Executive Order 14324 suspended duty-free de minimis treatment globally effective August 29, 2025, and postal traffic to the US fell by over 80%, according to the Universal Postal Union (UPU). Most major operators have since resumed, including Deutsche Post, India Post, Japan Post, Royal Mail, Canada Post and Australia Post, but typically on Delivered Duty Paid or business-only terms. No verified count of operators still suspended exists as of August 2026.
What happened on August 29, 2025?
Executive Order 14324 suspended duty-free de minimis treatment globally, effective August 29, 2025. De minimis is the threshold below which imported goods enter without duty collection, and its removal meant every inbound parcel, regardless of value, became subject to duty.
The operational problem was not the duty itself but the collection mechanism. Postal channels had no established way to collect duty on low-value shipments at scale, because the entire point of de minimis was that no collection was required. Removing it created an obligation with no infrastructure behind it.
Under the new arrangement, duties must be collected either by the carrier or by a US Customs and Border Protection (CBP) approved "qualified party" holding an Activity Code 1 bond. That bond requirement is the gate: an operator without access to a qualified party has no compliant way to move goods.
How large was the disruption?
The UPU reported that postal traffic to the US fell by over 80%, with 88 postal operators fully or partly halting US-bound parcels. That is a near-total collapse of the postal channel into the world's largest consumer import market, occurring within days.
The suspensions were not uniform. Some operators halted all US-bound goods, others suspended only certain product categories or only consumer, as opposed to business, shipments. This distinction matters when reading resumption announcements, because "resumed" rarely meant a return to the pre-August 2025 service.
Worth knowing: Postal parcels and commercial express parcels were affected differently. Express carriers already operated customs clearance and duty collection infrastructure, so their exposure was to cost and complexity rather than to whether shipment was possible at all. The postal channel had the harder problem.
Which operators have confirmed resumption, and on what terms?
The table below lists only resumptions that are documented in the sources cited. Where a date or term is not documented, it is left blank rather than estimated.
| Operator | Resumption date | Terms |
|---|---|---|
| DHL and Deutsche Post (Germany to US and Puerto Rico) | September 25, 2025 | Postal Delivered Duty Paid, business customers only, EUR 2 per shipment |
| India Post | October 15, 2025 | Resumed, specific terms not documented here |
| Japan Post | April 2026 | Resumed after roughly eight months, with pre-payment of duties |
| Royal Mail | Not documented | Resumed, date and terms not documented here |
| Canada Post | Not documented | Resumed, date and terms not documented here |
| Australia Post | Not documented | Resumed, date and terms not documented here |
The Deutsche Post case is the most fully documented and is a useful template for what resumption looks like in practice. Per DHL Group's announcement, the Germany to US and Puerto Rico postal goods service resumed on September 25, 2025 for business customers, using Postal Delivered Duty Paid (DDP) at EUR 2 per shipment. Delivered Duty Paid means the sender pays duties and taxes upfront rather than the recipient paying on delivery.
Japan Post's own service notice confirms that acceptance resumed on April 14, 2026, with duty pre-payment required for covered goods through a CBP-approved qualified party. The pattern across confirmed cases is consistent: service can return under new duty-payment mechanics rather than on the same terms that applied before the US de minimis suspension.
The general position as of August 2026: most major operators are back, but on DDP-only or business-only terms with added fees. Treating "resumed" as equivalent to "as before" is the most common planning error here.
How does DDP collection now work through the UPU system?
The UPU launched its first Delivered Duty Paid solution in October 2025, integrated into the Customs Declaration System (CDS), the UPU platform used by 176 postal operators to exchange electronic customs data. Integrating DDP into CDS meant operators could adopt duty pre-payment through infrastructure they already used, rather than building it individually.
The model works through commercial partners rather than the UPU itself calculating or collecting duty. Zonos was the first landed-cost and qualified-party partner, providing both the duty calculation and the CBP-approved qualified party role with the Activity Code 1 bond. Per the UPU, BoxC, Hurricane, iCustoms/JamesCB, MyDutyCollect and SafePackage were in the certification pipeline.
How many operators are actually live on it?
Sources conflict on this point, and it is worth stating plainly rather than picking a number. The UPU's own article describes two operators live with about a dozen implementing. Secondary reporting gives 23 designated operators live as of February 11, 2026.
The figures are not necessarily contradictory if they were measured at different times, but the discrepancy is large enough that neither should be quoted without attribution. If you need a number for a business case, cite the source and date alongside it, and note that the other figure exists.
Current count unavailable: We could not verify how many postal operators remain suspended for US-bound goods as of August 2026. The UPU's figure of 88 operators halting service refers to the period immediately following the August 29, 2025 suspension, not the present, and should not be used as a current count.
What should a merchant check before quoting a US postal service?
Do not rely on a general "resumed" status. Verify the specific service, from your specific origin, for your specific sender type, on the day you are quoting. Resumptions have been partial and conditional often enough that the operator-level headline is not sufficient.
Work through these before publishing a US postal shipping option:
- Confirm the exact service is open, not just the operator. Many operators resumed some services and not others. Check the named service you intend to use.
- Check whether consumer shipments are included. The Deutsche Post resumption was business customers only. If you dispatch as a business this is fine; if you rely on consumer-facing counter services, it may not be.
- Establish who acts as the qualified party. Duty must be collected by the carrier or a CBP-approved qualified party holding an Activity Code 1 bond. Know which applies to your route.
- Price the DDP fee into the quote. Where a per-shipment fee applies, such as the EUR 2 on the Germany to US service, it is a real cost per parcel and should be in your shipping price, not absorbed silently.
- Confirm duty pre-payment mechanics. Japan Post's resumption requires pre-payment of duties. Understand at what point in your process duty is calculated and paid, and what happens if the calculation is wrong.
- Check your product categories. Suspensions were sometimes category-specific. Confirm your goods are within the resumed scope.
- Verify the date of whatever you are reading. This area has changed repeatedly since August 2025. A six-month-old status page may be wrong in either direction.
What this means for your customer-facing messaging
Delivery expectations for US-bound postal shipments should be set more conservatively than pre-2025 norms, because the customs step is new and its performance is not yet well established. Clear tracking through the customs phase reduces support contacts more than any other single measure, since "held at customs" is the status customers most often escalate.
Merchants running multiple postal origins into the US will find the operational picture easier to manage with unified tracking across operators, which is the kind of coverage Ship24 provides across its courier and postal integrations. The underlying requirement, visibility into the customs stage, applies whatever tooling you use.
Where does this leave cross-border postal shipping to the US?
The postal channel to the US has reopened but has fundamentally changed shape. What was a low-friction, low-cost route for small parcels is now a duty-paid channel with per-shipment fees, business-sender restrictions in some corridors and a mandatory customs data and collection step. The volume that fell by over 80% will not all come back at the old economics, because the old economics no longer exist.
The structural change worth understanding is who now bears the duty. DDP moves the cost and the administrative burden to the sender, which is better for the customer experience and worse for the merchant's margin on low-value goods. For items where duty and the DDP fee approach a meaningful share of the item price, the postal route may simply no longer make commercial sense, and that is a pricing decision rather than a logistics one.
The honest summary as of August 2026 is that the direction is clear and the detail is not. Most major operators are back, DDP through the UPU Customs Declaration System is the emerging standard mechanism, and the certification pipeline is widening. But the number of operators live on UPU DDP is disputed, the number still suspended is unknown, and terms differ enough by corridor that route-by-route verification remains necessary. Anyone telling you the situation has fully normalised is working from less information than they think.
Sources & methodology
- DHL Group DHL Parcel resumes postal goods shipping from Germany to the US and Puerto Rico Primary carrier source.
- Universal Postal Union (UPU) UPU Delivered Duty Paid rollout with partners Primary source.
- Japan Post Resumption of acceptance of mail to the United States Primary postal-operator source.
- Universal Postal Union (UPU) FAQ on US customs changes and international postal services Primary source.
