UK Landed Cost Intelligence API

UK-only e-commerce landed-cost decision API for goods imported into Great Britain.

What it does

Input a cart/product description, country of origin, value and logistics costs. The API returns:

• official UK commodity-code candidates;
• an MFN customs-duty baseline from the UK Global Tariff;
• import-VAT estimate where the normal import regime applies;
• landed-cost estimate in GBP;
• confidence, evidence and warnings;
• NEED_MORE_INFO instead of silently guessing when classification or tax treatment is not sufficiently determined.

This is deliberately not a generic tariff lookup. It combines product classification assistance, tariff evidence, valuation logic and cart-level cost calculation.

V1 scope

• Destination: Great Britain only (England, Scotland and Wales).
• Currency: GBP only.
• Commodity candidates: official UK Global Tariff commodity descriptions.
• Customs duty: current measure type 103 (Third Country Duty / MFN), filtered to Erga Omnes (geographical area 1011), no automatic special additional-code treatment.
• Preferential origin rates are not automatically claimed.
• Simple ad-valorem duty expressions can be calculated automatically.
• Non-ad-valorem, conditional, quota, additional-code, anti-dumping, excise and special-procedure cases return warnings or require review.
• Consignments at or below £135 use the current low-value duty-relief path only when they are non-excise. Checkout VAT must be supplied to produce a complete low-value landed-cost result.
• Imports above £135 require a product-specific VAT rate per line. V1 does not silently assume the 20% standard rate because reduced and zero-rated goods exist.
• The published UK reform removing the £135 customs-duty relief has a future operative date to be appointed. V1 must be updated when the new regime takes effect.

Endpoints

• GET /
• GET /health
• GET /v1/tariff/status
• GET /v1/tariff/{commodity_code}
• POST /v1/classify
• POST /v1/landed-cost/estimate
• POST /v1/landed-cost/batch

Main source

Department for Business and Trade / UK Global Tariff:

• Commodity hierarchy: DBT commodities-report from the newest coherent recent dataset version.
• Measures: DBT measures-on-declarable-commodities pinned to the same concrete dataset version.
• The daily sync falls back from an incompletely published latest version instead of mixing data from different tariff versions.
• Licence: Open Government Licence v3.0.

VAT and valuation logic is based on HMRC / GOV.UK guidance. Because standard, reduced and zero rates exist, V1 requires the caller to supply the product-specific VAT rate for imports above £135 rather than inventing a default. For low-value e-commerce consignments, the caller supplies checkout VAT when applicable.

Important

This product provides estimates and decision-support signals. It does not constitute customs, tax or legal advice, and it does not make a binding tariff classification.

A commodity candidate is not automatically treated as a declaration-ready classification. If no commodity code is supplied, the API returns candidates and NEED_MORE_INFO.