Import Duty & Customs Fee Calculator (US)

What US Customs actually collects on an entry

Four separate charges land on a typical commercial import into the United States, and only one of them is what people mean by "the tariff". You pay ordinary duty at the rate your commodity's Harmonized Tariff Schedule subheading carries. You may pay an additional tariff from Chapter 99 of the HTSUS — the mechanism used for Section 301 actions, Section 232 steel and aluminium measures, and antidumping or countervailing duty deposits. You pay the Merchandise Processing Fee on nearly every entry. And if the goods arrived by ship at a US seaport, you pay the Harbor Maintenance Fee. On top of that sits your customs broker's fee, which is a private charge for filing the entry summary, not money that reaches the Treasury.

The number that matters for pricing is not any one of these. It is the effective rate: everything you paid to clear the entry, divided by the entered value. That single percentage is what you add to your supplier's price to get a duty-inclusive cost, and it is what you compare when you evaluate a second source in another country.

One structural point catches almost every first-time importer. The United States assesses duty on the FOB value of the goods — the transaction value at the port of export, under 19 U.S.C. §1401a. Most other countries assess on a CIF basis, adding international freight and insurance to the dutiable base first. So a $20,000 shipment with $3,000 of ocean freight is dutiable on $20,000 in Los Angeles and on $23,000 in Rotterdam. Do not let your freight forwarder's CIF invoice total become your entered value.

Each charge, and the rule that sets it

Ordinary duty is entered value times the ad valorem rate on your 10-digit HTS code. Rates run from free to well above 30% depending on the commodity, and they are published in the current edition of the HTSUS by the US International Trade Commission. Some subheadings are specific rather than ad valorem — cents per kilogram, for instance — or compound; this calculator handles the ad valorem case, which covers the great majority of manufactured goods.

Additional tariffs stack on top. A Chapter 99 subheading does not replace your Chapter 1–97 classification; it is an extra line on the entry summary charging an extra percentage of the same entered value. That is why a 6.5% HTS rate plus a 25% Section 301 rate produces 31.5% of value, not a compounded 33.1%. Both apply to V, not to each other.

The Merchandise Processing Fee is set by 19 CFR 24.23. On a formal entry it is 0.3464% of entered value, but it is bounded: there is a minimum and a maximum per entry, and both are indexed for inflation and republished by CBP each fiscal year under the FAST Act. The bounds are what make MPF interesting operationally. Below roughly $9,400 of entered value the minimum binds, so the fee behaves like a flat charge and small shipments carry a disproportionate cost. Above roughly $183,000 the cap binds, so the fee stops growing entirely and a larger consolidated entry becomes cheaper per dollar of goods. Those two crossover points are simply the floor and the cap divided by 0.003464.

The Harbor Maintenance Fee is set by 19 CFR 24.24 at 0.125% of value, and it has no floor and no cap. It applies to commercial cargo unloaded from a vessel at a HMF-assessed US port. Air freight does not pay it. Truck and rail arrivals across a land border do not pay it. This is a real, if small, structural advantage for air freight on high-value, low-weight goods.

How to read the effective rate

Compare the effective rate against your gross margin, not against zero. If you sell at a 40% gross margin and duty adds 32.6% of your supplier cost, roughly a third of your unit cost has become a government charge — and unless you reprice, that comes straight out of margin. Work the arithmetic backwards with the selling price from margin calculator before you decide whether the product still works.

Three patterns are worth recognising in the output. First, when the additional tariff line dominates, your problem is classification and origin, not logistics: no amount of freight optimisation offsets a 25-point add-on, whereas a correct classification or a different country of origin might remove it entirely. Second, when the MPF line is a large share of the total, your problem is shipment size — you are paying a per-entry minimum too many times, and consolidating orders will help. Third, when duty and tariff are both small and the broker fee is the biggest line, you are importing low-duty goods in shipments too small to justify formal entry overhead.

Also watch the fixed-versus-variable split. Duty, additional tariff and HMF all scale linearly with value, so they never improve with volume as a percentage. MPF is capped and the broker fee is per entry, so both dilute as the entry grows. Consolidation helps on MPF only once the cap is in play: merging two $150,000 entries into one $300,000 entry cuts MPF from $519.60 twice to a single capped $634.62, a saving of $404.58, plus a broker fee. Merge two $90,000 entries instead and MPF is $623.52 either way, because $180,000 is under the cap — there only the broker fee is saved. Duty never improves with consolidation.

Finally, treat every rate in this calculator as a quote that expires. Ordinary rates change with each HTSUS revision, and additional tariff rates change by executive and agency action, sometimes with only days of notice. The rate that governs your entry is the one in force on the date of entry, not the date you placed the order.

The four charges on a US import entry

Excise taxes, FDA or USDA user fees, and antidumping cash deposits can apply to specific commodities on top of all of these.

How the Merchandise Processing Fee behaves as entry size grows

Between the two crossover points the fee is exactly 0.3464% of value. Below the first, small entries pay a flat minimum; above the second, the fee is fixed in dollars and shrinks as a percentage.

Mistakes that make a duty estimate wrong

• Using the CIF total as entered value. US duty is assessed on the FOB price at the port of export. Adding freight to the dutiable base overstates duty on every line.
• Compounding the additional tariff onto the duty. Both percentages apply to the same entered value. Multiplying them together inflates the estimate.
• Guessing the HTS code from a product description. Classification turns on construction, material composition and function, and a neighbouring subheading can differ by twenty points. Get it from a broker or a binding ruling.
• Forgetting that MPF has a minimum. On a $2,000 sample order the fee is not $6.93; the per-entry floor makes it several times that, and small parcel programmes hide the charge inside a courier invoice.
• Assuming HMF applies to air freight. It does not. Nor does it apply to truck or rail arrivals across a land border.
• Treating a supplier's DDP quote as duty-paid certainty. If the supplier is importer of record, you have no visibility into the declared value, and an undervalued entry is your exposure if CBP reopens it.
• Ignoring antidumping and countervailing duties. AD/CVD cash deposit rates can exceed 100% of value and are assessed on top of everything in this table. Check whether your commodity and origin are subject to an active order before you buy.
• Costing a purchase order at today's tariff rate. The rate in force on the date of entry governs, and goods on the water can be overtaken by a rate change.

Where duty sits in the rest of your import cost

Duty and fees are one block of a landed cost, and often not the largest. The full stack runs: supplier price, export packing and inland haulage at origin, ocean or air freight, insurance, terminal and drayage charges at destination, the duties and fees this calculator produces, and finally warehousing and pick-and-pack before the first sale. Assemble all of them with the landed cost calculator, and check whether your freight bill is being driven by weight or by volume using the dimensional weight calculator — a light, bulky product can cost more to move than to buy.

Which of these costs is yours at all depends on the Incoterm on the purchase order. Under EXW or FOB you are the importer of record and everything above is your problem. Under DDP the supplier clears the goods, and while the cash cost is bundled into their price, the compliance exposure often is not. Under DAP the supplier delivers to your door but duty is still yours. Read the term before you read the price.

Two neighbouring decisions are worth modelling once duty is known. First, order size: because MPF is capped and broker fees are per entry, larger and less frequent entries lower cost per unit — but they raise inventory carrying cost, which is exactly the trade-off the economic order quantity calculator resolves. Second, reorder timing: long ocean transits push lead time out to eight or ten weeks, and the reorder point calculator converts that lead time into the stock level at which you must place the next order. Duty-driven cost changes also feed straight into pricing, so re-run the markup vs margin calculator whenever a tariff rate moves.

For duty-relief programmes, three are worth knowing about even if you never use them. Duty drawback refunds up to 99% of duties paid on goods that are subsequently exported. A foreign trade zone defers duty until goods leave the zone for US commerce, and can lower it if you manufacture inside. Free trade agreements can eliminate ordinary duty entirely when the goods satisfy the agreement's rules of origin — which are about where the goods were substantially transformed, not where they were shipped from.

Key terms

Entered value

The value declared to CBP as the basis for ad valorem duty — normally the transaction value of the goods at the port of export, excluding international freight and insurance.

HTSUS

The Harmonized Tariff Schedule of the United States. Chapters 1–97 carry ordinary duty rates on a 10-digit code; Chapter 99 carries temporary modifications, including Section 301 and Section 232 tariffs.

Formal vs informal entry

Formal entry is the standard commercial filing, usually required above $2,500, and pays an ad valorem MPF. Informal entry covers lower-value shipments and pays a small flat MPF instead.

Importer of record

The party legally responsible for the entry, the declared value, the classification and any duty CBP later assesses. Under a DDP purchase this may be your supplier rather than you.

AD/CVD

Antidumping and countervailing duties. Case-specific rates imposed on named products from named countries, collected as cash deposits at entry and trued up later, sometimes years later.

Duty drawback

A refund of up to 99% of duties, taxes and fees paid on imported goods that are later exported, destroyed, or used to make an exported article.