Section 321 De Minimis Is Suspended: What Importers Do Now

What changed, and when

De minimis entry did not lapse quietly. It was suspended by executive action, continued through a change of legal footing, and then written into regulation. The dates matter, because guidance published between them is often still describing a rule that had already changed.

• August 29, 2025. The de minimis administrative exemption under 19 U.S.C. 1321(a)(2)(C) is suspended for imports from all countries, under Executive Order 14324 (90 FR 37775), building on the earlier suspension for China and Hong Kong.
• February 20, 2026. Executive Order 14388 (91 FR 9433) continues the suspension for all countries, including shipments sent through the international postal network.
• June 24, 2026. CBP publishes two concurrent interim final rules implementing an indefinite suspension for all modes other than the postal network and an indefinite suspension for mail shipments, with a new postal informal entry process.
• July 24, 2026. Those rules take effect. This is the current operative instrument, and it is the one to cite rather than the 2025 order.
• July 1, 2027. Congress separately repealed the commercial de minimis exemption by statute, effective this date, so the statutory basis is scheduled to end regardless of the administrative suspension.

The suspension is indefinite rather than time limited. No restoration date has been announced, and planning that assumes one is planning on a hope.

The part most coverage gets wrong

On February 20, 2026 the Supreme Court decided Learning Resources, Inc. v. Trump, holding that the International Emergency Economic Powers Act does not authorize the President to impose tariffs. A great deal of commentary read that as the end of the trade measures of the previous year, and some importers concluded that de minimis was back.

It is not, and the reason is worth understanding because it will keep coming up. The decision did not address de minimis. On the same day, Executive Order 14389 ended the additional duties that had been imposed under that authority, while Executive Order 14388 separately continued the de minimis suspension. Those are two different legal tracks. One was struck down; the other was not, and CBP has since carried it into regulation on its own statutory authority.

The practical consequence: changes to the tariff program do not tell you anything about whether low-value parcels clear duty free. Check the de minimis instruments directly.

What still enters duty free

Section 321 of the Tariff Act of 1930 contains three exemptions, and only one of them was suspended. The other two are intact, which is the source of a lot of half-remembered advice:

• Bona fide gifts valued at $100 or less sent from a person abroad to a person in the United States, or $200 or less from certain island possessions, under 19 U.S.C. 1321(a)(2)(A).
• Personal and household articles valued at $200 or less accompanying a traveler, under 19 U.S.C. 1321(a)(2)(B).

Neither is a commercial import channel, and neither can be engineered into one. Structuring commercial shipments to look like gifts is not a strategy; it is a customs problem waiting to happen.

Separately, CBP’s postal rule establishes a new informal entry process for merchandise valued at $2,500 or less arriving through the mail environment. That is an entry procedure, not an exemption: the goods still owe duty.

What it means for cross-border fulfillment

An entire fulfillment pattern was built on this exemption: hold inventory in Mexico, Canada or the Caribbean, then send individual orders across the border as $800-or-less parcels that entered duty free. Providers marketed it as “Section 321 fulfillment”. Because the suspension applies to shipments from all countries, the border-adjacent warehouse no longer produces the duty-free outcome that justified it.

That does not make cross-border facilities useless. It makes them a logistics decision rather than a duty-avoidance one, and the two have very different economics. If a provider is still selling the duty saving rather than the transit time, ask them which instrument they are relying on and when they last checked it.

Country risk also moved, and it moved unevenly, which is the part worth getting right rather than reacting to. Three proclamations issued under Section 338 of the Tariff Act of 1930 impose an additional 50 percent ad valorem duty on specified Canadian-origin goods, effective August 19, 2026, covering dairy, alcoholic beverages and motor vehicles. Those are product-specific measures, not a blanket duty on everything Canadian, so for most ecommerce catalogues the direct exposure is nil. The point is narrower and more useful: positioning inventory in a neighbouring country is no longer a stable way to avoid duty, because both the de minimis position and the country-level measures have moved repeatedly through 2026. Verify the position for your own goods and origin before committing inventory, rather than inheriting a structure someone designed under different rules.

What importers can do now

None of these recover the exemption. They are how importers absorb its loss without giving up margin they did not have to.

1. Reprice against landed cost, not unit cost

The first casualty of the suspension is any pricing model that treated duty as zero. Rebuild landed cost per SKU with duty, fees and brokerage included, then decide what to reprice, what to absorb and what to discontinue. Brands that did this early found their exposure concentrated in a small number of SKUs.

2. Move to consolidated entry deliberately

Parcel-by-parcel entry was cheap when it was free. It is not the efficient shape now. Bulk import into a domestic fulfillment center, clear once, and ship domestically to the customer. For most direct-to-consumer catalogues this is cheaper per order than cross-border parcel entry even before the duty change.

3. Get a customs broker involved in the design

Entry type, classification and valuation now carry real money. A broker consulted at the design stage, rather than at the border, is the difference between a workable structure and a series of corrections.

4. Revisit classification and country of origin

Duty rates turn on the tariff classification and the origin of the goods. Both are worth a proper review rather than an assumption inherited from a freight forwarder years ago, because both are legitimate levers and neither requires changing what you sell.

5. Re-run the sourcing question honestly

Alternative sourcing regions are worth evaluating, but the current tariff program reaches most trading partners, so treat “move production and the problem goes away” as a claim to test rather than a plan.

3PLs for a post-de-minimis supply chain

The useful question is no longer who runs a border-adjacent warehouse. It is who can take bulk imported inventory, handle domestic fulfillment at your volume, and give you clean data on what each order actually costs to deliver. These providers are on our network and work in that shape:

ShipBob

• Operates an extensive U.S. fulfillment network, so inventory can be imported in bulk and distributed domestically.
• Advises on inventory placement across nodes, which is the lever that matters most once duty is a fixed cost.

Cart.com

• Domestic fulfillment alongside inventory and commerce tooling, for brands consolidating operations after a cross-border model stops paying.
• Scales with brands expanding U.S. operations.

Manifest

• Austin-based, serving direct-to-consumer and B2B, with kitting, labeling and custom packaging.
• Supports 1,000 to 100,000 monthly orders, a useful range for brands re-shoring fulfillment in stages.

GoBolt

• Fulfillment and last-mile delivery across North America, for brands that still need cross-border capability as a logistics choice rather than a duty strategy.
• End-to-end visibility across inventory and delivery.

If you want the comparison done properly against your own volumes and catalogue, our matching service will do it with you. You can also browse the full 3PL directory or read what a 3PL actually does first.

How the Section 321 model used to work

Kept for context, in the past tense, because a lot of live contracts and internal playbooks still refer to it.

Section 321 programs allowed shipments valued at $800 or less, excluding goods such as cigarettes, cigars and alcoholic beverages, to enter free of duty. The threshold was $200 until the Trade Facilitation and Trade Enforcement Act of 2015 raised it to $800. The attraction was three-fold: no duty, faster clearance for low-value shipments, and lighter customs paperwork.

That combination produced the cross-border fulfillment pattern described above, most visibly for apparel and other finished goods moved from Asia into a Mexican facility and then across the border order by order. Mexico’s textile tariff increases and its tightening of the IMMEX program put the first real pressure on that model. The U.S. suspension of de minimis ended it.

Common questions