One-line definition: US de minimis was the rule that let parcels valued under $800 enter the United States free of duties and formal customs entry - and as of 29 August 2025 it's gone, meaning every parcel you send to a US customer now needs proper customs handling, duties, and taxes.
If you sell from Europe into the US, the ground shifted under you in 2025. For years, the American market was unusually easy to ship to: anything under $800 sailed in duty-free with minimal paperwork, which made the US a low-friction growth market for Nordic and EU stores. That era ended on 29 August 2025, when the US removed the de minimis exemption entirely. Now every parcel - even a €30 order - faces formal customs entry, duties, and taxes. This is what actually changed, what it means for your store, and how to keep shipping to the US without nasty surprises for you or your customers.
What changed, precisely
Until 2025, a shipment valued under $800 could enter the US under de minimis: no duty, and a simplified clearance process. It's why so many small cross-border parcels moved so cheaply.
As of 29 August 2025, that exemption was eliminated for shipments from all countries. The practical consequences are threefold. Every shipment now requires a formal (or informal) customs entry with complete data rather than a wave-through. Duties apply based on the product's classification and value, where before there were none under the threshold. And the clearance itself takes more - more data, more processing, and often more cost per parcel in brokerage and handling. A €30 order that used to clear invisibly now carries duty, paperwork, and potentially a fee that's significant relative to the order value. For context on how these thresholds work in general, our explainer on the de minimis threshold is worth a read.
Who this hits hardest
This change lands differently depending on what you sell and how.
If your US orders are typically low-value - think accessories, apparel, small homeware - you're the most affected, because the duty and clearance cost is now a meaningful percentage of a small order. High-value shipments were often over the old threshold anyway, so proportionally they change less. Stores that built a US customer base specifically on cheap, fast, duty-free delivery are the ones that need to rethink pricing and delivery promises the most.
The uncomfortable part is who notices. If you ship on delivered-duty-unpaid terms, it's your customer who gets stopped by the carrier and asked to pay duty and a handling fee before they can receive their order - a genuinely bad experience that produces refused parcels, chargebacks, and lost repeat business. The change is technical, but its sharpest edge is the customer's doorstep.
Get your customs data in order
The baseline requirement now is that every US-bound parcel carries complete, accurate customs information - the same discipline that used to be optional below $800 is now mandatory on everything.
That means the full set: a correct commercial invoice declaring contents and value, the right HS/tariff code for each product so duty is assessed correctly, accurate country-of-origin data, and clean product descriptions that a customs officer can classify without stopping to question. Get any of these wrong now and the parcel doesn't slip through on the old exemption - it gets held. Doing this by hand on every order is exactly the kind of repetitive, error-prone work worth automating; our guide to managing international shipping on Shopify covers setting it up so the documents generate from your order data. A shipping app like Packrooster produces the customs paperwork as part of creating the label, pulling the codes and values you've stored against your products.
Decide who pays the duty - and be upfront about it
The biggest experience decision you now face is duty terms: DDU (delivered duty unpaid) or DDP (delivered duty paid).
With DDU, the customer pays the duty and a carrier handling fee on delivery. It's simpler for you to set up, but it means surprise charges at the door - the single most common reason a cross-border parcel gets refused. With DDP, you calculate and collect the duty at checkout, so the customer pays one all-in price and receives the parcel with nothing owing. DDP is more work to configure and requires you to handle the duties, taxes, and VAT properly, but it's a dramatically better customer experience and it's increasingly the expectation for cross-border retail.
Whichever you choose, the cardinal rule is transparency. If duty will be charged, the customer should know before they buy, not discover it when the carrier calls. A clear line at checkout about duties and delivery terms prevents the refused-parcel spiral that quietly kills US expansion.
Should you keep shipping to the US?
For most stores, yes - but deliberately rather than by default. The US is still a large, attractive market; it's just no longer a frictionless one, so it needs the same care you'd give any serious cross-border lane.
Practically, that means a few things. Reprice if you need to, so the new duty and handling costs don't quietly erase your US margin. Be honest with customers about total landed cost and delivery terms. Consider whether DDP is worth the setup to protect the experience. And if your US volume is high or your products are complex to classify, it may be worth talking to a customs broker or a carrier with strong US clearance capabilities. The stores that keep winning in the US after de minimis are the ones that treated the change as a prompt to get their cross-border house in order - not the ones who kept shipping as if it were still 2024.
