US de minimis shipments passed a billion a year before a crackdown

The signal

In consumer & society and retail trade policy, a customs exemption meant for the occasional traveller's parcel became, over a decade, a route for a much larger volume of low-value goods. A White House fact sheet dated 13 September 2024 states that shipments entering the United States under the de minimis exemption, which allows parcels valued under $800 to enter largely free of duty and with minimal paperwork, grew from approximately 140 million a year to over one billion a year over the preceding decade. The same notice states the administration would move to exclude shipments containing goods covered by existing Section 201, 301 or 232 tariff actions from the exemption, and require more detailed tariff-classification data at entry.

The evidence

US Customs and Border Protection's own trade data, as retrieved on 16 September 2026 from its e-commerce statistics page, a living document CBP updates on an ongoing basis, states that de minimis shipments totalled about 1 billion bills of lading valued at $54.5 billion in fiscal year 2023, rising to about 1.36 billion bills of lading valued at $64.6 billion in fiscal year 2024. The two documents measure different things over different periods, a decade-long trend in the fact sheet and a one-year change in the CBP figures, but they point the same direction: continued growth in shipment count even after the policy debate had become public. Neither document names Shein or Temu specifically; the fact sheet refers only to several China-founded e-commerce platforms, so any connection to a particular company is this outlet's own inference from those platforms' publicly known reliance on direct-to-consumer parcel shipping, not a claim either document makes by name.

Timeframe and confidence

The CBP figures are official customs statistics with named fiscal years, giving high confidence in the year-on-year direction. The White House figure is a round, decade-scale comparison stated in a policy document rather than a footnoted statistical series, so its precision should not be overstated beyond roughly 140 million to over a billion. This is an editorial reading: rising shipment counts alongside an announced policy response describe a threshold being reached, not yet its resolution, since the announced rulemaking had not been finalised as of the fact sheet's date.

What would change the reading

A finalised CBP rule excluding tariff-covered goods from de minimis eligibility, followed by a measurable drop in shipment counts, would show the policy response changed the underlying volume. Continued growth in shipment counts after any rule took effect would suggest the exemption's scale problem persisted despite the announced action.

• Did de minimis shipment volume keep rising, plateau, or fall after fiscal year 2024?
• Was the proposed rulemaking to exclude tariff-covered products finalised, and on what timeline?
• How much of the shipment growth came from a small number of large platforms versus a broad base of many small shippers?

The customs data and the policy notice together document a rapid rise in a once-marginal import channel and a government response still at the announcement stage when this record was compiled.

Source trail

1. U.S. Customs and Border Protection: E-Commerce and De Minimis trade datawww.cbp.gov · Source publication: not established · Retrieved 2026-09-16

   States de minimis (Section 321) shipments rose from about 1 billion bills of lading valued at $54.5 billion in fiscal year 2023 to about 1.36 billion bills of lading valued at $64.6 billion in fiscal year 2024.

2. FACT SHEET: Biden-Harris Administration Announces New Actions to Protect American Consumers, Workers, and Businesses by Cracking Down on De Minimis Shipments with Unsafe, Unfairly Traded Productsbidenwhitehouse.archives.gov · Source publication: 2024-09-13 · Retrieved 2026-09-16

   States de minimis shipment volume grew from about 140 million a year to over one billion a year over the preceding decade, and announces planned rulemaking to exclude certain tariff-covered products from the exemption.

Read across the evidence

• A pandemic e-commerce jump partly reverted within one quarter
• Amazon's own filings show its warehouse footprint nearly doubling
• An industry survey priced 2023's returns at $743 billion

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