Turkey or China for wholesale clothing in 2026?

What changed on 1 July

Until this summer, a consignment worth €150 or less could enter the EU without customs duty. That exemption is gone. It ended on 1 July 2026, and in its place there is a temporary flat charge of €3 per item on low-value consignments, running until the EU’s customs data system comes online around mid-2028. After that, normal tariff rates apply whatever the parcel is worth.

Two details in that sentence do most of the work, and nearly every summary I have read gets at least one of them wrong.

“Per item” means per tariff line, not per garment

An item here is a customs classification, not a unit. Thirty identical t-shirts share one tariff heading, so they are one €3 charge, not thirty. But a parcel holding a silk blouse and two wool blouses contains two headings, and pays €6. Mixed parcels multiply; boxes of one thing do not.

The €3 is a replacement, not a blanket

The old relief was repealed outright. The €3 regime steps in where the import is a distance sale — postal consignments and goods declared through IOSS, which is the overwhelming majority of parcel traffic. A small commercial shipment sent by courier outside that system now falls back on the ordinary tariff.

Which means a €120 sample box, once genuinely duty-free, can now be worse off than a €120 consumer parcel: no relief, no €3, just the full rate.

A further EU-wide handling fee has been proposed at around €2 a parcel, and several member states are adding their own charges per declaration line. None of that is settled yet, so treat it as a direction of travel rather than a number to budget.

What did not change

This is where most of the commentary has gone wrong, so let me be blunt about it.

If you were already importing a thirty-kilo box worth more than €150 as a business, you were already paying duty, and your bill this month looks the same as it did in June.

So the honest framing is not “China just got expensive for wholesale.” It is narrower and, I think, more interesting: the cheap test-order route closed. For years the way a small European seller tried China was to order forty pieces, have them arrive as a couple of low-value parcels, pay nothing at the border, and see whether the product sold. That was never really wholesale importing. It was a relief threshold being used for something it was not designed for, and it was the main reason people started with China rather than Turkey. It is not there any more.

If you already import properly and in quantity, nothing here forces your hand. If you were planning to start small and cheap, your plan needs replacing.

The two, side by side

Everything below this table is the explanation. If you only read one thing, read this.

Now the parts of that table that are worth arguing about.

Duty: twelve per cent against zero

The EU charges a standard customs duty of around 12% on most finished garments arriving from a country with no trade agreement. China is such a country. That 12% sits on top of the goods value and the freight, and then import VAT is calculated on the total — anywhere from 17% in Luxembourg to 27% in Hungary, with most member states between 20 and 23. VAT you can usually reclaim if you are registered. Duty you cannot. Duty is simply cost.

Goods coming from Turkey in free circulation carry no customs duty at all. Turkey and the EU have been in a customs union since the end of 1995, and it covers industrial goods, which includes textiles and clothing. Agriculture, coal and steel sit outside it; your jackets do not.

On a €5,000 order of clothing that difference is roughly €600 before you have counted a single other cost. It repeats on every order, forever.

The A.TR, and the trap inside it

The duty-free treatment is not automatic. It depends on a document called an A.TR movement certificate, which your supplier or their forwarder issues and which travels with the shipment. No A.TR, no exemption, and your customs broker will charge you the full 12% while you argue about it.

Now the part almost nobody explains. The A.TR certifies free circulation, not origin. It says the goods are legally inside the Turkish–EU customs territory, not that they were made in Turkey. Goods manufactured in China, imported into Turkey with Turkish duties paid, can travel onward to the EU on an A.TR without further duty.

Before anyone gets clever: this is not a way around the 12%. Turkey charges its own additional customs duty on imported textiles — 30% on apparel and considerably more on fabrics and fibres — so goods taking that route have already paid a higher bill than they would have paid landing in the EU directly. The A.TR is a consequence of how Istanbul's trade actually works, not a loophole. Anti-dumping measures also follow origin rather than route, so they are unaffected by it.

It is also why “from Turkey” and “made in Turkey” are not the same sentence. If Turkish manufacturing is part of your story to your own customers, ask, look at the labels, and ask to see the workshop. Plenty of my suppliers make their own; plenty of others are honest resellers of imported stock. Both are fine. Confusing them is not.

Forgetting to ask for the certificate at all is common enough that it has its own entry in my list of expensive first-trip mistakes, and I go through the duty, VAT and cargo arithmetic properly in what a first buying trip actually costs.

Time: days against weeks

This gap widened enormously over the past two years, and — I have to be careful here, because it is moving — it is now narrowing again.

Since the Red Sea diversions began, most Asia to Europe container traffic went round the Cape of Good Hope instead of through Suez, which adds roughly 11,000 nautical miles and 10 to 14 days to a rotation. That is what pushed Asia to Northern Europe sailings into the five-to-seven week range, and a lot of published schedules still sit there.

But carriers started coming back over the summer. By late August, Maersk said more than 30% of its previously Cape-routed volume had returned to Suez, MSC had resumed transits, and at least one serious analyst thought normalisation by the end of 2026 was plausible. So if you are pricing a Chinese order this autumn, do not take a number from an article, including this one. Ask your forwarder what the specific service does, because two sailings a fortnight apart can now differ by a fortnight.

Turkey to Europe goes by truck and is not affected by any of this. Istanbul to Germany is about 4 to 6 days; Netherlands 5 to 7. Those are forwarder figures for road transit, so add clearance and allow for queues at the Bulgarian border. Groupage textile freight is quoted around €150–350 a pallet or €100–150 per cubic metre, which for a load under ten cubic metres normally beats taking a full truck — though rates move fast enough that any figure in a blog post is indicative at best.

Even at the optimistic end, the shapes are different. At under a week you can see something selling, reorder, and have it on the rail before the trend is over. At a month or more you are guessing in February what people want in April, and if you guess wrong the money is already spent. That difference survives Suez reopening entirely.

Minimums, and the question behind them

Every comparison you will read online quotes minimum order quantities. Most of them are comparing two different things, so separate them first.

If you are buying ready stock

This is what most people who write to me actually do: walk into a showroom, pick from what already exists, and take it away. A Turkish wholesaler will normally sell you a seri — a size-run pack, typically five to ten pieces of one style. That is your minimum. It means a first order of a few hundred euros is a real order, not a favour someone is doing you.

There is no equivalent in China for a European buyer. Ready-stock markets exist, but they are not set up to send you eight pieces and have them arrive next week.

A word of warning on that word: a seri is a pack, and quoting the price of one while you are picturing one garment is the most common way a first order comes out four times bigger than planned.

If you are producing your own design

Now the numbers are closer to what the guides say. Turkish factories typically want 50–300 units per style. Chinese factories typically want 500–5,000+, with the Yiwu region an exception for simple pieces below 500.

So the real question is not “which country has lower minimums.” It is are you buying or are you making? Almost every argument about Turkey against China dissolves once you answer that.

Price per piece, honestly

I am not going to pretend Turkey is cheaper on the sticker. It is not.

For made-to-order production, the ranges you will see quoted put Turkey around $5–12 a piece and China around $2–6, with the usual quantity ladder underneath: the same garment drops perhaps 20–30% between fifty units and five hundred. Treat those as orders of magnitude rather than quotes. Different sources put the bands in noticeably different places, and in several of them the two countries overlap — a simple Chinese piece at the top of its range and a simple Turkish one at the bottom of its own are not far apart. The only number that means anything is the one a specific factory gives you for a specific garment.

Where it gets interesting is what you add afterwards. On the Chinese piece you add 12% duty, freight, weeks of your money sitting in a container, and the risk that whatever arrives is no longer the thing you wanted. On the Turkish piece you add road freight and nothing else.

At large volume the Chinese number still wins that arithmetic comfortably. At the volumes a single shop or a young label actually buys, the gap closes far more than the sticker suggests — and sometimes it closes completely.

When China is still the right answer

I sell Turkish supplier lists, so treat what follows with the suspicion it deserves. I would still tell you to go to China for these:

• Volume. Above a few thousand units of one style, the per-piece difference stops being a rounding error and starts being your margin.
• Your own design, made exactly. Chinese factories are extremely good at building precisely what a tech pack specifies. Istanbul is faster and more flexible; it is not always more literal.
• Hardware and accessories. Bags with complex fittings, technical fabrics, electronics-adjacent products, packaging. Turkey has these; China has more of them, cheaper.
• You have time and cash. If you can fund stock that lands in eight weeks and you are confident it will still sell, the wait is worth paying yourself for.

And one honest caution on the other side: Turkey is closer and faster, which makes it easy to over-order. Short lead times are only an advantage if you use them to buy less, more often.

How I would decide

Three questions, in this order.

1. Buying or making? Buying existing stock points to Turkey almost every time. Making your own design opens China properly.
2. How many of one style? Under a few hundred, Turkey. Over a couple of thousand, China. In between, run both numbers with duty and freight included, not just the piece price.
3. How fast do you need to react? If your season turns over in weeks, six weeks of transit is not a cost, it is a structural problem.

Most people asking me this question are one person with a shop or an Instagram page, buying twenty of this and fifteen of that, and needing to restock what sold. For that person the answer has been Turkey for a while, and as of July it is a little clearer than it was.

If that is you, the next question is which part of Istanbul to walk into, and the city is less obvious than it looks — I wrote about every wholesale district and what each one sells.

Questions I get asked most

Did the EU really end duty-free imports under €150?

Yes, on 1 July 2026. A temporary flat customs duty of €3 per item applies to low-value consignments until the EU customs data hub arrives around mid-2028, after which standard tariff rates apply regardless of value.

Do I pay customs duty on clothing from Turkey?

Not if the goods are in free circulation and the shipment travels with an A.TR movement certificate. Import VAT is still due at your own country’s rate, and is normally reclaimable if you are VAT-registered.

What is the duty on clothing from China into the EU?

Around 12% on most finished garments, charged on the value of the goods plus freight, with import VAT then calculated on that total.

Is Turkey cheaper than China for clothing?

Not per piece. It is usually cheaper per delivered piece at small volumes once you add duty, freight and the cost of waiting, and it is more expensive at large volumes.

Does “from Turkey” mean “made in Turkey”?

No. An A.TR certifies that goods are in free circulation in the customs territory, not that they were manufactured in Turkey. If Turkish production matters to your customers, ask the supplier directly and check the labels.

How long does shipping from Istanbul to the EU take?

Road freight is about 4 to 6 days to Germany and 5 to 7 to the Netherlands, plus customs clearance. Sea freight from China takes weeks rather than days, and the figure is unstable right now: carriers began returning to the Suez Canal over the summer of 2026 after two years of routing round the Cape, which cuts 10 to 14 days off the services that switch back. Ask your forwarder about the specific sailing rather than trusting a published average.