Landed cost per US order, 2026 rules

A Portuguese ceramics shop selling a $199 piece into the United States now loses $29.59 on every order that cost it nothing in fees a year ago, and $11,836 across a month of 400 orders.

On 24 June 2026 CBP issued interim final rules indefinitely suspending the de minimis exemption for merchandise arriving through every mode other than the international postal network, with a delayed compliance date of 2026-10-22 for certain specified shipments. The $800 free pass is gone. Every low-value parcel now needs an informal or formal entry, an HTS code, duty, and a merchandise processing fee. For a Shopify or Etsy seller who has never touched a customs form, that is a line in the margin sheet which has always read zero and now does not.

Here is the arithmetic on one order. Customs value $120. Shipping and insurance $18. HTS duty rate 12%. Automated informal entry. Carrier disbursement fee $12.50. The piece sells for $199.

The order is $2,500 or less, so it is an informal entry. Duty is 12% of $120: $14.40. The FY2026 merchandise processing fee for an automated informal entry is a flat $2.69. The carrier charges $12.50 to disburse the duty. New cost per order: $29.59. Landed cost: $167.59.

The margin is where it bites. Gross margin was 30.65%. With $29.59 of entry costs on top, it is 15.78%. To earn the same gross profit the piece has to sell at $228.59. At 400 orders a month the gap is $11,836.

The shape of the loss changes with the shipment, which is why a single blog-post answer does not work. Send a $3,200 pallet and the order crosses the $2,500 ceiling into formal entry: the fee becomes 0.3464% of value, with a $33.58 floor, a $651.50 cap and a $4.03 surcharge when filed manually. At 6.5% duty that pallet owes $208 duty and $37.61 MPF, and with a $145 broker fee the new cost is $390.61 per entry.

Go the other way and the fee does not disappear. A $42 cosmetics order at a 0% duty rate owes no duty, but still owes the $2.69 informal MPF. At 1,500 orders a month that is $4,035 on a line whose duty rate is zero.

This is exactly the question a general AI assistant answers badly. Free duty calculators are more careful but stop at the duty percentage: no FY2026 fee table, no $2,500 informal-entry line, no carrier disbursement fee. Each omission makes the per-order number smaller than reality, and sellers price from that number.

US Landed Cost Checker 2026 runs the whole calculation in the popup, and on a free web page using the identical code. You type the customs value, HTS duty rate, shipping, broker fee, sale price and monthly order count, and it returns 9 numbers: entry procedure, duty, MPF, new cost per order, landed cost, margin before, margin after, monthly cost, and the price that restores your old profit. Nothing you type leaves the browser.

All of that is free: no key, no sign-up, no watermark, no limit. The $60 licence key does a different job rather than more of the same one. It exports every order you checked to CSV, so the working reaches your broker and your bookkeeper instead of living in a browser tab, and it sets alarms for the 2026-10-22 compliance date and the 1 October user-fee revision that moves the MPF floor and cap each fiscal year. $60 once, one key per person or team seat.

A licensed customs broker quotes $100 to $250 per single entry in 2026 to classify and price one shipment. The date to put in a calendar is 2026-10-22. After it, there is no lane left where the old answer is the right one.