IOSS for Kickstarter Creators: What UK Founders Must Do

There are two €150 thresholds in EU import rules. One was abolished on 1 July 2026. The other, the one IOSS actually runs on, wasn’t, and most of what’s been written since has quietly merged the two into a single number that doesn’t exist.

That matters if you’re a UK creator with EU backers, because the confusion sits exactly where the money is. I’m an official Kickstarter Expert Partner, and this is the subject founders raise latest and should have raised first. Usually a week after the funds land, when a pallet is in a warehouse and the budget is spent.

General information rather than tax advice, by the way, and your accountant should sign off anything specific to your campaign.

IOSS and Kickstarter: what actually applies now

IOSS is the Import One Stop Shop. It’s a VAT mechanism, and only a VAT mechanism. You register once, charge the destination country’s VAT at the point of sale, and file one monthly return covering all 27 member states instead of registering in each.

The scope is distance sales of imported goods in consignments not exceeding €150, and that ceiling still stands. The European Commission’s addendum to its VAT e-commerce explanatory notes, covering 1 July 2026 to 30 June 2028, describes IOSS in exactly those terms throughout.

What changed on 1 July 2026 was something else. Council Regulation (EU) 2026/382 deleted the €150 customs duty relief. Different tax, different €150.

In its place the EU brought in a temporary flat customs duty of €3, running until 1 July 2028, when the Customs Data Hub is meant to arrive and normal tariffs apply to everything. The Commission’s guidance notes that end date could slip if the infrastructure isn’t ready.

So the honest answer to “does IOSS still work” is yes, unchanged, for VAT, up to €150. You now have a small duty on top that you didn’t have in June.

One caveat I’d rather flag than bury. There’s a live proposal to remove the €150 IOSS ceiling itself so the scheme can cover higher-value imports, and as of early October 2026 it was still under discussion, with some member states resisting on fraud grounds. Nothing has changed yet. If you’re reading this long after the date on it, check rather than assume.

The €3 trap: per declaration line, not per parcel

This is the detail that wrecks budgets, and almost everybody reads it wrong first time.

The €3 is not per parcel. The European Commission’s customs guidance says it applies per declaration line, regardless of how many items sit in that line, where an item means goods sharing a tariff classification, description and, where relevant, origin.

Read that again with a reward tier in your head. One product, one classification, one line: €3. Main unit plus a carry case plus a set of printed cards, three classifications: €9. Same box, same backer, same courier, triple the duty.

Creators assume consolidating rewards into one parcel collapses the charge. It doesn’t. The Commission is also explicit that artificially grouping or splitting shipments to reduce the line count isn’t allowed, so the clever workaround you’re forming right now has already been thought of.

The practical consequence is that bundles and add-ons cost more to land in the EU than a single-SKU reward does, for reasons that have nothing to do with weight. That belongs in your tier arithmetic from the start, which is what the reward pricing calculator is for, and there’s more on the shipping line itself in my post on what to charge for Kickstarter shipping and when.

One more is coming. The Commission has announced a Union handling fee expected from November 2026 at the earliest, separate from the €3 and, on its published position, outside the scope of VAT. No amount settled when I wrote this.

Your three options for EU backers

Strip away the acronyms and you have one decision with three answers.

Register for IOSS yourself. As a non-EU seller you’ll generally need an EU-established intermediary to register on your behalf, and that intermediary takes on liability for the VAT, which is why they charge for it. Your registration then sits in their member state. There’s a narrow carve-out for countries with a VAT mutual assistance agreement with the EU, applied inconsistently between member states, so don’t plan around it. Doing this yourself suits you if you expect continuous EU sales after the campaign, because then you’re buying an asset rather than a one-off.

Use your fulfilment partner’s IOSS number. This is what most creators do and I think it’s usually right. Fulfilment companies handling crowdfunding volume hold their own registration, declare your EU parcels under it, and invoice you for the VAT alongside the pick and pack. No intermediary to appoint, no monthly return, nothing to close down afterwards. Get the number in writing and establish who files the return, because “we handle IOSS” covers several quite different arrangements.

Ship DDU and let backers pay on delivery. Cheapest for you, worst for everyone else. Your backer gets a text from the courier asking for VAT plus a handling fee, commonly €10 to €20, before they can have the thing they paid for months ago. Outside IOSS the Commission has also confirmed the €3 duty forms part of the VAT taxable amount, so they pay VAT on the duty too.

For most UK creators running one campaign, option two. Least work, visible per-parcel cost, and it keeps the surprise away from the person whose goodwill you need for campaign two.

If your reward tiers were built before July 2026, or built without the per-line duty in them, the £60 strategy call is the quickest way to find out whether the numbers still work before you’re committed to them.

The thing to put on your campaign page before anyone pledges

The bit that gets lost in all the tax detail: import duty and import VAT are the backer’s cost, not yours. Legally and conventionally. You’re not absorbing anyone’s VAT unless you choose to.

The only thing that turns that into a problem is surprise.

So write it on the page, in the shipping section, before a single pledge lands. One line: import duties and taxes, where applicable, are the backer’s responsibility. Plain, unapologetic, visible. I’ve not seen a pledge lost over that sentence.

The alternative costs you. Run the sum on a €90 reward into the Netherlands and you get 21% VAT, the €3 duty and a courier handling fee, all landing on a backer who wasn’t told. Then there’s a comment about it on your page, read by everyone who visits afterwards, including in your final week when you need momentum most. You can’t delete it, and you shouldn’t. You live next to it.

It’s one of the pile of things nobody mentions until the money’s in, which I’ve gone through in what actually happens after your Kickstarter funds. The UK side, VAT registration and the £90,000 threshold, is a separate question covered in the VAT guide for UK and EU founders.

If it is made in China, ship it from China

This is the one I repeat most, because getting it wrong is expensive and almost nobody sees it coming.

The instinct is to bring the whole production run into the UK, then post it out to backers from home. Do not do this. You pay UK import VAT and duty on the entire run on the way in, and then every EU and US backer pays their own import charges on the way out. The same goods are taxed twice, you have added a leg of freight and several weeks, and you are handling every parcel yourself.

Only the stock going to UK backers needs to enter the UK.

Everything else ships direct from the factory, or from a fulfilment partner sitting next to it, straight to the backer’s own country. One import event per parcel, paid once, by the person receiving it. That is also where IOSS does its work: your partner ships into the EU under an IOSS number, the VAT is collected at checkout, and nothing is owed at the door.

Operations shipping out of China have done tariff codes, commercial invoices and import declarations as daily routine for years. Classifying three accessory categories across three lines is a Tuesday for them. For a first-time creator in a spare room with a courier portal, it is a fortnight of confusion and a probable misclassification.

There are real reasons to bring stock in: QC you want to do with your own hands, repacking, retail stock, or a backer base that is overwhelmingly British. Those are decisions. Importing everything by default is not one, and it is the version I see most often. The fuller version of this sits in where to ship your Kickstarter from.

Pick your route out of the factory and the IOSS answer usually comes with it. Pick it last and you are retrofitting tax around a logistics decision you have already made, which is the expensive order.

What the rest of the world looks like now

Worth knowing, because the EU change didn’t happen in isolation and most shipping advice online is a year or two stale.

• United States. The $800 de minimis exemption has been suspended since 29 August 2025 and moved from executive order into CBP regulation in June 2026. No value threshold at all. Separate legislation makes the removal permanent from 1 July 2027.
• European Union. No duty relief. €3 per declaration line up to €150 until 1 July 2028, then normal tariffs. IOSS still covers VAT up to €150.
• United Kingdom. The £135 duty relief still stands on goods coming in. HMRC’s July 2026 policy paper confirms it is being removed but publishes no commencement date; trade reporting points at 2028. Treat the timing as unsettled and the direction as certain.
• Australia. AUD 1,000, with GST on low-value goods collected by the seller at the point of sale rather than at the border.

Canada is off that list deliberately. I couldn’t verify a current figure to the standard I’d want before putting a number in front of someone making shipping decisions, and a wrong threshold is worse than an absent one.

Same direction of travel in all four. Low-value exemptions are closing everywhere, at different speeds. If your campaign ships in 2027 or 2028, budget on the assumption that whatever relief exists today is smaller or gone by the time your pallet moves. I run campaigns of 37 to 45 days; fulfilment takes far longer, and the rules move inside that gap.

Key takeaways

• IOSS still covers EU consignments up to €150 for VAT. That €150 was never abolished.
• The €150 removed on 1 July 2026 was customs duty relief, under Council Regulation (EU) 2026/382.
• The EU’s temporary €3 duty applies per declaration line, not per parcel. Three categories is €9.
• Outside IOSS, the Commission confirms the €3 duty is included in the VAT taxable amount.
• Non-EU sellers generally need an EU-established intermediary to register for IOSS themselves.
• Most UK creators should use a crowdfunding fulfilment partner’s existing IOSS number.
• If it is made in China, ship it from China. Only UK-bound stock should enter the UK; importing the whole run and posting it out again is taxed twice.
• State on the campaign page that import duties are the backer’s responsibility, before launch.

Want a hand with yours?

Most of the import mess I get asked to untangle was decided months earlier, in a reward tier built without duty in it or a fulfilment partner chosen on price alone. Both are cheap to fix before launch and painful afterwards.

If you’re a UK creator with EU backers and you want the pricing, the shipping and the IOSS route looked at together, book a call and we’ll go through your numbers in an hour.