Import Duty & Landed Cost Calculator

How to use this calculator

What "landed cost" actually includes

Most importers price their products off the supplier's invoice — and most importers are wrong. The invoice is only the first layer. By the time a unit is legally imported, delivered and ready to sell, it has also absorbed its share of international freight (ocean or air, port to port), cargo insurance, customs duty charged on entry, any additional tariffs that apply to your origin and product list, brokerage and entry fees for filing the customs paperwork, assorted port and processing charges, and domestic shipping from the port or airport to your warehouse, prep center or Amazon FC. That all-in figure is the landed cost, and the per-unit version of it — total landed cost divided by units — is the only honest starting point for pricing.

The duty line deserves special attention, because it is the one sellers most often leave out entirely. Duty is calculated on a taxable value, and what goes into that value depends on the destination: the United States generally works from the transaction value of the goods themselves, while the EU and UK include freight and insurance to the border (the CIF basis). On a thin-margin product, choosing the wrong basis — or forgetting that an additional tariff stacks on top of the base duty rate — can move your real cost by several dollars a unit. If you ship on DDP terms, your forwarder bundles most of these charges into one quote, but they have not disappeared: they are inside the price you are paying, and modelling them yourself is how you check whether a DDP quote is fair. Our Incoterms guide explains who is responsible for each cost at each stage of the journey.

The de minimis change: why small shipments cost more now

For years, the quiet subsidy behind a lot of cross-border ecommerce was the US de minimis rule: shipments valued under $800 entered the country duty-free, with minimal paperwork. That world is gone. The exemption was suspended for China and Hong Kong in May 2025 and for all countries in August 2025, and as of October 2026 low-value imports into the US are broadly dutiable like any other shipment — with further rule changes still moving through CBP and Congress. Sellers who built their pricing on duty-free sub-$800 parcels have had to reprice, consolidate shipments, or change entry strategy entirely.

The practical lesson is not that importing got impossible — it is that duty is now a line item on almost every shipment, at almost every value, so it belongs in your unit economics from the first quote, not as a surprise on the broker's invoice. Consolidated freight, correct HS classification (never a creative one — misclassification is where penalties live), and an honest landed-cost model are the difference between sellers who absorbed the change and sellers still wondering where their margin went. If you would rather have the whole chain — supplier, freight, customs, delivery — handled as one managed service, that is exactly what our DDP freight forwarding team does.

Worked example

The calculator above opens with the example below, so you can check the maths line by line:

Notice what happened: an $8.50 product became a $15.54 product — an 83% increase — before a single marketplace fee or ad dollar. At a $29.99 selling price the gross margin is 48.2%, which sounds healthy until referral, fulfillment and ad costs take their share. That is why landed cost comes first in every pricing decision: it sets the floor everything else is built on. Once you have your per-unit figure, the break-even calculator shows how many units you need to sell to recover the full shipment investment.