable mainly for higher-value goods where the per-unit overhead is a smaller share.
  • Rethink sourcing geography. For lower-volume sellers, the math can favor shifting production to origins that face the reciprocal tariff but not Section 301.

A recurring, costly mistake: brands that assumed they had until 2027 to adapt based on partial 2025 enforcement signals, and entered 2026 still operating on de minimis assumptions. The elimination arrived faster than most planned for.

The Forward Risk

The US has now established a clear precedent for country-specific elimination, and the EU (roughly ─150 threshold) and UK have their own restrictive regimes. Exporters who still rely on de minimis-style thresholds for any market should treat the benefit as potentially temporary and build contingency plans rather than assume permanence.

How Zhongshen Can Help

We help exporters move from small-parcel to consolidated bulk-and-fulfillment models, handle the formal customs entries and classification that every shipment now requires, and model landed cost across the available structures. If your US volume still runs parcel-by-parcel, contact our trade desk for a consolidation and entry review.