UK Import Duty & Landed Cost Calculator

Know what a shipment actually costs to land in the UK — before you quote it.

Give it a commodity code, a country of origin and a CIF value. Get back the customs duty, the import VAT, the excise flag, every control and restriction, and a full landed-cost breakdown — live from HMRC's UK Integrated Online Tariff.

Built for one destination and complete on it: every charge that lands on a UK import declaration, resolved from the official tariff and traceable back to it.

And when the honest answer is "it depends", this Actor says so — in a structured, machine-readable way — instead of quietly returning a number that's wrong.

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Why this exists

Most landed-cost tools return a single confident number. The tariff data underneath frequently does not support one.

Three examples, all real, all reproducible here today:

• Cotton t-shirts carry two UK VAT rates — 0% and 20%. Which applies depends on whether the garments are child-sized. The commodity code doesn't say.
• Ceramic tiles from China carry 107 anti-dumping measures, one per exporter, from 0% to a 69.70% residual. Which applies depends on which company made the goods.
• Wine is charged at £12.00 per hectolitre — not a percentage. A tool that only takes a value is structurally incapable of getting this right.

A tool that picks one and moves on is guessing with your client's money. This one hands you the candidates, tells you exactly what's missing, and cites the regulation behind every figure it does calculate.

What you pay for

The rule is "did you get usable tariff data?" — not "did we produce a single number". Published in full, because you should never be surprised by an invoice.

What you asked for	What you got back	Charged
Commodity code → full determination	RESOLVED — duty, VAT, total	Full determination
Commodity code → consignment £135 or less	RESOLVED_LOW_VALUE_REGIME	Full determination
Commodity code → several measures compete	AMBIGUOUS_MULTIPLE_MEASURES + every candidate	Full determination
Commodity code → specific duty, no quantity given	REQUIRES_QUANTITY + the unit needed	Full determination
Commodity code → question can't be answered	NOT_COMPUTABLE	Nothing
Bad input, unknown code, no search hits	NOT_COMPUTABLE	Nothing
Plain-text description → candidate codes	ranked candidates	Code lookup (cheaper)
Any row inside a bulk run	as above	At that row's bulk tier

Ambiguous answers are charged in full, and that's deliberate. When t-shirts come back with two VAT rates, or ceramic tiles with 107 exporter-specific anti-dumping rates, you've received the complete measure set and the reason no single number exists. That took the same work as a clean answer — and it is the answer. It's what stops you filing a declaration on a rate that was never going to apply.

"I don't know" is free. If we return NOT_COMPUTABLE you are not charged, even when we hand you the full measure set alongside it. Some commodities — collectors' items, banknotes — come back with measures but no unconditional duty measure, so the question can't be answered. You keep the data; you don't pay.

What you get back

Every response carries a top-level status, so your system always knows how much to trust the number:

Status	Meaning
RESOLVED	One applicable measure. Duty, VAT and total landed cost computed.
RESOLVED_LOW_VALUE_REGIME	Consignment £135 or less. Fully computed — but the VAT shown is not collected at the border; the seller charges UK VAT at the point of sale.
AMBIGUOUS_MULTIPLE_MEASURES	More than one measure could apply. All candidates returned, nothing computed.
REQUIRES_QUANTITY	Specific or compound duty (per litre, per kg, per 1,000 items). Give us the quantity and we'll compute it.
NOT_COMPUTABLE	Out of scope or unresolvable — with a plain-English reason. Never charged.

Plus, on every response regardless of status:

• Every underlying measure — type, geographic area, validity dates, rate, footnotes and regulation ID. Audit anything.
• Itemised charge lines, each traceable: a regulation ID where the tariff publishes one, and a measure reference plus a verifyUrl you can open and check on gov.uk in every case. Each line carries collectedAtBorder, so you know what's actually payable on import.
• Preferential rates with their conditions — not just "0% available", but the document code you must declare and the certification of origin required.
• Excise flagged on alcohol, tobacco and energy products.
• Prohibitions, restrictions, quotas and conditional reliefs.
• Export controls kept in a separate block, because export licensing has nothing to do with what you'll pay to import.
• Attribution and disclaimer on every record.

Who it's for

• Customs brokers and freight forwarders — quote landed cost in seconds, with an audit trail your client can check line by line.
• Ecommerce and DTC brands — price UK-bound SKUs correctly, and see the £135 low-value rule flagged before the border, not after.
• Procurement and sourcing teams — compare true landed cost across origins before committing to a supplier.
• ERP, TMS and customs-software teams — a clean JSON contract with explicit ambiguity states, so your UI can ask the right follow-up question instead of displaying false precision.

Try it

{
  "commodityCode": "6109100010",
  "originCountry": "CN",
  "cifValue": 10000
}

Returns AMBIGUOUS_MULTIPLE_MEASURES — duty resolves to 12.00% (£1,200), but VAT could be 0% or 20%. Both candidates returned. You decide, or ask your client whether the garments are child-sized.

{
  "commodityCode": "2204211790",
  "originCountry": "CL",
  "cifValue": 20000,
  "quantityValue": 50,
  "quantityUnit": "hl"
}

Returns RESOLVED — £600 duty (£12.00/hl × 50 hl), £4,120 VAT, £24,720 total. Excise is flagged. And because Chile is a CPTPP member, you also get a second scenario at 0% duty (£24,000) — labelled conditional, with the exact precondition spelled out: declare document code 9081 plus a CPTPP Certification of Origin (9U01 exporter / 9U02 producer / 9U03 importer).

Leave the quantity fields blank and you get REQUIRES_QUANTITY, naming the unit required — never a silently wrong total.

{ "commodityCode": "8507600030", "originCountry": "US", "cifValue": 120 }

Returns RESOLVED_LOW_VALUE_REGIME — duty computed as normal, VAT shown but labelled "VAT (not collected at the border)", because for consignments of £135 or less the seller accounts for UK supply VAT at the point of sale. We also say plainly that we could not verify any matching customs-duty relief at that threshold, so the duty figure is the normal-import amount.

Bulk mode — price a whole catalogue in one run

Pass an items[] array. Each row inherits any field you don't override.

{
  "originCountry": "CN",
  "cifValue": 5000,
  "items": [
    { "commodityCode": "6109100010" },
    { "commodityCode": "6203423500", "cifValue": 12000 },
    { "commodityCode": "6402993100", "originCountry": "VN" },
    { "commodityCode": "2204211790", "originCountry": "CL", "quantityValue": 12, "quantityUnit": "hl" }
  ]
}

How long your catalogue will take

HMRC rate-limits the tariff API, so we hold a deliberate 10 requests per second — their documented ceiling is 750/minute, and we stay under it on purpose so your run never gets throttled mid-catalogue. Throughput is therefore predictable, and you can work out your own runtime before you buy:

runtime ≈ rows ÷ 10 per second

Your catalogue	Runtime
500 rows	~50 seconds
1,000 rows	~1m 40s
5,000 rows	~8m 20s
10,000 rows	~16m 40s
50,000 rows	~1h 23m
100,000 rows	~2h 46m

Runs are asynchronous — start it, get on with something else, collect the dataset when it finishes. Every row is written as it completes, so you can start consuming results before the run ends.

Volume pricing

Bulk rows cost less than interactive lookups, and get cheaper with volume:

Rows in the run	Price per row
1 – 1,000	$0.030
1,001 – 10,000	$0.018
10,001+	$0.012

A 10,000-row catalogue costs $192 — an effective $0.0192 per row.

Tiers count within a single run and reset on the next one, so run your catalogue as one job rather than splitting it into batches. Each result row carries a billingTier field so you can reconcile the invoice against your data.

Don't know the commodity code?

Send a plain-text description instead of a code and you'll get ranked candidate commodity codes with confidence scores and links.

We will never pick the code for you. Tariff classification is the importer's legal responsibility, and a wrong commodity code is the most expensive mistake in customs. We narrow it down; you or your broker confirm it.

How we decide — so you can audit us

• MFN is the default. The standard third-country duty applies unconditionally, so that's what we compute.
• Preferential rates are an alternative, never the headline. A preference only applies with valid proof of origin — a fact about your shipment, not about the goods. We show it as a labelled scenario and always state the precondition: the document code to declare, the certification of origin required, and the tariff's own guidance on making it out. If the tariff publishes no documentary condition, we say so explicitly rather than leaving a cheaper rate looking unconditional.
• Ambiguity means same-kind competition. Two VAT rates. A hundred exporter-specific anti-dumping rates. Cases where the data genuinely offers several answers and gives us nothing to choose between them.
• Conditional reliefs are listed, never applied. End-use suspensions, airworthiness reliefs and quotas can cut your duty — but only if you hold the authorisation or the quota still has balance. We flag them; we don't assume them.

Scope

Resolved from the live HMRC tariff for a UK import:

• Customs duty — ad valorem, specific (per litre, per kg, per 1,000 items) and compound.
• Import VAT — including where a commodity carries more than one rate.
• Excise — flagged on alcohol, tobacco and energy products.
• The £135 low-value regime — identified, with the VAT treatment spelled out.
• Preferential rates — with the exact document code you must declare.
• Anti-dumping — including exporter-specific additional codes and the flagged residual rate.
• Prohibitions, restrictions, quotas and conditional reliefs.
• The full measure set behind all of it, each with a regulation ID or a verifiable measure reference.

Historic and forward dates are supported — resolve rates as at any import date, so you can price a shipment landing next month or check what applied last quarter.

Importing into the EU as well? The EU/TARIC equivalent ships as a separate Actor.

What it won't do — stated up front

• GBP only. We don't apply exchange rates, because an unsourced FX rate would make every figure untraceable. Convert using the HMRC monthly rate first.
• Excise is flagged, not calculated. UK excise is charged per unit of product at rates published outside the tariff.
• Quota balances are not tracked. We tell you a quota exists; we can't tell you whether it's still open.
• No customs-duty relief is applied below £135. HMRC's published guidance at that threshold covers VAT only. We flag the regime and compute duty as normal rather than invent a relief we can't cite.

Source, licence and attribution

Data comes from the HMRC Trade Tariff API — the same data behind trade-tariff.service.gov.uk — licensed under the Open Government Licence v3.0.

Every record carries a machine-readable attribution block containing the source name, source URL, the API endpoint queried, the retrieval timestamp, the licence and its URL, and an explicit statement that the data has been modified and derived:

Contains public sector information licensed under the Open Government Licence v3.0. Source: HM Revenue & Customs, UK Integrated Online Tariff. © Crown copyright.

This data has been modified and derived from the official source. Measures were filtered by origin and date, classified into duty / VAT / excise / control categories, and monetary amounts were computed by this Actor from the published rates and the values you supplied. Computed amounts are the work of this Actor, not of HM Revenue & Customs, and are not endorsed by HMRC. Always verify against the source URL provided.

The tariff updates daily; responses are cached for 60 minutes by default. A scheduled canary re-checks the upstream data shape and fails loudly if HMRC changes anything — because a stale or silently wrong number is worse than an error.

Disclaimer

Indicative estimate for planning purposes only. This is not customs advice and carries no legal standing.

Duty and VAT liability depends on the correct commodity code, the origin of the goods and valid proof of that origin, the customs value as determined under UK valuation rules, reliefs and authorisations held by the importer, and the exporter's identity where trade remedies apply. Verify with a licensed customs broker or HMRC before making any customs declaration or commercial commitment.

The same disclaimer is returned in a disclaimer field on every record, so it travels with the data into your system.

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