Regulations
Three things changed for EU importers this month, and a fourth lands on 12 August 2026. Two of the three took effect on 1 July. None of them is difficult to understand. All of them carry a conditional clause that decides whether they reach your product at all — and that clause is where sourcing decisions usually go wrong.
Last reviewed: 30 July 2026. Operational guide, not legal advice. Every figure below links to its source.
The short version: steel safeguard quotas were cut and the out-of-quota duty doubled to 50%. The customs duty relief for parcels under €150 is gone, replaced by a temporary flat charge. PPWR starts to apply on 12 August. In each case the headline is simple and the scope test is not.
The EU’s new steel trade regime was published in the Official Journal on 24 June 2026 and applies from 1 July 2026, replacing the safeguard measure that expired on 30 June. Two numbers matter: the annual tariff-free quota is set at 18.3 million tonnes across the covered product categories, and the out-of-quota duty is 50%, up from 25%.
The regulation also introduces a “melt and pour” requirement — a declaration of the country where the steel was first melted and cast into solid form, intended to stop material being routed through a third country to escape measures.
If you do not buy steel, do not stop reading here. This is the change most likely to reach an importer indirectly.
The practical question for your next RFQ is not “is this Chinese steel?” It is “can this supplier tell me, and evidence, where the steel was melted and poured?” A supplier who cannot answer that today will not be able to answer it under time pressure later.
Two things to confirm for your own case. Country-specific quota allocations are being set through a separate Commission implementing act, so the quota position for any given origin is not readable from the regulation alone. And the exact date from which the melt-and-pour declaration is operative is a detail we have not confirmed against the regulation text — check it before you build a supplier questionnaire around it.
From 1 July 2026, the customs duty relief for low-value consignments up to €150 has been abolished. In its place is a temporary flat customs duty of €3, running until 1 July 2028, after which normal duty rates apply according to the goods.
The detail that changes the arithmetic: Commission guidance indicates the €3 applies per item line in the customs declaration — and goods sharing the same tariff classification are generally declared on a single line. That is a materially different cost from €3 per physical unit, and it is worth confirming with your customs agent for your specific declaration pattern before you re-price anything.
Who this actually affects: if you sell direct-to-consumer from China into the EU, or your supplier ships samples and small replenishment orders as individual parcels, your landed cost model has changed. If you import in containers and clear in bulk, it has not.
Not verified: how the charge interacts with IOSS registration. Published summaries conflict on whether IOSS-collected VAT affects the duty position, so we are not stating a rule here. Confirm with your customs representative.
Regulation (EU) 2025/40 generally applies from 12 August 2026. The obligation that bites first is the Article 18 conformity gate before packaging is placed on the EU market, plus the Article 5(5) concentration thresholds for PFAS in food-contact packaging.
The part most people have wrong: the widely-quoted “40% empty space rule in August 2026” is not a thing. The empty-space provision is Article 24, the ratio is 50%, and it applies from 1 January 2030 or three years after the relevant implementing acts enter into force, whichever is later. Harmonised material-composition labelling is Article 12 and runs to 2028 on the same conditional logic.
Three details — article, number, date — all commonly misquoted together. We had them wrong on this site until this week, which is a reasonable indication of how far the error has travelled.
For the full breakdown, the supplier evidence pack and RFQ wording, see the PPWR 12 August 2026 importer checklist.
Look at what these three changes have in common. Almost every obligation is gated by a condition:
| Change | Headline | The clause that decides whether it reaches you |
|---|---|---|
| Steel safeguard | 50% out-of-quota duty from 1 July 2026 | Country quota allocation set by a separate implementing act; melt-and-pour origin, not supplier country |
| Parcel duty | €3 flat charge from 1 July 2026 | Per declaration line, not per unit; temporary until 1 July 2028 |
| PPWR empty space | Often reported as August 2026 | 1 January 2030 or three years after implementing acts, whichever is later |
| PPWR labelling | Often reported as August 2026 | 12 August 2028 or 24 months after implementing acts, whichever is later |
Importers do not usually get caught by the headline date. They get caught by acting on a headline date when the real obligation was conditional, deferred, or attached to a different article than the one they read about. Or by the reverse — assuming something is years away when the food-contact threshold applies in two weeks.
Before a purchase order commits money: check the exact article, the application date, and whether an implementing act still gates it. A duty rate or a deadline you have not opened the primary source for is not a fact you can plan against.
Stating this plainly is more useful to you than a longer article would be. The following were reported this month and are not included above, because we do not yet hold a primary-source citation for them:
Every claim in this article has a source below. Anything we could not source, we left out.
See also the SinoSource EU regulation tracker, the tariff and trade-measure tracker, or a worked example of how we separate evidence from conclusions in the sample decision report.
Use the tariff verification hub and duty risk assistant to prepare product-specific checks.