For years, shipments valued at $800 or less could enter the United States without formal entry and without duty. It was written into law as an administrative convenience, and over time a lot of supply chains quietly organized themselves around it. Direct-to-customer parcels. Sample shipments. Replacement parts. Anything small enough to slip under the line.
That ended on 24 June 2026. Customs and Border Protection published an interim final rule suspending the exemption for every mode except international mail, and a companion rule covers the mail. Both are in force now.
What actually changed
- Non-postal shipments under $800 now require formal entry in ACE, filed by an authorized filer.
- Formal Entry Type 01 applies to commercial shipments over $2,500, and to anything subject to additional duties, quotas, or other regulation.
- The suspension is indefinite. It lifts only when CBP determines the exemption no longer jeopardizes revenue or facilitates unlawful importation.
The duty itself is often not the painful part. The filing is. A shipment that used to move without a broker now needs one. The cost of that entry does not shrink with the value of the goods. On a $600 shipment, the paperwork can cost more than the tariff.
Nobody saw it coming. The winners just got faster at doing the math.
What distributors are actually doing about it
The operators handling this well are not the ones with better forecasts. Trade policy has outrun everyone’s planning cycle for two years. The ones who tried to predict it mostly guessed wrong.
What separates them is speed of recalculation. When a rule lands, they can answer three questions the same afternoon: which SKUs are affected, what the new landed cost is, and which customer prices need to move. Companies that can answer those in an afternoon absorb a change like this. Companies that need three weeks and a spreadsheet archaeology project eat the margin instead.
That gap has almost nothing to do with tariff expertise. It is a question of whether landed cost, supplier terms, and customer pricing live somewhere they can be queried together, or whether they live in four systems and one person’s head.
The play to run this week: the Tuesday Test
Pull last Tuesday’s routes. Put what was ordered, what actually came off the truck, and what got billed side by side. Most owners can’t do it without going digging, and the gap between those three columns is usually bigger than any tariff change. If the pull takes more than ten minutes, that’s the finding. See how the delivery day works in Workd.
Sources
- Indefinite Suspension of the De Minimis Exemption for Merchandise Arriving Through All Modes Other Than the International Postal Network · U.S. Customs and Border Protection, Federal Register, 24 June 2026
- Monthly Wholesale Trade Survey · U.S. Census Bureau