About the numbers
Every figure on this site is an estimate built from published government rates. This page says where each rate comes from, how the maths works, and what the estimate cannot know about your particular parcel or deed.
Sources
- Item duty and VAT
- The Customs and Excise Division duties table at customs.gov.tt, 108 items with HS codes. Scraped and checked on 7 Sept 2026.
- Exchange rates
- The Customs rates of exchange, effective 1 Sept 2026. US dollar at 6.77698. Customs uses its own rate for valuation, so it will not match what your bank charged your card.
- Online purchase tax
- 7% of the customs value on goods bought online, shipped by air and consigned to a person, per the Miscellaneous Taxes Act. Exemptions for phones, laptops, tablets, digital equipment, software and accessories come from the Finance Act 2020, effective 1 January 2021. Where the Customs table still lists an older rate for those items, the site applies the Finance Act.
- Stamp duty
- Stamp Duty Act Chap 76:01, First Schedule (consolidated to 31 Dec 2016). IRD notice, stamp duty rates from 1 Oct 2008. Finance Act 2020, clause 7 (first-time homeowner threshold to $2,000,000, effective 1 Jan 2021). Checked on 6 Sept 2026.
How the import estimate is built
- Each item's price is multiplied by its quantity and by the Customs exchange rate.
- Freight and insurance for the whole box are split across the items in proportion to their value. That is how Customs does it. The item value plus its share is the CIF, or customs value.
- Duty is the item's rate applied to its CIF.
- Online purchase tax is 7% of the CIF, unless the shipment came by sea or the item is exempt.
- VAT is 12.5% of CIF plus duty plus OPT. It is charged on the taxes, not only on the goods.
- The landed cost is CIF plus all three taxes, added up across the items.
The maths runs at full precision and rounds only the figures you see, which is why the totals match to the cent on the cases we check against: a US$100 television priced by the customs.gov.tt calculator, and the clothing and laptop examples CNC3 published when the online purchase tax came in.
What the estimates leave out
- Courier fees. Skybox, Aeropost, eZone, DHL and the rest each charge their own handling, brokerage or clearance fee on top of freight, and some add a bond or processing fee. These differ by company and by parcel. The calculator never includes them.
- Classification. Customs classifies goods by what they are used for. If your item is not one of the 108 listed, you picked the closest match and the officer may pick another.
- Rate changes. Customs updates its exchange rate monthly and the duty table from time to time. The dates above tell you how fresh the data is.
- Storage, penalties and re-assessment. Late collection, missing invoices or a value query at the counter can add charges.
- Your card. Your bank converts at its own rate and may add a foreign transaction fee. Customs has no hand in either.
- Stamp duty. The first-time homeowner bands above the TT$2,000,000 exemption are assumed to shift with the threshold, based on the Board of Inland Revenue's guidance, and are flagged in the tool. Legal fees, valuation reports, land registry fees and bank charges are outside the calculation. Exemptions only apply once the Board approves your application.
Use the numbers to decide whether to buy and to check a courier invoice against the rules. Do not treat them as a quote. Customs and Excise makes the final assessment on imports and the Board of Inland Revenue on stamp duty. If a figure here looks wrong, tell me and I will check the source.