On 9 June 2026, a Lille-based distributor of bicycle spare parts receives a notice of assessment (avis de mise en recouvrement, AMR) for 286,000 euros. The administration alleges that it classified dynamo hubs under a tariff heading at 2.7% when, in its view, they fall under a heading at 4.7%, and that it did so on one hundred and forty declarations lodged between September 2021 and December 2023. The managing director makes the calculation everyone makes. Three years. Everything imported before June 2023 should be time-barred, which is nearly three quarters of the amount. The department replies, in one line, that the debt results from an offence and that the period is five years.
Who is right? Not he, or not really any more. Since the judgment delivered by the Commercial Chamber on 28 May 2026, the answer leans clearly towards the administration, and many companies are still reasoning with a time limit that no longer reflects practice. This page explains how the limitation period for customs duties is calculated, what extends it, what suspends it, and where useful arguments can still be found. The articles cited are those of the Customs Code in force since 1 May 2026 (Ordinance No. 2026-265 of 8 April 2026), with the former numbering in brackets where it helps in reading the case law.
1. The principle: three years to notify, not to recover
The limitation period for customs duties is not set by French law. It is governed by the Union Customs Code (Regulation (EU) No 952/2013), Article 103(1) of which prohibits notifying a customs debt to the debtor after the expiry of a period of three years from the date on which it was incurred. Two words matter. Notify, incurred.
Notify, first. The time limit concerns not payment or enforced recovery, but the communication to the debtor of the amount of duty, in the forms provided for in Article 102 of the Code, so that a debt notified within three years is not time-barred because its recovery then drags on, because the debtor challenges it, because the administration is slow to issue enforcement measures or because the file lies dormant for several years in a litigation department. Conversely, a debt that is entirely well founded on the merits but notified too late can no longer be claimed: Article 124(1)(a) of the same Code makes limitation a ground for extinguishing the debt.
Incurred, next. For an ordinary importation, the debt is incurred at the time the customs declaration is accepted (Art. 77(2)). Not before. The starting point is therefore not the invoice date, the vessel’s arrival date or the financial year-end. It is the date shown on each declaration, which is why limitation is calculated declaration by declaration, never as a block over a period.
This obvious point is often lost in practice, because a notice of assessment covering “imports for the 2021 to 2023 financial years” presents the debt as a block, with a single amount, a single period and a single statement of reasons, whereas it in fact adds together dozens or hundreds of distinct debts, each incurred on a different date, some of which may be time-barred and others not, and the administration has no reason to do that sorting on behalf of the person liable. The first task is therefore to go back to the list of declarations. Date of acceptance, date of notification: compare them.
2. Five years where the debt results from an act that could give rise to criminal proceedings
Article 103(2) of the Union Customs Code allows Member States to extend the period to a minimum of five and a maximum of ten years where the debt was incurred as a result of an act which, at the time it was committed, was liable to give rise to criminal court proceedings. France chose five years. Not ten. The rule now appears in Article L. 322-2 of the Customs Code (formerly Art. 354 bis).
Everything then depends on what counts as an act “liable to give rise to criminal court proceedings”. It could be argued that the phrase referred to customs délits, that is to say outright fraud, and not to mere errors in declarations penalised as contraventions. The argument had some intuitive force. It seemed excessive to apply the same period to organised smuggling and to a tariff classification error made in good faith by a declarant who had followed the advice of its customs broker, consulted the explanatory notes, sometimes even asked the department, and who discovered three years later that the administration did not share its reading of the tariff.
The Cour de cassation rejected it. Without hesitation. In a judgment of 28 May 2026 (Cass. com., no. 25-14.078, appeal dismissed), delivered on an appeal against a judgment of the Rouen Court of Appeal, it held that a false declaration as to tariff description, a contravention under former Article 412 of the Customs Code, constitutes an act liable to give rise to criminal court proceedings and justifies applying the five-year period. The judgment is not published in the Bulletin. It nonetheless matters, because it is consistent with a reading the administration has defended for years and which nothing in EU law contradicts: the text refers to the possibility of proceedings, not to their seriousness.
Our position is clear, and it is not comfortable. For a company that imports regularly, the three-year period has become the exception. Almost any inaccuracy in a declaration (as to tariff description, value or origin) is capable of being classified as a contravention, and customs contraventions are strict liability offences, made out without any need to establish intent. Reasoning on the basis of three years exposes a company to unpleasant surprises, both in its accounting provisions and in negotiation.
It remains to check, case by case, that the act complained of was indeed liable to give rise to proceedings at the time it was committed, which means going back over the classification the administration adopts (false declaration as to tariff description, value or origin, failure to fulfil an undertaking given under a special procedure, failure to present goods placed under a suspensive procedure), checking that the provision creating the offence was in force on the date of each declaration, which is far from obvious for operations prior to 1 May 2026 whose basis must be traced in the former numbering, and then making sure that the facts described in the official customs report (procès-verbal) genuinely correspond to that classification and not to a mere difference of assessment that the administration dresses up after the event in a criminal classification to gain two years. This condition is not always met. A debt incurred through no fault of the declarant, for example following a later administrative decision or a change of classification that nothing allowed it to anticipate, rests on no offence. An administration relying on the five-year period must be able to identify the offence it has in mind; classifying it in the notice of assessment is not a formality.
3. What suspends the period: appeals and the adversarial exchange
The Union Customs Code provides for two grounds of suspension, set out in Article 103(3). The period is suspended where an appeal is lodged under Article 44, for the duration of the appeal proceedings. It is also suspended where the administration communicates to the debtor, in accordance with Article 22(6), the grounds on which it intends to notify the debt, from the date of that communication until the end of the period given to the debtor to express a point of view.
The second ground matters a great deal. The period for submitting observations is in principle thirty days (Art. 8 of Delegated Regulation (EU) 2015/2446). An administration that sends its communication of grounds a few weeks before the three- or five-year period expires thereby secures an additional month in which to notify. This is not a manoeuvre. It is the text. But it means that a declaration that seemed time-barred on the day of notification may not be, and that the calculation must be redone by adding the period of suspension.
The Court of Justice has clarified how these rules apply over time. In Jumbocarry Trading of 3 June 2021 (C-39/20), it held that Article 103(3)(b) and Article 124(1)(a) of the Union Customs Code apply to a debt incurred before 1 May 2016, the date on which the Code became applicable, provided that it was not yet time-barred on that date. The Cour de cassation cites that judgment in its decision of 28 May 2026. For older debts, still being argued in lengthy litigation, it should therefore not be assumed that the former Community Customs Code alone governs the question. Caution is required.
4. What interrupts the period, and what allows it to be exceeded
French law adds its own rules, and they almost always work in the administration’s favour, because they allow it to reset the clock by an act that it alone controls, on the date it chooses, without having to wait until its reassessment has been quantified or the company has been heard on the merits. For customs duties, notification of an official report interrupts the right of recovery, without prejudice to the grounds of suspension provided for in the Union Customs Code, and this interruption may operate up to the tenth year following the year in respect of which the duties are due (Art. L. 322-2, para. 2). The ceiling reflects the upper limit authorised by Article 103(2) of the Union Code.
This is why investigation units often draw up an official report of findings before they have even finished quantifying their reassessment, and sometimes a few days before the deadline. There is nothing irregular about this. Practice simply requires checking, on receipt, the exact date of notification of the official report, the person to whom it was notified and the scope of the operations it describes. An official report that covers only imports from one supplier says nothing about those from others, and the administration cannot make it produce an interruptive effect on operations it does not mention.
Interruption must also be distinguished from suspension. Suspension stops the clock, which then restarts where it left off. Interruption, by contrast, wipes out the time already elapsed and starts a new period running, within the statutory ceiling. The two mechanisms combine in a single case, and limitation can be established only after applying them one after the other.
Two less well-known provisions complete the picture. Article L. 322-3 allows the administration, notwithstanding the expiry of the ordinary periods, to recover duties evaded through offences revealed by court proceedings, until the end of the year following the decision closing the proceedings and at the latest ten years after the chargeable event. Criminal proceedings brought against a supplier or a competitor may thus reopen years the importer believed closed. Article L. 322-4, for its part, provides that officers retain their investigative powers to exercise this right of recovery, even where the action to prosecute the offences is itself time-barred (Art. L. 612-1).
5. Other charges collected by customs
All of the above concerns customs duties within the meaning of the Union Customs Code, that is to say import and export duties. Customs also collect national charges: excise duties on energy, alcohol and tobacco, and various earmarked taxes. For these, the Customs Code sets the right of recovery at three years from the chargeable event, and notification of an official report interrupts it (Art. L. 322-1, formerly Art. 354). The same article suspends that period from receipt of the challenge sent by the person liable until the regional director’s reply or a final court decision. Indirect taxes follow yet another rule: recovery may be exercised until the end of the third year following the year in respect of which the charge is due (Art. L. 322-5).
The distinction matters in mixed cases. A single inspection may cover two claims: customs duties and an excise duty. The two claims do not have the same time limit. Nor the same starting point, nor the same adversarial exchange regime (Art. 22(6) of the Union Code for customs duties; Art. L. 311-3 to L. 311-9 of the Customs Code for other charges). Article L. 311-9 also provides that the recovery period is suspended during the adversarial exchange organised for national charges, until the observations of the person liable are received and at the latest until the thirty-day period expires.
6. Raising limitation: when, how, before whom
No one will raise limitation on your behalf. The natural moment to rely on it is the challenge to the notice of assessment, addressed to the authority that issued it within three years of its notification (Art. L. 331-1, formerly Art. 346). The regional director rules within six months; proceedings may then be brought before the judicial court (tribunal judiciaire) within two months of the reply or of the expiry of that period (Art. L. 332-2).
The argument is best presented in the form of a table. One line per declaration: declaration number, date of acceptance, date of notification of the debt, grounds of suspension or interruption relied on by the administration, applicable period, conclusion. This table forces the administration to reply line by line. It also highlights the operations for which it must establish an offence in order to claim the five-year period. A claim that merely asserts that “operations prior to 9 June 2023 are time-barred” will be rejected in two lines, and often rightly so.
Where the administration also seeks penalties, limitation of the action to prosecute the offences follows separate rules (Art. L. 612-1) and is not the same as limitation of the debt. A debt may no longer be recoverable while the facts can still be prosecuted, or vice versa. Two calculations, therefore, and never one in place of the other.
In the Lille distributor’s case, the analysis would have led to a less favourable conclusion than his instinctive calculation, but a more useful one. The five-year period probably applies, since the administration relies on a false declaration as to tariff description. The discussion then shifts to the merits (the classification of the dynamo hubs) and, where appropriate, to a possible remission of duties. That is often where the real room for manoeuvre lies.
The firm advises on checking limitation, challenging notices of assessment and litigation before the judicial court. Hervé Guyader is co-author of the Guide Lamy des procédures douanières, whose update following the recodification of 1 May 2026 is under way. For an overview of all our work, see our page customs lawyer in Paris; for a current matter, contact the firm, with a reply within 24 business hours.
On the same path: responding to the adversarial exchange within thirty days; challenging an official customs report; repayment and remission of customs duties; what to do during a customs inspection at your company.
If the matter turns into a reassessment, see our page on challenging a French customs reassessment.
This analysis is part of the firm’s work in international trade law.
Frequently asked questions
What is the limitation period for customs duties?
Three years from the date on which the debt was incurred, that is to say in principle from acceptance of the declaration (Art. 103(1) and Art. 77(2) of the Union Customs Code). This period is extended to five years where the debt results from an act liable to give rise to criminal court proceedings (Art. L. 322-2 of the Customs Code). The Cour de cassation applies this five-year period to a mere contravention of false declaration as to tariff description (Cass. com., 28 May 2026, no. 25-14.078).
Is a good-faith error enough to trigger the five-year period?
In most cases, yes. The text refers to an act “liable to give rise to” proceedings, not to an act actually prosecuted, and customs contraventions are made out without any need to prove intent. The administration must nevertheless identify the offence it relies on, and the five-year period does not apply to a debt incurred without any inaccuracy attributable to the declarant.
Does the adversarial exchange extend the customs time limit?
Yes. The communication of grounds provided for in Article 22(6) of the Union Customs Code suspends limitation until the end of the period given to the debtor to reply, in principle thirty days (Art. 103(3)(b)). An appeal lodged under Article 44 also suspends it for the entire duration of the proceedings.
Does an official customs report interrupt limitation?
Yes. Its notification interrupts the period (Art. L. 322-1 and L. 322-2 of the Customs Code), and a new period runs from that date. For customs duties, the interruption cannot operate beyond the tenth year following the year in respect of which the duties are due. The date of notification, the addressee and the operations covered must be checked.
What if I have paid time-barred duties?
A time-barred debt is extinguished (Art. 124(1)(a) of the Union Customs Code). Duties paid without being legally owed may be the subject of a repayment application, to be submitted within the time limits of Article 121 of the same Code. Act quickly, as those time limits are also three years.
References: Union Customs Code (Regulation (EU) No 952/2013 of 9 October 2013), Art. 22(6), Art. 44, Art. 77(2), Art. 102, Art. 103, Art. 116, Art. 121, Art. 124(1)(a); Delegated Regulation (EU) 2015/2446 of 28 July 2015, Art. 8; Customs Code, Art. L. 311-3 to L. 311-9, L. 322-1 to L. 322-5, L. 331-1, L. 332-2, L. 612-1, in force since 1 May 2026 (Ordinance No. 2026-265 of 8 April 2026); CJEU, 3 June 2021, Jumbocarry Trading, C-39/20; Cass. com., 28 May 2026, no. 25-14.078; Doctrine: Guide Lamy des procédures douanières, Wolters Kluwer, co-authored by Hervé Guyader (update in progress).