Published
The $800 de minimis exemption no longer exists in practice. US Customs and Border Protection has indefinitely suspended it for imports from every country, which means a parcel worth $40 arriving from overseas is now subject to entry procedures and duty in the same way a commercial shipment always has been.
If you import inventory, dropship from abroad, or run a non-US account shipping into the States, this changes your landed cost rather than your ShipStation configuration. Below is what actually changed, on which dates, and which of the widely repeated deadlines applies to what.
It was an administrative shortcut, not a tax break. Section 321 of the Tariff Act let CBP admit a shipment valued at or under $800 free of duty and without formal entry, on the reasoning that collecting a few dollars of duty on a low-value parcel cost more than it raised.
That shortcut is what made a certain kind of cross-border ecommerce work. It is now suspended indefinitely, across all countries, following the executive action continuing the suspension of duty-free de minimis treatment.
This is the part most summaries flatten, and flattening it produces the wrong date. CBP issued two separate interim final rules, both published on 24 June 2026, splitting the world by how the goods arrive.
Everything that is not mail. The rule covering all modes other than the international postal network — express carriers, air cargo, ocean, truck. Its own summary states the effect plainly:
This indefinite suspension means that all entries of merchandise valued at $800 or less arriving through all modes other than the international postal network must utilize formal or informal entry procedures.
Effective 24 June 2026. Immediately on publication, with no delayed compliance window. If your inbound freight or express parcels come through a carrier rather than a postal service, this has been live since late June.
Mail. The rule covering the international postal network does the same thing for postal shipments and adds something the other rule does not: a new postal informal entry process, which CBP limits to articles classifiable in chapters 1 to 97 of the Harmonized Tariff Schedule.
Effective 24 July 2026, with one amendment to 19 CFR 145.31 effective a month earlier on 24 June.
So there are already three dates in play, and none of them is October.
You will see 22 October 2026 quoted as the deadline for the whole change. It is not.
The postal rule sets it out precisely:
Compliance date: The compliance date for 19 CFR 145.12(a)(2)(v) and (vi) is on October 22, 2026.
That is a delayed compliance window attached to one requirement — that certain merchandise arriving through the international postal network must file formal entry. CBP’s stated reason is to give the trade time to adjust, describing it as a “narrow and short-term delayed compliance window.”
Everything else in both rules is already in force. The exemption itself was not deferred to October; a single postal formal-entry requirement was.
Two things happen when that window closes. Filers covered by it must either use formal entry procedures or take the alternative, and CBP opens that alternative on the same day: a voluntary Entry Type 13 test, described in the rule as
a test of a new voluntary electronic mail process for shipments valued at $2,500 or less, known as the Entry Type 13 test, which will provide an optional alternative to filing formal entry in those cases.
The rule states that the opening of the test will coincide with the end of the delayed compliance window.
Four consequences, in the order they will reach you.
Your inbound landed cost went up, and not only by the duty. The duty is the visible part. Entry procedures carry brokerage and filing costs that did not previously apply to low-value shipments, and those are charged per entry rather than per dollar of value — which means the proportional hit is worst on the cheapest parcels. If your unit economics were built on duty-free inbound samples, replacement parts or small replenishment shipments, they were built on the shortcut rather than on the tariff schedule.
Who files may have changed for you. The rule is direct about the effect on intermediaries: clients using non-broker qualified parties will switch to brokers unless their existing party becomes a licensed customs broker, and some importers “will need to find a broker if their previous qualified party was not a licensed customs broker.” If a freight forwarder or consolidator has been handling this on your behalf, that arrangement is worth confirming rather than assuming.
Non-US sellers shipping into the States lost the biggest single advantage of low-value cross-border. A Canadian, British or Australian merchant sending $60 parcels to US customers was, until this year, sending them duty-free. They are not now. If that is your operation, the delivered price your US customer sees is a different number than it was, and whether you absorb it or pass it on is a pricing decision rather than a shipping one.
Your customer’s experience of a border changed. Duty owed on a parcel has to be collected from someone, and the default is the recipient at the door. That is the single most common source of international delivery complaints, and it now applies to a value band that never used to generate it. Who pays is something you can decide in advance rather than discover — ShipStation carries a Bill Int'l Duties to Payor of Shipping Charges action and a Prepay Duties and Taxes action, both covered in how customs declarations get filled in.
Worth stating, because the noise around this has swept in things it should not.
Your outbound US domestic shipping is untouched. This is an import rule. Nothing about a domestic label, rate or service changes because of it.
Your customs declarations are still customs declarations. HS codes, country of origin, detailed descriptions and tax identifiers are required for the same reasons they were before, and the six-digit HS code requirement USPS introduced in September 2025 is a separate obligation that was already in force.
The $800 figure has not moved. It was not lowered. The exemption attached to it was suspended, which is a different mechanism — the threshold still appears in the statute, and the administrative treatment that made it useful has been withdrawn.
Three things, all answerable from records you already hold.
Pull your last quarter of inbound shipments and separate them by value and mode. Anything under $800 arriving by express or freight has been dutiable since 24 June; anything under $800 arriving by post since 24 July. That is the population whose cost changed, and its size is the size of the problem.
Then ask whoever files your entries what they are doing about the October window, and whether they intend to use Entry Type 13. If the answer is vague, that is worth knowing now rather than on 23 October.
Then, if you sell into the US from outside it, re-run your delivered-price arithmetic on a representative order. The duty is calculable from the tariff schedule; the entry cost is a number your broker can give you.
This is a description of what two published rules say and when they took effect. It is not customs advice, and I am not a customs broker.
The rules are interim final rules issued with a request for comments, which means the detail can still move. Both are linked above in full, they are short by the standards of the Federal Register, and the dates section of each is the first thing on the page. If a decision turns on this, read them and then talk to a broker — the value of knowing the dates is that it tells you which questions to ask, not that it answers them.
An international order carries decisions a domestic one does not: who pays the duty, which tax identifiers the declaration needs, which service is worth the transit, and how the contents have to be described. Each of those is correct per order and per destination rather than set once.
String builds and maintains that logic inside existing ShipStation accounts, for operations shipping roughly 6,000 orders a month or more. Below that, product-level customs data and ShipStation's International Settings will cover most of it.
