Landed cost calculator
What does the consignment actually cost?
Landed cost from your own invoice, your own freight and your own duty rate. We publish no duty table and no charge tariff, because we hold no sourced rows for your tariff line. Bring the figures off your documents; the arithmetic is here — including the two steps a spreadsheet usually gets wrong.
Your consignment
Duty and tax, off your own tariff line
After arrival
Landed cost of this consignment
USD 46,287.5
15.72% more than the invoice price of the goods
Import tax is treated as recoverable, so it is not in the landed cost above. It is still cash out: you finance it until the credit comes back.
- Customs value
- USD 42,750
- Duty
- USD 2,137.5
- Import tax
- USD 4,039.88
- Cash out, before any credit
- USD 50,327.38
- Landed cost per unit
- USD 46.29
How it breaks down
| Component | Amount |
|---|---|
| Goods, on the commercial invoice | 40,000 |
| Freight | 2,200 |
| Insurance | 300 |
| Other charges before arrival | 250 |
| Duty at 5% — charged on the CIF value | 2,137.5 |
| Charges after arrival | 1,400 |
Recoverable import tax is excluded here on purpose — it is cash flow, not cost.
The number that matters
On the other duty base the same consignment would payUSD 2,000of duty. If your spreadsheet assumed the wrong one, every unit cost in it is wrong by that difference.
The other half is timing: a charge you did not know about until the invoice arrives has already been quoted against. Storage and demurrage land last and hurt most.
Method. The customs value is the goods value, plus freight, insurance and pre-arrival charges when you pick the CIF base. Duty is that value at your rate. Import tax is charged on the customs value plus the duty. Landed cost is goods, logistics, duty and post-arrival charges — plus the import tax only when you tell us it does not come back. No duty rate, tax rate or charge on this page comes from us — the defaults are a worked example so the page is not an empty form, and every figure should be replaced with your own. Money is rounded once, at the end. Exchange differences are not modelled: put everything in one currency before you start, because a rate moving between the purchase order and the payment is its own line and it is not this one.
Straight answers
How this is calculated
What is landed cost?
Everything the goods cost you by the time they are in your warehouse and available to sell: the price on the commercial invoice, the freight and insurance to get them there, the duty the customs declaration assessed, and every charge after arrival — broker, terminal handling, haulage, storage. It is the number your margin is actually made against, and it is almost never the number on the purchase order.
Is duty charged on CIF or on FOB?
It depends on the importing country, and it is an input on this page rather than an assumption. Article 8.2 of the WTO valuation agreement leaves it to each member whether the cost of transport, loading and handling charges, and insurance go into the customs value. Singapore Customs establishes the value on a CIF basis, and so do the GCC states, so freight and insurance are inside the duty base there. Other members exclude them. Pick the basis your declaration is actually assessed on — it moves the duty, not the landed cost.
Do I include GST or VAT in landed cost?
Only if you cannot claim it back. Import GST or VAT that comes back to you as input tax is cash out, not a cost of the goods; leaving it inside landed cost inflates every unit cost by the tax rate and quietly ruins the margin comparison you built the spreadsheet for. This calculator shows it either way — as a cost when you tick that it is not recoverable, and as cash out when it is.
Do I need my duty rate to use this?
Yes, and that is deliberate. Duty is per tariff line, per jurisdiction, and it changes on notification; a preferential rate under a trade agreement changes it again. We do not publish duty tables because we hold no sourced rows for your classification, and a confident wrong rate is worse than a blank one — you would quote against it. Take the rate off your own tariff line or your broker’s working, the same way you would take the free days off your own service contract.
How do I get landed cost per unit?
Put the sellable quantity in the consignment into the units field and the page divides the total by it. That is the flat allocation, which is right when the consignment is one product. When a container holds several SKUs, the allocation rule is the whole argument: freight tends to go by volume or weight, duty follows each line’s own tariff rate, and a flat split across values will misprice the cheap heavy lines every time.
Working it once on a calculator is one job; having every consignment's cost assembled as the charges arrive is another. There is an entry on what goes into the cost of an import, one on the code the duty rate hangs off, a walkthrough ofper-container against per-SKU allocation, and the landed cost tracking software page for the part that runs on its own. Which Incoterm you bought on decides what is already inside the invoice price —the eleven rules are here.
Want this run against a real consignment with your documents in front of us?Send it over.
Who you will be dealing with
Give me 15 minutes and I'll show you what we've taken off a real importer's desk
I'm Balkrishna, and I built this after more than twenty years working on and managing an export–import trade desk — I have chased the packing lists, checked the packs and paid the demurrage this site describes. Docket runs a real import SOP end to end today — the six jobs on this page are working software, not a roadmap. We are taking on two or three import desks to build the next part around.
Write in and you get me, not a sales team. That is deliberate rather than an apology for our size: the fastest way to make Docket good at your desk is to talk to the person building it.
Bring us your real numbers
Tell us your volumes and we will run the arithmetic on a call — with demurrage and fraud added back in, which the published figures leave out.
WhatsApp, email or phone — you get the founder, not a sales team.