EU Customs Duty Calculator 2026 — €3 per tariff heading

A US seller shipping 900 parcels a month into the EU now owes €8,100 a month in customs duty, not the €2,700 that a flat €3-per-parcel reading gives. The difference is one word in the rule, and almost every duty plugin, spreadsheet and chatbot gets it wrong.

Here is what changed. On 11 February 2026 the Council of the EU gave final approval to a new customs duty on small consignments. The €150 customs duty relief — the one that let low-value parcels into the EU duty-free — ended, and from 1 July 2026 a flat duty applies instead, on an interim basis until the wider customs reform lands. The flat duty is €3. The trap is what it is charged on.

It is €3 per 4-digit tariff heading in the consignment, not €3 per parcel. A parcel holding a silk blouse, two wool blouses and a leather belt contains three distinct 4-digit headings. The two wool blouses share a heading, so they count once. That parcel is €9, not €3. If your typical parcel mixes three product types — as apparel, accessories and homeware kits do — your duty bill is three times what you budgeted.

Run the arithmetic on a small shop. 900 parcels a month, 3 tariff headings in a typical parcel, €42 of goods, a destination VAT rate of 21%, IOSS registered so VAT is charged at checkout, a €2 handling fee passed on by the carrier, and €0 of duty collected at checkout because your storefront was built when the relief still existed.

Duty per parcel: €9. Import VAT per parcel: €8.82. The landed cost your DDP price has to carry: €61.82 on €42 of goods. Duty for the month: €8,100. Handling fees for the month: €1,800. Missed purely by reading the rule as €3 per parcel: €5,400 a month. Unbilled at checkout, every month: €9,900. Over a year: €118,800.

None of that is a penalty. It is the bill, and someone pays it. Quote DDP and that someone is you, as a carrier disbursement invoice weeks later, matched to nothing. Quote DDU and it is your customer, asked for money at the door.

Two edges catch people out, and the calculator handles both. The first is €150. The flat €3-per-heading duty only covers consignments with an intrinsic value up to €150. Above that, normal ad valorem duty applies at your commodity's own rate, and IOSS cannot be used at all, so import VAT is charged on the customs value plus duty rather than on the checkout price. Enter €310 of goods at a 12% duty rate into Germany and the answer stops being €3-shaped entirely: €37.20 of duty and €65.97 of VAT on a single parcel.

The second is the handling fee. An EU-wide per-consignment handling fee has been proposed, but through autumn 2026 its amount and start date were still being settled. So the fee is an input, not a number baked into the tool. You type what your carrier actually passes on. Set it to 0 until they do.

Why not ask a chatbot? The models were trained on a world where €150 meant duty-free, and the ones that know the rule changed still answer "€3 per parcel." That missing word is a 3x error on every mixed parcel, and it is invisible: the number looks plausible, so you price against it.

The calculator is a Chrome, Edge and Firefox extension and a free web page that runs the same code. Nine inputs, eight figures out, no key, no cap, no watermark, nothing withheld. The $60 full version sits on a different axis: it exports the parcel-by-parcel figures to a .csv you keep for your filing, and turns the return date you enter into reminders 30, 14 and 1 day out. A customs consultant charges €80 to €150 an hour to classify a catalogue to 4-digit headings, and a broker bills €25 to €50 per import entry.