A CBP proposal published Oct. 8 would require electronic filing, bonds and pre arrival entry for every shipment valued at $2,500 or less, with a government estimated price tag near $9.3 billion
WASHINGTON, OCT. 13, 2026
U.S. Customs and Border Protection has proposed the most sweeping overhaul of low value import procedures in modern customs practice, and the comment clock is now running.
The agency published a notice of proposed rulemaking in the Federal Register on Oct. 8, 2026, at 91 FR 64532, under docket USCBP-2026-0298 and RIN 1685-AA38. The proposal would rewrite informal entry requirements for shipments valued at $2,500 or less, including international mail, by amending parts 113, 128, 141, 143 and 145 of Title 19 of the Code of Federal Regulations. Comments are due Dec. 7, 2026. Nothing in the proposal is in effect today.
The substantive changes are three. Electronic filing would become mandatory for informal entries, replacing the current option to file on paper. Entry would have to be made upon or before the date of importation rather than within 15 calendar days after arrival. And every informal entry filer would need a basic importation and entry bond, either single transaction or continuous, with goods not released absent a bond meeting the requirements of 19 CFR 113.62.
CBP’s own regulatory analysis puts the net present value cost of the package at roughly $9.30 billion over 2026 through 2035 at a 3 percent discount rate, or about $7.72 billion at 7 percent.
What changes, in detail
The proposal reworks the existing entry type 11 informal entry and creates a new entry type 13 for informal mail.
For entry type 11, the filing deadline moves from within 15 calendar days after landing to upon or before importation, a change that removes the buffer logistics providers have long used to assemble data after a shipment is already in motion. Filing becomes electronic. Filers must identify a final deliver to party and address whenever that differs from the ultimate consignee. Goods classified under Chapter 99, Subchapters III and IV of the Harmonized Tariff Schedule and valued above $250 but not above $2,500 would become eligible for informal entry, which lifts an existing $250 ceiling that had forced many tariff affected shipments into formal entry. And a consignee that is not the owner or purchaser would be required to appoint a licensed customs broker as importer of record.
Entry type 13 is new. It would replace the current postal informal entry process, which runs on a monthly international mail duty worksheet and a pay.gov payment, with an electronic entry filed through a CBP authorized electronic data interchange system by the importer of record or a broker, on or before importation. The owner or purchaser may self file in the Automated Commercial Environment. A consignee that is neither owner nor purchaser must use a licensed broker as importer of record.
Two new data elements are central to the mail proposal. Filers must supply the identity and address of the shipper or sender, and the Universal Postal Union S-10 tracking number. Carriers would have to report that tracking number on the inward manifest so CBP can confirm arrival dates.
The consequence for mail that is not entered is severe. Mail shipments valued at $2,500 or less that are not properly entered within 15 days of importation would be treated as voluntarily abandoned and handled by the U.S. Postal Service, which may destroy the shipment or return it to the sender. Bona fide gifts would keep their existing entry procedures.
CBP has noted that the voluntary entry type 13 process for postal shipments, announced in June 2026, remains available, and a separate entry type 13 test was scheduled to begin Sept. 22, 2026.
On bonds, the agency proposes a $1,000 minimum for liquidated damages per breach of listed bond conditions, or the value of the merchandise if that is higher, with certain conditions excluded from the minimum. CBP’s analysis observes that the current single transaction bond minimum is $100 and could rise to $1,000. The proposal would also give CBP broader discretion to require formal entry on a blanket basis, for example by importer, by manufacturer or by product category.
The enforcement case CBP makes
The agency grounds the proposal in an enforcement gap in the postal channel, where it receives less data and receives it later than in other modes.
The most striking figure in the rulemaking record concerns seizures. In fiscal 2024, CBP recorded 277.8 narcotics seizures per million postal de minimis shipments, against 15.8 per million for entry type 11 shipments. The agency also reported that only about 67 percent of postal shipments went through any entry process between September 2025 and May 2026, leaving roughly a third of the channel outside the process entirely.
The volumes involved explain why this matters. Between September 2025 and May 2026, CBP processed approximately 24.4 million postal entries and 52.5 million entry type 11 entries. Annualized, that is roughly 32.7 million postal and 70.1 million entry type 11 shipments, or more than 100 million low value consignments a year. The agency’s projections for 2026 through 2035 apply growth rates observed from 2021 through 2024 to those figures.
CBP argues it needs earlier data for risk targeting, admissibility screening and revenue protection. Under the current regime, a postal shipment can arrive before the agency knows anything useful about it, and the monthly worksheet process for mail duties gives CBP no transaction level visibility at all.
How the United States got here
The proposal is the administrative sequel to the end of de minimis.
For decades, Section 321 of the Tariff Act allowed shipments valued at or below a threshold, most recently $800, to enter free of duty and with minimal data. That exemption underwrote the direct to consumer cross border e commerce model, in which goods ship individually from a foreign warehouse to a U.S. household and never pass through a U.S. distribution center.
Executive Order 14324 suspended de minimis treatment for all countries effective Aug. 29, 2025. A Federal Register notice published June 24, 2026 made the suspension indefinite for merchandise arriving through all modes other than the international postal network. And under the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, de minimis treatment terminates by statute on July 1, 2027.
The suspension solved the duty question but not the process question. Tens of millions of parcels a year that had moved on a manifest clearance suddenly needed an entry, and the informal entry rules they fell into were written for a different era and a far smaller volume. The Oct. 8 proposal is CBP’s attempt to build a process that can carry the load, with bonds to secure the revenue and electronic data to make targeting possible.
The timing also interacts with the broader tariff environment. The provision allowing Chapter 99 goods valued between $250 and $2,500 to use informal entry is a direct accommodation to the fact that most imports now carry a Chapter 99 heading of some kind, whether Section 232, Section 301 or another program. Without that change, the $250 cap would have pushed an enormous volume of modest shipments into formal entry.
Reactions
Customs practitioners have focused on the bond requirement as the provision with the greatest structural consequence.
Diaz Trade Law, writing on Oct. 9, observed that bond costs and sureties’ underwriting of importers would become part of every low value shipment, and expects sureties to scrutinize financials and compliance history more closely than they do today. That is a meaningful shift. A surety that writes a continuous bond for a company moving 50,000 parcels a year is taking on a different risk profile than one writing for a traditional importer with a hundred container entries, and the underwriting market has limited experience pricing it.
The firm’s practical guidance to clients was to model the proposal against their own shipment profiles, obtain bond pricing from sureties, confirm importer of record status across their flows, test their data capture against the new required elements, and consult carriers and brokers before the comment deadline. It also noted that it had raised concerns at the small business listening session held during the 2026 CBP Trade Summit.
The broker requirement for non owner consignees has drawn separate attention. Under the proposal, a consignee that is not the owner or purchaser of the goods must appoint a licensed customs broker as importer of record. In the postal and e commerce channels, a very large share of shipments move to consignees who are neither owner nor purchaser in the customs sense. Requiring a licensed broker in that position inserts a regulated intermediary, and a fee, into transactions that previously had neither.
Analysts covering small e commerce sellers have been blunter about the consequences for that segment. Commentary on the end of de minimis has consistently identified small sellers and newer importers as the parties least able to absorb fixed compliance costs, because those costs do not scale down with order size. A $15 parcel cannot carry a bond premium, a broker fee and an entry filing charge and remain a viable transaction.
CBP, for its part, has asked for comment on precisely the points practitioners are raising. The agency solicited input on the cost of the earlier filing deadline, on its effect on shipping times by mode, and on the cost of returning undeliverable mail.
Economic impact
The agency’s own $9.30 billion net present value figure, at a 3 percent discount rate over 2026 through 2035, is the headline number, and it is worth unpacking what sits inside it.
CBP’s processing costs are estimated at about $7.95 per Form 3461 and $15.89 per Form 7501. Postal Service programming costs are put at $12 million to $20 million, with a midpoint of $16 million, plus roughly $1 million a year in operations and maintenance. The Postal Service would also need storage capacity for 80 percent or more of import volume, at lease rates of $25 to $50 per square foot, to handle shipments held pending entry. The analysis acknowledges possible deadweight loss from reduced imports.
That last item is the one with the largest macroeconomic footprint and the least precise estimate. If a meaningful share of the roughly 100 million annual low value shipments becomes uneconomic once bond, broker and filing costs are loaded on, the transactions do not simply shift to another channel. Some of them stop happening. The welfare loss falls on U.S. consumers who no longer buy the goods and on U.S. small businesses that sourced inputs or inventory through those channels.
There is an offsetting effect on the other side. Domestic retailers and U.S. based fulfillment operations have argued for years that the de minimis exemption gave direct shipping foreign sellers a structural cost advantage over companies that imported in bulk, paid duty and held U.S. inventory. Closing the process gap removes the remainder of that advantage. Firms that built U.S. distribution infrastructure stand to benefit from a level playing field, and third party logistics providers positioned to offer bulk import and domestic fulfillment to foreign sellers have a commercial opportunity.
The revenue picture is less clear than it might appear. Duty collection on low value shipments was already enabled by the de minimis suspension. What the proposal adds is process integrity, meaning fewer shipments escaping assessment and better data to support it. The incremental revenue is real but is a second order effect of enforcement rather than a new tax.
For the logistics sector, the pre arrival filing requirement is the operational pressure point. Express carriers already file before arrival as a matter of course, and their systems can accommodate it. The postal channel cannot, at least not today. Reconstructing a flow in which the Postal Service, foreign posts, importers and brokers exchange transaction level data before a parcel lands is a multi year systems project, and the proposal’s abandonment rule, under which unentered mail may be destroyed or returned after 15 days, puts a hard consequence on any failure in that chain.
What importers and U.S. businesses should do
The comment deadline of Dec. 7 is the first order of business for any company with material low value import volume. Rulemaking records matter, and the agency has specifically invited data on costs and transit time effects. Companies that can quantify the impact on their own flows have a better argument than those offering general objections.
Beyond commenting, several steps are worth taking now regardless of how the final rule reads.
Determine importer of record status across every low value flow. The requirement that non owner, non purchaser consignees use a licensed broker as importer of record will reclassify a large number of existing arrangements. Companies should know which of their shipments fall into that category before the rule is final, because the fix involves contracts and broker relationships that take time to put in place.
Price bonds. Continuous bond pricing for high volume, low value importers is not a mature market, and sureties will want financial statements and compliance history. Starting that conversation in October is better than starting it after a final rule with a near term effective date.
Test data capture against the new elements. Shipper or sender identity and address, the UPU S-10 tracking number for mail, and the final deliver to party where it differs from the ultimate consignee are the three additions. Companies whose order management systems do not capture those fields today need to know how long it will take to add them.
Model the all in landed cost per parcel. The relevant question for most sellers is not whether compliance is possible but at what order value it stops making sense. That threshold, once calculated, drives product mix, minimum order value policies and whether to shift to bulk import with domestic fulfillment.
Review carrier and broker agreements for who bears the new obligations and the new costs. Pre arrival filing shifts timing risk onto whoever holds the data, and the abandonment rule for unentered mail creates a loss exposure that current contracts are unlikely to address.
Exporters selling into the United States from abroad should recognize that the burden of this rule falls on the U.S. side of the transaction but the commercial consequence falls on both. Foreign sellers that have relied on direct shipment to U.S. consumers should evaluate whether a U.S. importing entity, a bulk import model or a third party logistics arrangement is now the better structure. Those changes take quarters, not weeks.
The wider context
The low value proposal arrives in a crowded quarter for trade compliance. Importers are simultaneously working through refunds of tariffs collected under the emergency authority the Supreme Court struck down in February, with CBP reporting roughly $136.6 billion in potential and certified refunds in its administrative program as of Oct. 2. They are absorbing Section 301 forced labor duties of 10 to 12.5 percent that USTR finalized in July across 60 economies accounting for 99.4 percent of U.S. imports. They are preparing for Section 232 tariffs and minimum import prices on polysilicon and solar products effective Dec. 4. And they face an enforcement posture in which the Department of Justice Fraud Division has named tariff evasion and import fraud as core priorities and CBP has sharply expanded its use of CF-28 Requests for Information driven by data mining.
Against that backdrop, a rule that adds a bond, an earlier filing deadline and two new data elements to every parcel might look like a minor administrative matter. It is not. The low value channel is where the largest number of transactions and the largest number of inexperienced importers sit. Rules written for a hundred million parcels a year touch far more American businesses than rules written for container freight.
CBP has set the comment deadline at Dec. 7, and the statutory termination of de minimis on July 1, 2027 gives the agency an external timetable. Companies that wait for a final rule before beginning to adapt will have, at most, a few months to implement changes that involve sureties, brokers, carriers, foreign posts and their own order systems. The realistic planning assumption is that something substantially resembling this proposal takes effect, and that the work of getting ready for it starts now.
Open questions in the rulemaking
Several points in the proposal are likely to generate the bulk of the comment record.
The first is the pre arrival filing requirement as applied to mail. Express consignment operators control their own networks end to end and can require data from shippers as a condition of carriage. Posts cannot. A foreign post accepting a parcel from a consumer in a small town has limited ability to compel the transaction level data a U.S. entry requires, and no commercial relationship with the U.S. importer of record. Whether the UPU S-10 tracking number and sender identity are sufficient to bridge that gap, or whether the practical result is a large volume of mail that simply cannot be entered, is the central technical question in the proposal.
The second is the abandonment rule. Treating unentered mail as voluntarily abandoned after 15 days, with destruction or return to sender as the outcome, gives CBP a clean disposition path and gives the Postal Service a storage problem it has quantified at 80 percent or more of import volume. It also creates consumer harm that is invisible in the regulatory analysis. A household that ordered a item and never receives it, because an entry it never knew was required was not filed, experiences a loss the cost estimates do not capture.
The third is the $1,000 minimum for liquidated damages. Applied to a breach involving a parcel worth $40, a $1,000 minimum is a penalty an order of magnitude or more above the value at risk. CBP has excluded certain conditions from the minimum, but the proposal does not scale the figure to shipment value in the general case. Expect comment on proportionality.
The fourth is the blanket formal entry discretion. Giving CBP authority to require formal entry by importer, manufacturer or product category is an efficient enforcement tool and also a substantial grant of discretion with no stated standard or appeal mechanism in the proposal. Trade associations are likely to ask for criteria.
The bottom line
CBP has proposed to treat low value imports like imports. That is a defensible policy position, and the seizure data the agency has put on the record makes the enforcement case difficult to dismiss. The disagreement will be about cost, proportionality and whether the postal channel can physically do what the rule asks of it.
For U.S. businesses, the planning posture is straightforward even while the rule is unsettled. The direction of travel has been clear since de minimis was suspended in August 2025 and confirmed by statute for July 2027. Low value cross border shipments are becoming formal transactions with data, bonds, intermediaries and costs attached. Companies whose economics depend on that not happening have until Dec. 7 to say so on the record, and until the final rule to build something that works under the new terms.