By now you should know that the US has imposed a 10% tariff on around $200 Billion worth of goods exported from China into the United States and is expected to rise to 25% on March 1st, pending a lack of a trade agreement. Now there is a great deal of uncertainty with the tariffs, but we will let you know how you can navigate it the best that you can. Even before the current trade dispute, buyers still had to pay duties and customs fees on a wide range of products shipped into the United States.

Please note: This section is also written from an American perspective, however, the process of finding out tariffs and duties the is relatively similar to most Western countries as well as the E.U.

Figuring out the HTS Code

One of the big things that you need to know about your product is the HTS Code. HTS stands for Harmonized Tariff Schedule and the system in which the US determines what tariffs are placed on a product. Any product imported into the US needs to be accurately classified by its HTS code and the tariffs will be applied accordingly. The HTS code is based on the International Harmonized System, which is a globally recognized system of trade classification.

This part can be difficult, especially if it’s a new product it takes a decent amount of searching to find just the right product category. If you're importing an existing product, then they should have a classification. But if you are importing a new product that does not exist in the market it can he easiest way to do it is to look for similar items or items made of the same material.

You can freely search the US’s database here: https://hts.usitc.gov/

In the end, you should have an 10 digit HTS number (####.##.####) that corresponds to your product. Now that you have that figured out you can look up the tariffs.

Looking up the Tariffs of your product

This is for importing into the United States, however, almost every other country publicly posts the rates on a publicly available government website. For the most part, the rates will be done by the department or ministry that handles trade. You can use the same HTS tool to look up you tariffs as you did to look up the HTS code: https://hts.usitc.gov/

If you are importing from China into the United States, you can view the full list of affect products and their tariffs here [PDF Warning]: https://ustr.gov/sites/default/files/2018-13248.pdf

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Existing tariffs and Duty Taxes

Keep in mind that in addition to the new tariffs there are still existing duties and fees that are applicable to most products. By using the same link to the HTS database you should be able to find the existing duties. This database has the duty listed,