• The removal of the US$800 de minimis exemption initially hit cross-border e-commerce hard, with UPS reporting a 34.8 percent year-on-year decline in average daily volume in May and June 2025. Volumes have since recovered, with UPS reporting China-US growth in 2026 and FedEx’s international export package volumes ending its fiscal year 1 percent higher.
• Airfreight demand is increasingly being driven by high-value technology cargo, particularly data centre, cloud, semiconductor and AI-related shipments. Data centre components alone represent around 1.4 million tonnes of annual air cargo and grew 39 percent year on year, while priority freight is taking capacity ahead of lower-value e-commerce, leaving less predictable space and tighter booking windows for other shippers.
• The changing cargo mix is also raising the compliance burden, with higher-value shipments requiring more documentation and tariff scrutiny. Automation such as optical character recognition is reducing manual data entry, but customs brokers and compliance specialists remain essential for validation and regulatory judgement. Meanwhile, the de minimis suspension has been codified by US Customs and Border Protection, making the change more durable despite wider shifts in US tariff policy.

The US$800 de minimis exemption did not disappear all at once. It was suspended first for China and Hong Kong in May 2025, then for all countries that August. The effect was immediate. “An increased tariff and the elimination of de minimis exceptions resulted in a year-over-year drop in average daily volume of 34.8 percent for the months of May and June,” UPS chief executive Carol Tomé told investors on a second-quarter earnings call, describing what she called the company’s most profitable trade lane.

The volume has since partially returned. Tomé told investors in July 2026 that the company had “returned to year-over-year volume growth on the China-to-US lane,” a shift she said began in May. FedEx’s annual report shows international export package volume falling over the first nine months of its fiscal 2026 before recovering to finish the year up 1 percent.

The freight that grew
Marco Bloemen, managing director of aviation consultancy Aevean, pointed to a market running on two tracks: “We really have two different bases. We have a US slowdown and we have the rest of the world growing.”

At the centre of the US picture is technology freight tied to data centre construction. Data centre components alone account for 1.4 million tonnes of annual air cargo, growing 39 percent year on year, roughly 5 percent of global volumes for a single vertical. Between April and November, Bloemen said, high-tech added around 300,000 tonnes into the US market, effectively neutralising weakness elsewhere.

The integrators have followed the same shift. Tomé told analysts UPS is “focused on premium, high-quality volume,” and has reduced lower-margin Amazon business to make room for it. Its forwarding revenue rose 8.1 percent in the second quarter on higher international air freight rates.

What it looks like from the forwarding seat
Patrik Gaehwiler, president and chief executive of JAS USA, sees the two developments as connected.

“The removal of de minimis has materially reduced traditional e-commerce volumes into the US,” he says. “The more significant constraint today is limited capacity, with high-value, high-priority cargo, particularly cloud, semiconductor and AI-related goods, taking precedence over lower-value shipments and consequently causing delays in e-commerce and other cargo movements.”

Other forwarders describe the same mechanism. Estes Forwarding Worldwide reported in February that priority cargo “is booked earlier, protected more aggressively, and often displaces freight with flexible delivery windows.” As the cargo mix shifts, it noted, cutoff times move earlier and last-minute availability shrinks. “For shippers outside these priority categories, availability can disappear quickly without any obvious change in headline data.”

That last point explains why the effect could be easy to miss. Capacity can look adequate while bookable space at predictable rates has already gone.

The compliance layer underneath
The freight that grew is also more complex to clear, arriving with higher values, tighter tariff exposure and more documentation.

Laurie Arnold, vice president of trade and compliance at JAS USA, described optical character recognition tools extracting data from commercial invoices, bills of lading, certificates of origin and Participating Government Agency documents, then populating it into entry preparation. “Instead of manually keying large amounts of information, we can focus on reviewing and validating the data for accuracy,” she said. “This not only improves productivity but also helps reduce the potential for clerical errors, which is especially valuable in today’s rapidly changing regulatory environment.”

The automation has limits. “The industry is still far from a completely touchless environment,” Arnold explained. “Licensed customs brokers and compliance specialists must evaluate the information, apply regulatory knowledge, make informed decisions, and exercise professional judgment throughout the entry process. Technology serves as a powerful tool to support these activities, but it does not replace the need for human oversight and accountability.”

What is now permanent
The rule that triggered the shift has outlasted the tariff regime around it. In February, the United States Supreme Court held that the International Emergency Economic Powers Act does not authorise the president to impose tariffs, invalidating the reciprocal duties imposed in 2025. Within hours the administration reimposed a global tariff under Section 122 of the Trade Act. De minimis was untouched, resting on separate authority. On 24 June, CBP codified the suspension into regulation.

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