Is De Minimis Still in Effect? Status of the De Minimis Exemption and Section 321

No. As of October 2026 the US de minimis exemption is not available for commercial shipments from any country, by any mode. Duty-free treatment under 19 U.S.C. 1321(a)(2)(C), the $800 administrative exemption known as Section 321, has been suspended for China and Hong Kong since May 2, 2025 and for all countries since August 29, 2025. CBP wrote the suspension into its own regulations on June 24, 2026, as an indefinite suspension that no longer depends on any executive order. Separately, the One Big Beautiful Bill Act terminates the exemption by statute effective July 1, 2027.

The practical consequence is that every low-value commercial shipment now needs an entry: an informal entry up to $2,500, a formal entry above it, or for mail, the new postal informal entry process.

Is De Minimis Still in Effect? The Dated Answer

The short answer depends on which exemption is meant. Section 1321 authorizes three administrative exemptions, and only one of them is gone. Bona fide gifts valued at $100 or less ($200 from certain island possessions) under 1321(a)(2)(A), and personal or household articles of $200 or less accompanying travelers under 1321(a)(2)(B), are expressly untouched by the June 2026 rules. What is suspended is the third category, the de minimis exemption under 1321(a)(2)(C) for articles valued at $800 or less imported by one person on one day, which is the one cross-border e-commerce was built on.

For that exemption, the status is unambiguous. CBP’s interim final rule at 91 FR 37789 states that all entries of merchandise valued at $800 or less arriving through all modes other than the international postal network must use formal or informal entry procedures. A concurrent rule at 91 FR 37801 does the same for mail. Any future change to the suspension will be announced in the Federal Register, so the operating assumption for planning purposes is that duty-free de minimis is closed for commercial goods until the statutory repeal makes the question moot.

The phrase de minimis rule still appears in older guidance and contracts, and some importers continue to price landed cost as if the $800 threshold applied. It does not. A shipment valued at $120 now carries the same duty, the same Chapter 99 stacking and the same importer of record liability as a container, just through a lighter entry type.

The De Minimis Suspension Timeline

The suspension moved through four legal instruments in fourteen months. Each one changed either the scope or the legal footing, which is why secondary summaries written in 2025 are now wrong on details that matter for compliance.

The February 2026 step is the one most often misreported. When the Supreme Court decided Learning Resources v. Trump on February 20, 2026, holding that IEEPA does not authorize tariffs, the IEEPA duties ended but the de minimis suspension did not. Executive Order 14388, signed the same day, continued the suspension for all countries, and Executive Order 14324 had already provided that its de minimis provisions would survive invalidation of the IEEPA tariff orders. CBP’s June 2026 rules then grounded the suspension in CBP’s own authority under 19 U.S.C. 1321(b), independent of the executive orders.

Why the Exemption Was Closed

Section 1321 was always an efficiency provision. It lets Treasury exempt articles where collecting the duty would cause expense and inconvenience to the Government disproportionate to the revenue. For decades that described occasional personal imports. It stopped describing reality once foreign sellers structured fulfilment to ship each order direct to a US consumer under the threshold.

CBP’s own figures in the June 2026 rule show the scale: over 1.36 billion de minimis shipments in fiscal year 2024, against 139 million in 2015. CBP connects the growth to three things: e-commerce, the 2016 increase of the cap to $800, and the voluntary Type 86 electronic entry test. At that volume, a channel with minimal data and no duty became the obvious route around Section 301 and other trade remedies, and CBP concluded that targeting for fentanyl, counterfeits and unsafe products was not workable on the data available.

The reasoning predicts where enforcement goes next: the follow-on rules are about data timing, data elements and bonds, not only duty.

What Low-Value Commercial Shipments File Now

For goods arriving by air courier, express consignment, ocean or truck, the de minimis exemption has been replaced by ordinary entry procedures. The split is by value. Shipments valued at $2,500 or less can use informal entry under 19 U.S.C. 1498(a)(1)(A), filed in ACE as entry type 11, except articles valued over $250 that are classified in Chapter 99, Subchapters III or IV, HTSUS, such as goods subject to Section 232 or Section 301 duties (19 CFR 143.21). Anything above $2,500, those Chapter 99 articles, and any shipment that is ineligible for informal entry because of quota, AD/CVD or other restrictions, goes as a formal type 01 consumption entry with a bond and a full entry summary. The mechanics of choosing between them are covered in our guide to formal vs informal entry.

Duty is assessed on every one of those entries at the applicable HTSUS rate plus any Chapter 99 additional duties, so a low-value shipment of goods covered by Section 232 or Section 301 carries those duties exactly as a full container would. The formal entry path also brings the CBP Form 7501 entry summary, liquidation and the full reasonable care standard.

For high-volume sellers the operational change is larger than the duty. Each shipment now needs an entry filer with the right to make entry, a correct 10-digit classification, a supportable value and, for formal entries, a customs bond on file. One structural response is bulk importation into a US warehouse under one formal entry, followed by domestic fulfilment, which replaces thousands of parcel-level entries with a single entry per container.

Postal Shipments and the New Postal Informal Entry

Mail followed a separate track because the postal network never had the electronic entry infrastructure that express carriers use. Between August 2025 and July 2026, postal items that would have qualified for de minimis were handled under an interim duty process set by Executive Order 14324, revised by Executive Order 14388, with duties collected through qualified third parties rather than a CBP entry.

The rule at 91 FR 37801 replaced that interim process on July 24, 2026 with a postal informal entry. It is available only for mail shipments valued at $2,500 or less and classifiable in HTSUS chapters 1 through 97. Merchandise subject to quota, AD/CVD orders, Chapter 98 or Chapter 99 duties, or PGA entry requirements, and goods claiming duty-free treatment under Chapter 98 or a free trade agreement, must use formal entry. For goods subject to PGA requirements or Chapter 98 or 99 duties, and for Chapter 98 or FTA duty-free claims, CBP gave the trade a delayed compliance window that ends on October 22, 2026; quota and AD/CVD goods had no such window.

Only a party with the right to make entry can file: the owner or purchaser of the goods, or a licensed customs broker designated by the owner, purchaser or consignee. The filer must hold a basic importation and entry bond, either a single transaction bond or a continuous bond, under new 19 CFR 145.15. CBP officers no longer prepare mail entry forms manually, and duties are no longer collected from addressees on delivery.

Alongside the rule, CBP announced a voluntary test of a new electronic informal entry type for mail, Entry Type 13, at 91 FR 38007, which began on September 22, 2026. It gives filers of mail shipments of $2,500 or less an electronic alternative to formal entry where the shipment would otherwise be pushed out of the postal informal process.

What Type 86 Was and Why CBP Ended It

Entry Type 86 was a voluntary electronic entry type CBP created in 2019 through a test under 84 FR 40079 for shipments claiming Section 321. Unlike a manifest release, it let goods subject to Partner Government Agency data requirements claim de minimis, with the PGA data transmitted in ACE. In January 2024 CBP tightened the test at 89 FR 2630 to require the entry data before or upon arrival, instead of up to 15 days after.

CBP’s assessment of the test is blunt. The June 2026 rule states that goods entered through the Type 86 test were often undervalued, misclassified or failed to comply with PGA requirements, and cites an estimate of 34.8 million violations in Type 86 entries in fiscal year 2024. Following Executive Order 14324, type 86 entries could no longer be used, and filers were required to use an alternate entry type for shipments valued at $800 or less.

Type 86 is therefore historical. Its design is not. The pre-arrival filing requirement, the final deliver-to party and the per-shipment PGA data are all reappearing in the type 11 and type 13 proposals, which is why programs that were built to file Type 86 cleanly are the easiest to adapt.

The Proposed Low-Value Shipments Rule

On October 8, 2026, CBP published a proposed rule titled Low-Value Shipments at 91 FR 64532, with comments due December 7, 2026. It is a proposal, not law, but it shows where the informal channel is heading now that former de minimis volume is moving into it.

Three proposals affect importers directly. First, type 11 informal entries would have to be filed electronically, upon or prior to the date of importation, rather than within the 15 days that 19 CFR 141.5 allows today. Second, the entry would have to identify the final deliver-to party where it differs from the ultimate consignee. Third, type 11 and type 13 filers would need a basic importation and entry bond, single transaction or continuous, with the 19 CFR 113.62 conditions, where today informal entries are bonded only in certain situations. The proposal would also remove the $250 limit that today keeps Chapter 99, Subchapter III and IV goods out of informal entry.

The bond proposal is the one with balance-sheet consequences. A business that has relied on informal entries precisely because they needed no bond would need to arrange one, and an importer that already holds a continuous bond should expect its amount to be reviewed once informal entries start drawing on it. A licensed customs brokerage team can model which flows would change entry type and what bond amount the new volume implies before the rule is finalized.

Compliance Checklist for Former De Minimis Flows

The adjustments below hold regardless of how the October 2026 proposal is finalized, because they follow from the suspension already in force.

Foreign sellers shipping direct to US customers should settle who acts as importer of record before goods move. A foreign company can make entry, but it needs a CBP-assigned identity and a bond, and those steps are covered in our guide for the non-resident importer. For the full sequence from arrival to liquidation, the customs clearance process guide sets out who does what at each stage.

• Re-cost every SKU that moved under Section 321 with the full duty stack, including Chapter 99 duties, and the merchandise processing fee on formal entries.
• Validate 10-digit HTSUS classifications. Errors that went unnoticed under a manifest release are now on an entry and subject to 19 U.S.C. 1592.
• Identify mail flows subject to PGA requirements, Chapter 98 or 99 duties, or Chapter 98 or FTA duty-free claims; from October 22, 2026 they must use formal entry or the Type 13 test. Mail subject to AD/CVD or quota already requires formal entry.
• Confirm a bond is in place for formal entries and postal informal entries, and size it for the added volume.
• Compare per-parcel entry with bulk importation and domestic fulfilment, using a documented landed-cost model rather than an assumption.

Frequently Asked Questions