The Import One-Stop Shop lets you collect EU VAT at checkout on consignments of €150 or less, and report it in one monthly return instead of registering in every member state. Your buyer gets no surprise VAT bill or handling fee at the door, and the parcel clears faster.
Source: IOSS import scheme, Art. 369l Dir. 2006/112/EC (the €150 per-consignment ceiling and the excise-goods exclusion live here; Art. 143(1)(ca) is the related import VAT exemption). Confirm against the Official Journal.
Since 1 July 2026 the €3 flat duty is tied to IOSS or postal consignments. A courier parcel without an IOSS number may fall outside the €3 and onto the full tariff. So IOSS is no longer only about a smoother doorstep — it may be the thing keeping your duty at €3 rather than ~12%.
Source: Reg. 2026/382 scope; see the €3 page.
If your business has no establishment in the EU, you generally cannot register for IOSS directly — you appoint an EU-established intermediary (a fiscal representative) who registers you, files your monthly returns, and shares liability for the VAT. Two caveats worth knowing: an EU fixed establishment lets you register without one, and the intermediary exemption for a handful of countries is origin-conditional — it turns on where the goods ship from, so a business in an exempt country shipping from China still needs an intermediary. It is an ongoing paid relationship — worth it above a certain volume, overkill below it.
Source: Non-EU sellers without an EU fixed establishment appoint an EU-established IOSS intermediary — Avalara / VAT IT / Taxually, 2025–2026. The intermediary exemption is origin-conditional (Art. 369m(1)(c)); not simply “Norway only.”
The €150 ceiling is not permanent. Council Directive (EU) 2025/1539 abolishes the €150 IOSS limit from 1 July 2028 and makes IOSS mandatory for deemed-supplier marketplaces. So a decision to skip IOSS today should be revisited before 2028 — the thing that makes it optional now has a known expiry, landing in the same window as the wider reform.
Source: Council Directive (EU) 2025/1539: €150 IOSS ceiling abolished from 1 Jul 2028; IOSS mandatory for deemed-supplier marketplaces. Confirm against the Official Journal.
The IOSS check weighs your volume and channel and tells you plainly whether to get one now, later, or not at all — including the duty-rate angle, not just the doorstep one.
Open the tool →Every claim on this page is sourced to the regulation, not to a summary of it. DutyVault verifies against primary EU texts (EUR-Lex, DG TAXUD). None of this has been reviewed by a customs lawyer, and consistency with a text is not the same as being right about your exact situation — it is a starting point that makes a lawyer’s hour cheap.
Verified 14 Jul 2026 · rules current to the €3 interim regime (1 Jul 2026 – 1 Jul 2028) and the March 2028 reform.