Is $800 De Minimis Still Available? What Changed in 2025–26

Short answer first: no, the $800 de minimis exemption is not currently available for any origin. As of this writing it is suspended worldwide, the suspension is indefinite, and the exemption itself is due to be eliminated by statute on 2027-07-01. If you are still pricing or filing shipments as if sub-$800 parcels enter duty-free by default, that assumption is out of date and could cost you at the port.

For close to a decade, de minimis was the quiet engine behind cheap, fast cross-border shipping. A parcel under the threshold moved with almost no customs friction and no duty bill. Between May 2025 and June 2026, that engine was switched off in stages, and the rest of this piece walks through exactly when, why, and what any importer or small shipper should do about it now.

What de minimis was

Section 321 of the Tariff Act, codified at 19 U.S.C. 1321, lets CBP admit a shipment of articles imported by one person on one day, fairly valued at or below a set threshold, free of duty and tax. Congress raised that threshold to $800 in 2016 under the Trade Facilitation and Trade Enforcement Act — one of the highest de minimis values anywhere in the world, and roughly sixteen times the EU's equivalent limit at the time. The logic was administrative, not generous: assessing formal duty on a single $40 phone case costs CBP more in processing time than the duty is worth.

CBP built a dedicated electronic filing lane for these shipments, generally referred to as Entry Type 86. It let carriers and brokers submit a light data set through the Automated Commercial Environment (ACE) instead of a full formal or informal entry, even though no duty was owed. That lane is what made same-week delivery of a $12 phone case from overseas viable at scale — CBP has publicly cited daily Entry Type 86 volumes in the millions at the programme's peak.

Is the $800 de minimis exemption still available?

No. As of the most recent suspension, no shipment from any origin qualifies for duty-free de minimis treatment under Section 321, regardless of value. That is a change from the position through early 2025, when the exemption still applied to most countries even as scrutiny on China-origin parcels was building. The suspension is indefinite rather than time-limited, and a separate statutory change is scheduled to remove the exemption from the law itself on 2027-07-01, which would make the current suspension permanent even if a future administration wanted to reverse course.

It is worth being precise about what "suspended" means. The $800 threshold has not been repealed from the statute yet — that happens on the 2027 date. What has already happened is that CBP, acting on presidential authority, has removed the duty-free treatment those shipments would otherwise get. A parcel that used to sail through as Entry Type 86 now typically needs a formal or informal entry instead, with the applicable duty — including any Section 301, 232 or 122 measures — assessed against it.

The de minimis suspension timeline

The rollout happened in four distinct steps over roughly fourteen months, and the order matters — it shows the policy moving from a China-specific measure to a universal one rather than arriving all at once.

What changed for Entry Type 86 filings

Entry Type 86 was built specifically to move low-value, duty-free parcels through ACE with minimal data. With duty-free treatment suspended, a shipment that would have used that lane generally moves through formal or informal entry instead — more data fields, a duty calculation against the correct HTS line, and, depending on value, potentially a customs bond. Carriers and platforms built around Entry Type 86's lighter requirements have had to rebuild those pipelines from scratch.

Who is affected by the de minimis suspension

• Direct-to-consumer sellers shipping small parcels internationally — China and Hong Kong felt it first, but the suspension is now global regardless of origin.
• Marketplaces and fulfilment platforms that built pricing and checkout flows around duty-free sub-$800 parcels.
• Anyone who was splitting a single order into several parcels to keep each one under the threshold — a practice CBP already treated as a red flag before the suspension, and one that no longer has a de minimis benefit to chase.
• Buyers who previously saw no duty line on sub-$800 purchases and may now see one, or see the seller quietly absorb it into the sale price instead.

Customs brokers describe the shift bluntly in trade webinars: clients who built a five-year business model on a duty-free assumption are now re-pricing everything from a $9 phone case to a $400 bicycle, because the exemption they priced against no longer exists for their origin.

How is DDP shipping affected by the de minimis change?

Many sellers reacted by moving to Delivered Duty Paid (DDP) terms, where the seller — not the buyer — is the importer of record and pays the duty upfront, folding it into the listed price so checkout still looks simple. That keeps the customer experience close to what it was under de minimis, but it shifts who is legally on the hook for classification accuracy and who carries the compliance risk if a shipment is mis-declared.

What to do if your business relied on de minimis

Take an Austin-based accessories brand shipping phone grips and cases from Vietnam as an example. Before the suspension, a typical order — say $28 retail, three items — cleared under Entry Type 86 with no duty line at all. After the all-origin suspension, that same order needs a real HTS classification and a duty calculation, even though the value is nowhere near a big commercial shipment. Multiply that by several thousand orders a month and the margin hit is not trivial. The honest first move is to re-run unit economics with duty included: classify products to their real HTS lines rather than guessing, look up the base ad valorem rate, and layer on any Section 301 or 232 measures for the country of origin. A product that was effectively duty-free as a small parcel may now carry the full tariff stack a commercial shipment would — better to find that out in a spreadsheet than at a customs hold.

De minimis vs formal and informal entry: the practical difference

Informal entry generally covers shipments valued up to $2,500 for most commercial goods — simpler than formal entry, but it still requires a duty assessment where duty is owed, unlike the old duty-free de minimis lane. Formal entry applies above that threshold, or where the product type requires it regardless of value, and typically needs a customs bond. For a business used to Entry Type 86's near-zero friction, informal entry is the closer landing spot for most parcels now, but it still means real classification work and a real duty bill that did not exist under de minimis.

Where this is likely headed

The direction of travel is consistent even though the legal mechanism has shifted more than once: away from a broad duty-free exemption and towards treating every commercial shipment, however small, as dutiable. The 2027-07-01 statutory elimination date is the clearest signal — it converts what started as an executive suspension into a change in the underlying law. Whether that date holds is genuinely uncertain, and any of the 2025 suspension steps could in principle be adjusted again before then.

The bottom line

De minimis is no longer the reliable duty-free lane it was for parcels from any origin, and treating it as still available is now the exception you'd need to prove, not the default you can assume. Verify the current status against CBP before you file, price your products on their true landed cost rather than an exemption that may not apply, and build your operations around formal or informal entry as the normal path rather than the fallback. Nothing in this article is legal, customs, or tax advice — confirm your specific situation with CBP or a licensed customs broker before you act on it.