Customs & Tariff Classification
De Minimis
Also known as: Section 321, the $800 threshold, Type 86
De minimis is the value below which goods may enter the United States free of duty and without a formal customs entry. The phrase is from the Latin maxim that the law does not concern itself with trifles, and the idea is straightforward: below some figure, the cost of collecting the duty exceeds the duty.
The United States set that figure at $800 per person per day in 2016, one of the highest thresholds in the world. It was administered under Section 321 of the Tariff Act of 1930, which is why the trade calls the shipments themselves "Section 321" — and why the streamlined electronic filing built for them became known as Type 86.
That regime is gone. Duty-free de minimis was suspended for all countries, international mail included, on 29 August 2025 by executive order 14324, so goods that would have entered free the week before now meet the ordinary tariff. CBP then suspended the exemption in the regulations indefinitely: the postal entry process replacing the old paper mail entry took effect on 24 July 2026, with a compliance date of 22 October 2026 for shipments carrying partner government agency data, Chapter 98 or 99 duties, or a free trade agreement claim.
For about a decade, de minimis was the quiet machinery that made buying things from abroad feel like buying things. You ordered from a shop in Osaka or a dealer in Hamburg, a parcel turned up, and no part of the customs system ever introduced itself. That was not an oversight. It was policy, and at $800 it was a generous one.
It is worth being clear about what changed and what did not. Duty rates did not go up. The tariff on your goods is what it always was. What went away is the exemption — the reason you never met the tariff. The rule that used to be invisible has simply become visible, and it arrived by letter.
We say this to people every week now, usually to someone quite upset: you have not done anything wrong, and you are not being singled out. The parcel that a collector has been receiving from the same German dealer for eleven years is being treated exactly the way commercial cargo has always been treated. It is the first time they have had to see it.
The part that genuinely stings is not the duty. On a small parcel the duty is often modest and the processing fee is the larger number, which feels absurd and is nevertheless correct. That is the honest thing to tell someone weighing whether to clear a $200 parcel: sometimes the arithmetic says let it go back, and we would rather say so early than take a fee for a bad outcome.
If you are on the other side of this — a postal operator or a marketplace rather than someone waiting on a parcel — the same change arrives as an operational one. Every parcel now needs a filing, which for postal means entry type 13, and the filing needs a classification and a value the data was never built to carry. That is a volume and data-quality problem long before it is a customs problem.
Where it matters for compliance
- The threshold governed whether a shipment was dutiable and how it was entered. Removing it changed neither the tariff rate nor the classification — the goods were always dutiable in principle.
- Section 321 remains the statutory provision. What changed is eligibility, so the shorthand is now a source of confusion rather than a shipping instruction.
- The threshold was per person, per day. Deliberately breaking one order into several parcels to stay under it is structuring, and it is treated as an attempt to evade rather than as clever buying.
- Where a formal entry is required, so is an importer of record with a number and a bond. For a one-off parcel that is not as daunting as it sounds: a broker files it for you on a single-transaction bond, and no continuous bond or compliance program is being asked of you.
Related terms
Reviewed by a licensed customs broker. Definitions are general information, not legal or customs advice for a particular shipment. Duty rates, tariff programs and agency requirements change frequently.