Is Section 321 Still in Effect? De Minimis in 2026

Short answer: no. Duty-free de minimis treatment under Section 321 is suspended for every country of origin, and CBP made that suspension indefinite on 24 June 2026. The statute is still on the books but the exemption is not available, and Entry Type 86 is gone. If you are still planning around an $800 free threshold, the plan is out of date.

Section 321 of the Tariff Act of 1930 is the provision that let a shipment worth $800 or less enter the United States free of duty and free of the usual entry paperwork. For about a decade it was the quiet foundation of cross-border direct-to-consumer retail: ship each order individually from abroad, keep every parcel under the threshold, and pay nothing at the border. That is over, and it ended in stages rather than all at once, which is why there is still so much confusion about what applies today.

What happened, with dates

Four moments matter, and only the last two are still being absorbed:

• 2 May 2025 — Executive Order 14256 ended de minimis treatment for goods of Chinese and Hong Kong origin. At that point most importers treated it as a China problem.
• 29 August 2025 — Executive Order 14324 ended duty-free de minimis treatment for every country of origin. This is the date the exemption effectively stopped existing as a commercial strategy.
• 4 July 2025 — the One Big Beautiful Bill Act set a statutory repeal of the commercial de minimis provision, scheduled to take effect 1 July 2027. So the suspension is administrative today and becomes law later.
• 24 June 2026 — CBP made the suspension indefinite through two interim final rules, one covering non-postal shipments and one covering mail. This removed the remaining expectation that the exemption would simply lapse back into effect.

The practical upshot of the 2026 rules is that there is no longer a date to wait for. Earlier suspensions read like pauses; this one does not.

Entry Type 86 is gone too

Entry Type 86 was the electronic filing built specifically for Section 321 shipments — the mechanism that made high-volume, low-value clearance cheap enough to be worth doing. With the underlying exemption suspended, that entry type is no longer available. This matters more than it sounds: a lot of importers understood their process as "we file Type 86", not "we rely on Section 321", and so did not immediately connect the policy change to their own operation.

A commercial shipment that used to clear under Section 321 now generally needs a formal or informal entry, with the classification, valuation and recordkeeping obligations that come with it.

What it costs now, specifically

The duty itself depends on your Harmonized Tariff Schedule classification and on whether any additional tariff programs stack on top of the base rate. The part that catches people is not the duty — it is the federal user fees, because they have a floor.

On a formal entry the Merchandise Processing Fee is 0.3464% of customs value, but it cannot fall below a minimum, which is $34.58 for fiscal year 2027 (the figures are re-indexed for inflation each October). That minimum is the number that breaks the parcel-by-parcel model:

• One hundred separate $150 orders, entered individually, hit the MPF floor one hundred times: about $3,458 in processing fees on $15,000 of goods, before a cent of duty.
• The same $15,000 consolidated into a single entry pays the percentage instead: about $52.

Roughly a sixty-fold difference in fees, on identical merchandise, decided purely by how many entries you file. If the cargo arrives by vessel, add the Harbor Maintenance Fee at 0.125% of customs value, which has no cap at all. You can run your own numbers on our tariff calculator.

What importers are actually doing about it

Three responses have emerged, and they are not mutually exclusive:

Consolidate inbound, then fulfil domestically

Instead of shipping each order across the border, bring the inventory in as one bulk entry and hold it in the United States, fulfilling orders domestically from there. This pays duty and fees once, on one entry, and converts a border cost into a storage cost. It also shortens delivery times, which is usually the second reason brands make the move rather than the first. Our order fulfillment operation exists for exactly this shape of business, and ecommerce fulfillment covers how the order flow works.

Defer the duty with a bonded warehouse

If cash timing is the pressure rather than the total, goods can sit in a bonded warehouse under customs control, with duty deferred until they are withdrawn for consumption. Nothing is forgiven, but nothing is paid on inventory that has not sold yet. For importers who front-loaded stock ahead of the rule changes, this is often the difference that makes the position manageable.

Re-check the classification you never checked

When shipments entered free, the HTS line barely mattered. Now it decides the bill, and plenty of importers are discovering their products were never classified carefully in the first place. A misclassification is the importer's liability, so this is worth doing properly with a licensed customs broker rather than inherited from an old invoice.

What not to do

Two reactions make things worse. The first is splitting one shipment into several to get under a threshold that no longer exists — the exemption is suspended regardless of value, so this adds entries, and therefore adds MPF floors, for no benefit. The second is understating value on the entry. Valuation is the importer's declaration and the importer's exposure, and the penalty regime for it is considerably more expensive than the duty ever was.

Where this sits in the Northwest

For anyone importing through the Ports of Seattle and Tacoma, the shift from parcel-level clearance to consolidated entries is mostly a warehousing question once the broker work is done: the container has to be pulled before per-diem starts, stripped, and the freight has to land somewhere that can pick and ship individual orders. That is the chain we run from one building in Kent — drayage off the terminals, transloading out of the ocean box, bonded or regular storage, and fulfillment from the same floor. If demurrage is the immediate problem, the demurrage calculator will tell you what the clock is costing.

Common questions

Is Section 321 repealed or suspended?
Both, on different timelines. The exemption is administratively suspended now and indefinitely, and a statutory repeal of the commercial provision is scheduled for 1 July 2027. Either way it is not available to use today.

Does the $800 threshold still apply to personal shipments or gifts?
The duty-free de minimis treatment that Section 321 provided has been suspended across the board, and the 2026 rules cover mail as well as non-postal shipments. Personal and gift allowances are a separate part of the tariff schedule — ask your broker about your specific situation rather than assuming the old $800 figure carries over.

Can I still use Entry Type 86?
No. It was created for Section 321 shipments and is no longer available. Shipments need a formal or informal entry instead.

Will it come back?
Nothing in the current rules suggests a return date, and the direction of travel has been consistently one way since May 2025. Planning on its return is not a strategy.

This is an operational summary for importers, not legal or customs advice, and the dates above are what was in force as of 12 November 2026. Rules in this area have moved repeatedly — confirm anything you are about to act on with your licensed customs broker or CBP directly.