Türkiye's exemption from the EU's €3 parcel duty has a catch: you give up IOSS

On 1 July the European Union abolished its €150 duty-free threshold for parcels and replaced it with a flat €3 customs duty on every low-value consignment from outside the bloc. Two months on, the Turkish trade press has settled on a comfortable summary: Türkiye is exempt. It is, in the way that a door is open if you have the right key, know which lock it fits, and are willing to pay the locksmith. This is what the exemption actually requires, and when it is worth taking.

What changed on 1 July

The €3 is charged per tariff line, not per parcel. Five identical T-shirts in one box are one line and €3; a T-shirt and a watch are two lines and €6. It applies to B2C consignments valued at €150 or less, is non-refundable even if the goods come back, and runs until 1 July 2028, when the EU's customs reform is due to replace it with normal tariffs by product. The Commission counted about 5.9 billion low-value items entering the EU in 2025, 91% of them from China, and this is the instrument it chose to slow that down.

A second charge is still coming: a €2 handling fee per declaration line, pencilled in for 1 November but not yet adopted, plus mandatory structured product identifiers from the same date. France, Italy and Romania have added national fees of their own in the meantime.

What Türkiye negotiated

Goods in free circulation in Türkiye have entered the EU duty-free since the 1996 Customs Union, on an A.TR movement certificate. The €3 regime as drafted would have swept sub-€150 Turkish parcels in with everyone else. The Ministry of Trade took it to the Commission and secured this: a Turkish-origin (or Turkish-free-circulation) item shipped with an A.TR and declared on an H1 customs declaration keeps its preferential treatment and pays no €3. To make that workable at parcel scale, the Ministry built a simplified procedure that lets express carriers issue A.TRs on sub-€150 shipments in bulk.

That is a real win. It is also narrower than it sounds.

The condition nobody puts in the headline

The Commission's own guidance attaches two requirements to the preference. The parcel must be declared on the full H1 form — not the stripped-down H7 super-reduced dataset that virtually all low-value e-commerce uses — and VAT on it must not be collected through IOSS.

Read that second one again. IOSS is the mechanism that lets a non-EU seller charge EU VAT at checkout and remit it monthly, so the parcel clears with nothing owed on arrival. It is the reason a Turkish brand's German customer pays one price and gets a box, not a customs notice. Give up IOSS and import VAT is collected at the border instead: either you ship DDP and your carrier bills you the VAT plus a brokerage fee, or the customer is asked for the VAT plus the carrier's disbursement fee — typically €5 to €15 — at the door.

So the exemption's true cost is not zero. For a single-line €40 parcel to Germany, the choice is roughly:

• IOSS + H7: €3 duty, VAT already paid at checkout, no fees on arrival.
• A.TR + H1, no IOSS: €0 duty, €7.60 VAT collected on import, plus a per-parcel H1 clearance and disbursement charge that will exceed €3 on almost any express lane.

The exemption wins clearly when a parcel carries several tariff lines (three lines is €9 of duty), when you already ship DDP through a carrier with cheap H1 clearance, or when you are a marketplace seller whose platform is the deemed importer and handles the declaration anyway. It loses for the single-item, IOSS-registered, DDU shipper that makes up most Turkish micro-export volume.

Two things still in motion

The Ministry is negotiating two follow-ups with the Commission: extending A.TR recognition to the H7 declaration, which would let sellers keep the light dataset and IOSS while claiming the preference, and an exemption from the €2 handling fee. Neither is agreed. If the H7 route lands, the tradeoff above largely disappears and the exemption becomes what the headlines already say it is. Until then, the cheaper path for most sellers is to pay the €3 and keep IOSS.

What to do this month

Line-count your catalogue. If your average parcel is one tariff line, stay on IOSS/H7 and absorb €3. If it is two or more, price the A.TR/H1 route with your carrier — ask specifically for the H1 clearance fee and how VAT is collected.

Ask your carrier whether it has switched on the simplified A.TR. Not all have; some will only offer it on DDP products.

Watch 1 November. The €2 fee and the product-identifier mandate change the arithmetic again, and the identifier requirement applies regardless of which declaration you use.

Don't confuse the two years with the long run. After July 2028, Customs Union goods on an A.TR are duty-free under the normal tariff anyway, at whatever declaration standard exists then. The exemption is a bridge, and the bridge currently has a toll on it.

Türkiye's share of the EU's roughly $50 billion in annual e-commerce imports is about $2 billion. The Customs Union is the structural advantage no Chinese or American seller has; the question the last two months have answered is that it only pays out for sellers whose operations are built to claim it.