Tax Observatory › European taxation › Italy’s €2 charge on non-EU parcels: third postponement, now to 1 December 2026

Italy’s €2 charge on non-EU parcels: third postponement, now to 1 December 2026

Article 4 of decreto-legge No 162 of 17 September 2026 — a decreto-legge is an emergency government decree with immediate force of law — moves the application of the charge on low-value consignments arriving from third countries to 1 December 2026. The provision does not postpone a starting date: it excludes the charge for goods imported before that date. That wording raises a question which no administrative guidance has yet resolved, namely the treatment of the sums paid in the first half of the year. And for importers the calendar does not begin on 1 December.

Businesses importing small consignments from third countries had 1 October 2026 in their calendars. That date no longer holds: decreto-legge No 162 of 17 September 2026, published in the Gazzetta Ufficiale, the Italian official gazette, on 17 September and in force from the following day, has moved it to 1 December 2026. This is the third postponement since the measure was introduced. For anyone who has to plan, however, the Italian date is not the first on the list, and the charge is not the only levy falling on those parcels.

What the charge provides, in the words of the statute

The charge originates in the Budget Law for 2026, Italy’s annual budget statute. Article 1(126) of Law No 199 of 30 December 2025 introduces, “in compliance with European Union legislation on customs and taxation, a charge towards covering the administrative costs connected with the customs formalities relating to low-value consignments arriving from third countries”. Its scope is delimited by two cumulative requirements: consignments of goods “arriving from countries outside the European Union” and with a “declared value not exceeding 150 euro”.

Paragraph 127 fixes the amount and the moment of collection: the charge “is equal to 2 euro for each consignment referred to in the same paragraph and is collected by the customs offices upon the definitive importation of the goods forming the subject of the consignments”. Paragraph 128 adds that the charge “applies consistently with the provisions of Regulation (EU) No 952/2013”, that is, of the Union Customs Code.

That is the whole of the legislation. One clarification is necessary, because a citation error recurs even in official documents: circular No 37/2025 of the Agenzia delle dogane e dei monopoli, the Italian customs and monopolies agency, and paragraph 5 of circular No 17/2026 refer in their subject line to “paragraphs 126 to 129”, but paragraph 129 of the Budget Law concerns something else entirely, namely the re-determination of excise duty on petrol and diesel. Circular No 4/2026 correctly cites paragraphs “126 to 128”.

The legislature did not set a starting date of its own, did not identify the person liable, did not provide for payment arrangements, did not lay down a penalty regime of its own and did not refer the matter to any implementing decree; in the absence of an express starting date, the measure entered into force with the Budget Law, on 1 January 2026. The entire operating framework has been built by circular.

None of these gaps, however, is the stated reason for the postponements. That reason is written into the provisions which order them, and it is the adaptation of the Agency’s IT systems.

Three postponements in nine months: the full chain

The starting point is 1 January 2026, and not in a theoretical sense. Circular No 37/2025 of 30 December 2025 stated that the charge “is due for all imports of a declared value not exceeding 150 euro carried out from 1 January 2026”, specifying in a footnote that this means declarations for release for free circulation registered from that date. Circular No 1/2026 of 7 January reshaped the timetable, with a transitional period until 28 February and a recapitulative declaration to be filed by 15 March 2026, and the move to the ordinary regime from 1 March. For those months the charge was in fact assessed and paid.

The first postponement in legislation comes with Article 5(1) of decreto-legge No 38 of 27 March 2026, in force from 28 March: “Without prejudice to the work of adapting the IT systems carried out by the Agenzia delle dogane e dei monopoli, the charge referred to in Article 1(126) of Law No 199 of 30 December 2025 does not apply to the consignments, indicated therein, of goods imported before 1 July 2026”. Conversion Law No 88 of 22 May 2026 — the conversion law is the statute by which Parliament confirms a decreto-legge — left the article unchanged.

The second postponement is the work of Article 15 of decreto-legge No 107 of 26 June 2026, which replaces “1 July 2026” with “1 October 2026”. Conversion Law No 152 of 7 August 2026 intervened twice on that article: it specified that the amendment concerns Article 5, “paragraph 1,” of decreto-legge No 38 of 2026, and it corrected the quantification of the cost to public finances, taken from “euro 61.2 million euro” — the text of the decree contained a typographical error — to “61.25 million euro for the year 2026”.

The third postponement is the one of these days: Article 4 of decreto-legge No 162 of 17 September 2026 replaces “1 October 2026” with “1 December 2026” and quantifies the resulting cost at 40.8 million euro for 2026. It is worth noting that Article 5 of decreto-legge No 38 of 2026, the first of the three, contained no quantification of cost and no financial cover: the six months covered by that postponement were not recorded among expected revenue.

The provision does not postpone a starting date: it excludes a period

This is the technical point which deserves a close look, because it does not match the way the story is usually told. None of the three decrees says “the charge applies from…”. All of them operate inside a single sentence, that of Article 5(1) of decreto-legge No 38 of 2026, which provides for the non-application of the charge to consignments “of goods imported before” a given date; the later amending provisions did no more than replace that date.

The consequence is that the exclusion has never been written as the suspension of a payment deadline, but as an objective non-application to a period of imports. And since the first decree already, on 28 March 2026, excluded imports made before 1 July, from that moment the exclusion also covered the months for which the Agency had required the charge to be entered in the accounts and paid. Those are January and February, with the recapitulative declaration of 15 March, and the months which followed: revenue code 159 — the codice tributo, the code which identifies the charge — in ordinary declarations, and periodic entry in the accounts with payment by means of a bolletta, a customs payment document, in simplified declarations, which is the channel through which most small consignments pass.

Hence a question which no administrative guidance has yet addressed: can the sums paid on those imports be reclaimed? On the wording, there are two arguments. The first is the drafting of the provision itself, which denies the application of the charge rather than deferring its payment. The second is internal to the same decree: Article 1(2) of decreto-legge No 38 of 2026 contains, for an entirely different measure, an express clause under which “no tax refunds or adjustments to the tax previously assessed shall be made in any event”. No clause of that kind appears in Article 5; in Article 1 the legislature wrote one on the same day, in the same instrument.

The arguments to the contrary exist, however, and should be stated. An amending provision which replaces a date is normally read as operating from its own entry into force, and nothing in the three decrees expressly provides for retroactive effect. Article 5 carries no financial cover, which sits awkwardly with the idea that refunds flow from it. And in nine months, across five circulars and two conversion laws, the question does not appear to have been raised by the administration.

The position is therefore of differing strength depending on the period. For imports from 28 March to 30 June 2026 the exclusion was already written into a provision in force when the payment was made, and the claim is the most defensible. For those from 1 January to 27 March 2026 the payment was made under rules which at the time knew of no exclusion, and the position is more exposed. It remains an argument, not an established fact: no administrative guidance has confirmed it, there appear to be no reported judgments on the point, and the outcome of an application cannot be predicted.

If a claim is to be made, the time limit is the main problem

The natural instrument, for sums assessed in a declaration, is the post-clearance review of the declaration on application by the party concerned, governed by Article 42 of Annex 1 to Legislative Decree No 141 of 2024 (a decreto legislativo is a statute adopted by the government under powers delegated by Parliament). Paragraph 8 of that article provides that, at the end of the procedure, the Agency “shall proceed to recover the additional customs dues or to make a refund”. Paragraph 4 of the same article provides that the procedure “shall be concluded in any event within the time limits set by Union customs legislation”.

And it is here that the classification of the charge, which looks like a theoretical question, becomes the practical problem. Customs dues, diritti doganali, are in Italian law a category wider than duty alone. If the charge is a customs due, the time limit in Article 121(1)(a) of the Union Customs Code applies: three years from the date of notification of the customs debt. If it is not — and that is the Agency’s position — the route is the refund of sums not due, of a levy which on the prevailing analysis retains a tax character, with the shorter time limit of two years from payment or, if later, from the day on which the ground for the refund arose, laid down in Article 21(2) of Legislative Decree No 546 of 1992.

The operational consequence is clear and does not depend on which of the two views is preferred: the shorter of the two time limits is the one which has to be observed, and for payments made in the first half of 2026 the calculation needs to be done now. One further element deserves attention: Article 96(13) of Annex 1 to Legislative Decree No 141 of 2024 provides that administrative penalties do not apply and that no confiscation is to be ordered where the post-clearance review of the declaration is initiated on application by the declarant, on condition, however, that the application is filed before the declarant has become formally aware of any access, inspection or verification, or of the commencement of any administrative assessment activity or of criminal proceedings.

The same article then provides that interest on any additional customs dues is payable only if the application is filed more than ninety days after the release of the goods. It is a regime designed for the opposite case — a declarant who realises that too little was declared — but it indicates that filing an application voluntarily does not, in itself, expose the declarant to penalties. As a matter of procedure, the time limit indicated by the Agency for post-clearance review on application by the party concerned still stands: three years from the date of acceptance of the declaration to be corrected. That time limit does not replace the shorter one within which the refund must in any event be claimed: both have to be observed, and the effective constraint is the second.

Finally, what is claimed from the Agency has to be kept separate from what is settled with the contractual counterparty. Businesses which have passed the 2 euro on to the recipient have two distinct relationships: the one with customs, for recovery, and the one with their own client, which is governed by the contract. If the charge was shown on the invoice as a component of the consideration, removing it goes through the credit note under Article 26 of Presidential Decree No 633 of 1972, with the time limits which that provision sets; if it was handled as a disbursement made in the name and on behalf of the recipient, the route is different. This is not an accounting detail: it affects the taxable amount for VAT of the service supplied.

The calendar does not begin on 1 December

For distance sellers into Italy there are three dates to watch, and the first in time does not concern the charge.

1 November 2026 brings a Union declaration requirement which has nothing to do with the charge but affects the same flows: the indication of product identifiers in declarations relating to distance sales of imported goods, optional from 1 July 2026 and mandatory from 1 November 2026 under Commission Delegated Regulation (EU) 2026/1022. Anyone who has not yet adapted their data formats has a few weeks.

16 November 2026 is the expiry of the sixty-day period for the conversion into law of decreto-legge No 162 of 2026. If it is not converted, its provisions would lose effect from the outset, and the 1 October deadline would become applicable again; Article 77, third paragraph, of the Italian Constitution does, however, allow the two chambers of Parliament to regulate by statute the legal relationships which arose on the basis of a decree which has not been converted. That is why it is prudent to keep a record of below-threshold consignments declared from 1 October onwards.

On 1 December 2026, finally, the charge becomes applicable. From that date, and subject to any further extension, it will be assessed directly in the declaration, with automatic generation of the fixed amount of 2 euro and collection through the deferred payment account, the conto di dilazione: this is a different arrangement from the periodic entry in the accounts with a bolletta provided for simplified declarations in the first half of the year, and it was introduced by circular No 17/2026, in partial amendment of No 37/2025. Businesses which built their process around the earlier arrangement have to reconfigure it, not simply switch it back on.

For transactions straddling the date, the reference point is neither the order date nor the delivery date. The statute speaks of goods “imported” and paragraph 127 anchors collection “upon the definitive importation”; circular No 4/2026 clarifies that definitive importation means release for free circulation as defined in Articles 201 et seq. of the Union Customs Code, and the Agency’s practice has translated the test into the registration of the declaration. Goods declared on 28 November and released in December are not subject to the charge; goods which arrived on 27 November but were declared on 1 December are.

Three different levies, and one does not yet exist

In public debate three distinct levies are treated as though they were one.

The first is the national charge: 2 euro per consignment, Italian revenue, application deferred to 1 December 2026.

The second is already law in force, and it is a Union measure. Council Regulation (EU) 2026/382 of 11 February 2026 abolished the duty relief for consignments of negligible value and provided that “from 1 July 2026 until 1 July 2028, a customs duty of EUR 3 per item shall apply to a consignment whose intrinsic value does not exceed a total of EUR 150, instead of the relief which has been abolished”.

The quotation should not stop there, however, because it is precisely in what follows that the regulation sets the conditions: the flat-rate duty applies if the importation is exempt from VAT under Article 143(1)(ca) of Directive 2006/112/EC — that is, if the sale is handled under the Import One-Stop Shop scheme, the IOSS — or if the goods are contained in postal consignments. Outside those two cases the Common Customs Tariff remains applicable, with the duty proper to the tariff heading: the bill may turn out to be considerably higher than 3 euro, or nil for headings carrying a zero conventional rate.

The third is not yet law. The new Union Customs Code, which provides for a Union handling fee on goods sold at a distance, was approved by the European Parliament at second reading on 16 September 2026 and the act was signed the same day, but as at the date of this article it does not appear to have been published in the Official Journal of the European Union. The amount is not written into the regulation: it will be fixed by a Commission act, and the article governing its application provides that collection is to begin ten days after that act enters into force. Anyone quoting a figure today is reporting an estimate, not a rule.

The two levies which already exist do not exclude one another, but their scope is not the same. The national charge is the wider: circular No 37/2025 declares it due “irrespective of the type of commercial transaction underlying the consignment” and applies it to consignments to final consumers, to consignments to commercial operators and “to consignments sent by one private individual to another, even where they contain goods of a non-commercial nature”. The flat-rate duty, by contrast, concerns only distance sales in the two cases described above: it does not apply to a parcel sent by one private individual to another.

Outside the charge are goods carried by passengers and released for free circulation on an oral declaration, which do not fall within the notion of a consignment, and re-importations under temporary exportation, for which circular No 4/2026 excludes procedure codes 61, 63 and 68. For ordinary declarations the same circular indicates procedures 40, 42 and 45 as affected: release for free circulation with a destination in another Member State is therefore included as well.

What it costs: a worked example and the VAT treatment

Take an order of 40 euro, two items, sold at a distance by a non-EU supplier and handled under the IOSS. The flat-rate duty is 3 euro per item, so 6 euro. From 1 December 2026, 2 euro of charge is added. On VAT, however, the two levies follow opposite rules, and this is the point on which mistakes are most frequent.

Article 69 of Presidential Decree No 633 of 1972 measures the tax by reference to the value of the imported goods “increased by the amount of the customs dues payable”: the notion which counts is the wider one of customs dues, not that of duty. According to circular No 4/2026 the charge, which the circular traces to Article 52 of the Union Customs Code, “is not to be regarded as a customs due and must not be included in the taxable amount for VAT purposes”: those 2 euro therefore remain outside the taxable amount in every case.

The duty of 3 euro per item, by contrast, follows the regime of the transaction: circular No 17/2026 states that under the IOSS it “is exempt from VAT on importation and must not be included in the taxable amount”, whereas outside the IOSS the VAT is due on importation and calculated on a value which the duty helps to form. In the example, therefore, the 6 euro do not enter the taxable amount; for the same order handled outside the IOSS and outside the postal channel the calculation has to be redone twice, because the duty changes and with it the taxable amount. In the example the total levy thus goes from 6 to 8 euro, none of which enters the taxable amount for VAT.

On the classification of the charge it is worth knowing that the question is not closed. The Agency’s position has to be followed, because it is that of the administration which collects, but it coexists with a definition pointing the other way: Article 27(1) of Annex 1 to Legislative Decree No 141 of 2024 defines customs dues as “all those dues which the Agency is required to collect by virtue of obligations arising from European Union law or from statutory provisions”.

Classification determines inclusion in or exclusion from the taxable amount for VAT, the time limit for claiming a refund, the collection procedure and the penalties applicable. Some of the references, moreover, are due to change shortly: Articles 26 and 69 of Presidential Decree No 633 of 1972 are repealed with effect from 1 January 2027 by the consolidated VAT statute, Legislative Decree No 10 of 19 January 2026; from the same date, by virtue of a separate consolidating statute, Legislative Decree No 546 of 1992 is repealed, and with it Article 21 referred to above.

Who pays, and what is at stake for those who do not

Paragraph 126 does not identify the person liable. That gap is filled by circular No 37/2025, which starts from Article 77(3) of the Union Customs Code and concludes that “for the charge under consideration the debtor is the declarant and, in the case of indirect representation, also the person on whose behalf the customs declaration is made”. Under indirect representation, therefore, the obligation falls on both and the Agency may turn to either: that is why a freight forwarder cannot treat the matter as a problem for the client alone. Under direct representation, by contrast, the debtor is the person represented.

On penalties the rules governing the charge are silent: paragraphs 126 to 128 provide for none and refer to no regime. That does not mean, however, that nothing applies. Article 96(4) of Annex 1 to Legislative Decree No 141 of 2024 provides for a penalty of 150 to 1,000 euro, applicable once only even where the declaration covers several goods items. It replaces the proportionate penalty under paragraph 1 and so presupposes one of the infringements under Articles 78 to 83. The precondition is that the declaration fails to state accurately and completely all the elements prescribed for carrying out controls, while the border duties declared — diritti di confine, a narrower category within customs dues — are equal to or higher than those assessed: it is a penalty not measured by reference to those duties, and it applies precisely where no further amount of them is due.

Whether the omission of revenue code 159 falls among those elements is a question which no provision and no circular has clarified, and it has to be treated as open. That the question was open from the outset is suggested by the Agency itself, which in circular No 1/2026 thought it necessary to state that the absence of that code did not constitute, during the transitional period, “an independent ground for suspending the release of the goods or for applying penalties for failure to pay or late payment”.

The practical consequence of non-payment, in any event, concerns collection first of all: the charge is debited to the immediate payment account, the conto di debito, or to the deferred payment account, and insufficient funds in that account prevent the release of the goods. For businesses handling volume, sizing the guarantee is the adjustment which takes longest, and it needs to be redone on current volumes before the start on 1 December.

In practice

Until 30 November 2026 the charge is not to be assessed, not to be shown at checkout and not to be passed on: on that there is no uncertainty. The starting date entered in systems or communicated to customers has to be updated to 1 December, anchored to the registration of the declaration and not to the date of the document; and it should be updated in the knowledge that this is not a final deadline.

As regards the past, the review has to cover three items and not one: the ordinary declarations of the first half of the year bearing revenue code 159; the recapitulative declaration filed by 15 March 2026 for the January–February period, with the related bolletta; and the periodic entries in the accounts for simplified declarations from March to June, which for e-commerce businesses are as a rule the largest item and which anyone searching only for code 159 will not find. Once that review is done, the decision whether to file an application, and for which period, is one to be taken with the figures to hand and in the knowledge that this is an arguable position, not a certain claim: the segment from 28 March to 30 June is the most defensible, and the time limits are running.

The technical adjustments should not be dismantled but reconfigured: the revenue code remains 159, what changes is the way the charge will be assessed and collected, and the guarantee needs to be reviewed. Finally, the mandates given to freight forwarders should be reread, because the form of representation determines who is the debtor and how any passing-on is treated.

One methodological warning remains. As at the date of this article, the lists of circulars and notices of the Customs Directorate show no published act giving effect to the new deadline, and the Agency’s most recent document on the point still indicates 1 October; consolidated legislative databases, too, may not yet have incorporated the amendment. Anyone checking those texts without going back to the Gazzetta Ufficiale of 17 September 2026 will find information which has been superseded. And since in nine months the start date has moved three times — the Agency itself wrote “subject to any further extensions” — it is worth building processes which will hold up both if the deadline slips again and if 1 December really does arrive.

Frequently asked questions

I paid the charge on consignments in April 2026: can I claim it back?

It is a tenable position, not a certain claim. The provision which defers the charge does not postpone its payment: it excludes its application to goods imported before a given date, and for April 2026 that exclusion was already in force when the payment was made. No administrative guidance has addressed the question, however, and there appear to be no reported judgments on the point. The instrument is the post-clearance review of the declaration on application by the party concerned; the time limit depends on how the charge is classified and, on the more prudent analysis, is two years from payment or from the moment when the ground for the refund arose. It is better to quantify and decide than to wait.

Does the 2 euro charge apply to purchases already made on non-EU platforms?

That depends on when the goods are imported, not on when the order was placed. The charge does not apply to goods imported before 1 December 2026; for goods imported from that date onwards it does apply, even if the purchase was made earlier. The relevant moment, according to the Agency’s practice, is the registration of the declaration for release for free circulation.

Does the charge replace the European flat-rate duty of 3 euro?

No, they are distinct levies and can be cumulative, but their scope is not the same. The duty of 3 euro per item applies from 1 July 2026 to distance sales of imported goods handled under the IOSS or contained in postal consignments; outside those cases the ordinary tariff duty applies. The 2 euro charge has a wider scope, because it also covers consignments between businesses and consignments between private individuals, on which the flat-rate duty does not operate. The VAT treatment differs too: according to the Agency the charge never enters the taxable amount on importation; the duty enters it outside the IOSS and is excluded from it within the scheme.

Sources

Article 1, paragraphs 126, 127 and 128, of Law No 199 of 30 December 2025 (2026 Budget Law), Ordinary Supplement No 42/L to the Gazzetta Ufficiale, General Series, No 301 of 30 December 2025, text read in the Gazzetta Ufficiale.

Article 5(1) and Article 1(2) of decreto-legge No 38 of 27 March 2026, Gazzetta Ufficiale, General Series, No 72 of 27 March 2026, in force from 28 March 2026, converted, with amendments, by Law No 88 of 22 May 2026, Gazzetta Ufficiale, General Series, No 117 of 22 May 2026, which did not amend Article 5.

Article 15 of decreto-legge No 107 of 26 June 2026, Gazzetta Ufficiale, General Series, No 146 of 26 June 2026, converted, with amendments, by Law No 152 of 7 August 2026, Gazzetta Ufficiale, General Series, No 192 of 20 August 2026, which inserted into it the reference to paragraph 1 and corrected the quantification of the cost to 61.25 million euro for the year 2026.

Article 4 of decreto-legge No 162 of 17 September 2026, Gazzetta Ufficiale, General Series, No 216 of 17 September 2026, in force from 18 September 2026, with cost estimated at 40.8 million euro for the year 2026.

Agenzia delle dogane e dei monopoli, Customs Directorate, circular No 37/2025, ref. 885355 of 30 December 2025: scope of application, definition of consignment, person liable, revenue code 159, value and threshold for ordinary and simplified declarations, periodic entry in the accounts and guarantees.

Agenzia delle dogane e dei monopoli, circular No 1/2026, ref. 10031 of 7 January 2026: transitional period until 28 February 2026, recapitulative declaration by 15 March 2026, clarification on release of the goods and on penalties.

Agenzia delle dogane e dei monopoli, circular No 4/2026, ref. 90362: nature of the charge under Article 52 of the Union Customs Code and exclusion from the taxable amount for VAT, data formats affected, procedures 40, 42 and 45, exclusion of procedure codes 61, 63 and 68, rules for several consignments in the same declaration and for several individual items in the same consignment.

Agenzia delle dogane e dei monopoli, circular No 17/2026, ref. 354938 of 25 June 2026: regime of the Union flat-rate duty, VAT treatment under and outside the IOSS, and direct assessment in the declaration with collection through the deferred payment account, “subject to any further extensions”.

Agenzia delle dogane e dei monopoli, circular No 19/2026, ref. 468276 of 21 July 2026, on voluntary compliance: three-year time limit from acceptance of the declaration for post-clearance review on application by the party concerned, and conditions for the relief from penalties under Article 96(13).

List of circulars and notices of the Customs Directorate, consulted on 20 September 2026: the most recent published circular is No 19/2026 of 21 July 2026 and no act giving effect to the new starting date appears.

Council Regulation (EU) 2026/382 of 11 February 2026 amending Regulation (EC) No 1186/2009, Articles 1 and 2, read on EUR-Lex.

Commission Delegated Regulation (EU) 2026/1022, on product identifiers in declarations relating to distance sales of imported goods, mandatory from 1 November 2026.

Regulation (EU) No 952/2013 of the European Parliament and of the Council of 9 October 2013 laying down the Union Customs Code, Articles 5, 52, 69 to 76, 77(3), 105, 121(1)(a), and 201 et seq.

European Parliament, procedure 2023/0156(COD) on the new Union Customs Code: approval at second reading and signature of the act on 16 September 2026; as at the date of this article the act does not appear to have been published in the Official Journal of the European Union. Article 20 of the text adopted governs the Union handling fee, the amount of which is left to a Commission act, and Article 287 sets its application at ten days from the entry into force of that act.

Articles 26 and 69 of Presidential Decree No 633 of 26 October 1972, text in force at 20 September 2026 (Normattiva, the official consolidated-legislation database); both appear as repealed by Legislative Decree No 10 of 19 January 2026, with effect from 1 January 2027.

Articles 27(1), 42(4) and (8), and 96(4) and (13) of Annex 1 to Legislative Decree No 141 of 26 September 2024, in the text in force at 20 September 2026.

Article 21(2) of Legislative Decree No 546 of 31 December 1992, on the time limit for a refund claim; the decree appears as repealed by Legislative Decree No 175 of 14 November 2024, with effect from 1 January 2027.

Article 77, third paragraph, of the Italian Constitution, on the loss of effect of a decreto-legge which is not converted and on the power of the two chambers of Parliament to regulate the relationships arising from it.