An import duty calculator turns a supplier's quotation into the number that actually matters: what the goods cost once they are sitting in your warehouse, cleared. The gap between the two is routinely a third of the invoice value or more, and businesses that price from the invoice rather than from the landed cost discover the difference at the worst possible moment.
Every rate on this page is an input. Arb Digital publishes it in the free tool library at arbsbuy.com without a built-in rate table, because a duty rate depends on the precise tariff classification of your goods, their country of origin, any trade agreement in force, and the date — and a stale table on a website is a liability rather than a convenience. It complements the live shipping cost per item calculator, which handles the freight leg alone with no duty or tax component.
What This Import Duty Calculator Does
Enter the commercial invoice value, freight and insurance, then choose whether your customs authority assesses duty on a CIF basis or on the goods value alone. The calculator builds the customs value on that basis, applies the duty rate and any additional tariff you enter, adds import VAT or sales tax on the correct base, adds clearance fees, and reports the total landed cost and the cost per unit.
The bars split the total into goods, freight and insurance, duty, and tax, so you can see at a glance which component is doing the damage. On a low-duty product with expensive freight, chasing a better tariff classification is wasted effort; on a high-duty product shipped by sea, the opposite is true.
The subtitle also reports the landed cost excluding recoverable tax, because for a VAT-registered importer the import VAT is usually reclaimable and therefore does not belong in the inventory cost at all. Including it inflates every downstream margin calculation.
How to Use It
- Classify the goods first. Find the tariff code that applies to your specific product in your own country's schedule. The rate follows the classification; nothing else on this page can be right until that is.
- Check the valuation basis your authority uses, and set the selector accordingly. Applying a CIF rate to an FOB value understates duty by the freight component.
- Enter the rate exactly as published, including any additional or trade-remedy tariff as a separate figure so you can see what it costs you.
- Add every clearance charge — broker fees, port handling, deferment account charges and inspection fees all form part of the real landed cost.
- Use the per-unit figure in your inventory records, excluding recoverable tax, so that margins and stock valuation start from the right base.
The Formula / How It's Calculated
On a CIF basis, customs value = goods + freight + insurance. Duty is customs value × duty rate, and any additional tariff is applied to the same base. Import tax is normally charged on customs value + duty + additional tariff, which is why it is a tax on a tax. Total landed cost adds the goods, freight, insurance, duty, tariff, import tax and clearance fees together.
Work the defaults. Goods of 24,000 with freight of 1,850 and insurance of 320 give a customs value of 26,170. At a duty rate of 6.5 percent, duty is 1,701.05. There is no additional tariff, so the import tax base is 26,170 + 1,701.05 = 27,871.05, and at 20 percent the tax is 5,574.21.
Total landed cost is 26,170 + 1,701.05 + 5,574.21 + 145 in clearance fees = 33,590.26. Across 1,200 units that is 27.99 per unit. Against a goods value of 24,000 the total uplift is 9,590.26, or 39.96 percent — and the invoice price of 20.00 per unit was never the real cost.
For a VAT-registered importer who can reclaim the 5,574.21, the figure that belongs in inventory is 28,016.05, or 23.35 per unit. That is a 16.7 percent uplift on the invoice price rather than 40 percent, and using the wrong one of those two numbers will either destroy your margins or make you uncompetitive.
Classification Determines Everything
The duty rate is not a property of your goods in any commonsense way. It is a property of the tariff code they are classified under, and the classification system is far more granular and less intuitive than people expect.
The framework is the Harmonized System, maintained by the World Customs Organization. Its overview of the Harmonized System describes it as a multipurpose international product nomenclature covering over 5,000 commodity groups, used by more than 200 countries and economies and applied to over 98 percent of merchandise in international trade. The first six digits of a code are internationally common; countries then extend the code with further digits of their own, and those national digits are frequently where the rate is decided.
The practical consequence is that two products a layperson would call the same thing can attract very different rates because of a material, a function, a threshold percentage of one component, or how the item is packaged for retail sale. Getting it wrong is not a minor error either — an under-declaration is a compliance matter with penalties, and an over-declaration is money you will not get back automatically. Where the classification is genuinely arguable, most customs authorities offer a formal binding ruling process, and using it is far cheaper than being wrong across a year of shipments.
Where to Find the Rate That Applies to You
Every importing country publishes its own tariff schedule, and that schedule — not any calculator — is the authority for your rate. In the United States the relevant document is the Harmonized Tariff Schedule published by the International Trade Commission, available at the Harmonized Tariff Schedule search, and US Customs and Border Protection publishes guidance on determining duty rates. Other jurisdictions publish equivalents — the UK Trade Tariff, the EU's TARIC database, and national customs portals elsewhere.
Three things vary once you have found the code. Origin matters: preferential rates under a trade agreement usually require proof of origin, and origin is a legal test about where the goods were substantially transformed, not simply where they were shipped from. Additional duties sit on top of the base rate — anti-dumping duties, countervailing duties and safeguard measures are product- and country-specific and can dwarf the underlying rate, which is why this page gives them a separate input. And rates change, sometimes at short notice, so a figure checked six months ago should be re-checked before a large consignment.
Whatever the schedule says, the final assessment is made by the customs authority at the point of entry, on the basis of the declaration and any examination they carry out. This calculator produces an estimate for planning and pricing; it does not and cannot determine what you will be charged.
What Else Ends Up in Landed Cost
Duty and tax are the components people remember. The ones that quietly erode a margin are usually elsewhere, and a landed cost model that omits them will read low every single time.
Currency is the largest of them. The invoice is often in the supplier's currency while your selling price is in yours, and customs authorities specify which exchange rate applies for declaration purposes — often a fixed monthly or weekly rate rather than the spot rate you actually paid. Movement between order and payment is a real cost that no tariff schedule mentions. Demurrage and detention charges are the second: containers not cleared and returned within a free period accrue daily charges that can exceed the duty on a small consignment.
Then there are inspection costs where a shipment is selected for examination, port and terminal handling, deferment or guarantee account charges, and inland transport from the port to your warehouse. Under normal inventory accounting, all of these directly attributable acquisition costs form part of the cost of the goods, which means they belong in the unit cost you enter into the FIFO LIFO inventory calculator and flow through to the COGS calculator. Leaving them out overstates gross margin on every unit you sell.
Arb Digital runs paid advertising programmes built around real unit economics, so campaigns are priced against landed cost rather than invoice cost.
Paid Advertising Services Talk to Arb DigitalCommon Mistakes to Avoid
- Guessing the tariff code — the rate follows the classification, and a plausible-sounding code is not the same as the correct one.
- Applying a CIF rate to an FOB value — or the reverse, which understates or overstates duty by the whole freight component.
- Including recoverable import VAT in inventory cost — for a registered business it is usually reclaimable, and leaving it in inflates unit cost and depresses reported margin.
- Forgetting additional duties — anti-dumping and safeguard measures are country- and product-specific and can exceed the base rate several times over.
- Treating an estimate as an assessment — the customs authority determines what is payable, and a calculator output has no standing at the border.
Related Free Tools From Arb Digital
Pair this with the shipping cost per item calculator for the freight leg, the FIFO LIFO inventory calculator for valuing the lots once landed, the COGS calculator for the income statement, the VAT calculator for the domestic tax leg, the gross margin calculator to price from landed cost, and the EOQ calculator for how much to import at a time. The full free online tools hub lists everything else.
Frequently Asked Questions
Duty is a percentage of the customs value, which is usually the price paid for the goods plus freight and insurance to the border, though some countries assess on the goods value alone. The percentage comes from your country's tariff schedule for the classification of your product.
Because rates depend on the tariff classification, the country of origin, any trade agreement in force and the current date. A built-in table would be wrong for many users and would go out of date, so the rate is an input you take from the official schedule.
It is the international Harmonized System classification for a product, maintained by the World Customs Organization. The first six digits are common worldwide and countries extend them nationally. The code determines the rate, so classification decides the duty.
In most systems yes. Import tax is normally applied to the customs value plus the duty and any additional tariff, so the tax base includes the duty already charged.
A VAT-registered business can usually recover import VAT as input tax subject to the rules of its jurisdiction. Duty is not recoverable in that way, which is why the two are shown separately here.
No. Preferential rates depend on the goods meeting the agreement's rules of origin and on holding the required proof. Shipping from a partner country is not by itself enough to qualify.
No. It is an estimate from the values and rates you entered. The customs authority makes the final assessment at the point of entry based on your declaration and any examination, and their determination governs.
This calculator performs arithmetic on figures you supply and is provided for general information only. It is not customs, tax or legal advice, it contains no duty rate data, and it does not determine any amount payable — your customs authority makes the final assessment. Confirm classification, origin and rates with the official tariff schedule and a qualified customs professional before relying on any figure.
