Reading China's import tariff for one HS code

The last supplier quote I read had a ten-digit number printed under the unit price, next to the Chinese product name. That number decides the duty, and the duty is almost never the number anyone quoted me.

China publishes its import tariff once a year as a schedule of lines, and each line carries several rates at once. Which one applies depends on origin, on whether a quota certificate exists, and on the date of the declaration. Everything below is the Chinese import side; what your buyer pays elsewhere is a different schedule with a different origin test.

Six rate columns, one line of the schedule

China’s tariff law sets four statutory import rates, plus provisional rates that can sit below them, plus quota rates for goods under tariff-rate quotas.

Article 10 of the Tariff Law (passed 26 April 2024, in force 1 December 2024) lists them: most-favoured-nation, agreement, special preference and general. The same article sets an export rate, a quota rate, and a provisional rate that can apply “for a period”.

Article 13 fixes the order in which they meet. A provisional rate replaces MFN where one exists. With an agreement rate and a provisional rate both available, the lower wins; if MFN is below the agreement rate and no provisional exists, MFN applies. The general rate never takes a provisional. Within a quota the quota rate applies, or a provisional rate where one exists; above the quota, the earlier rules come back.

Origin decides the column, not the code

Two shipments of the same product under the same code can pay different rates, because the column is chosen by origin.

Articles 11 and 12 split the job. Article 11 sets origin: wholly obtained in a country, or last substantially transformed there. Article 12 maps that origin to a column: MFN for WTO members and treaty partners, agreement for qualifying FTA partners, special preference for unilateral preferences, general for everything else.

FTA claims live or die on that test. In 2026 China applies agreement rates under 24 agreements with 34 trading partners, each with its own product-specific rules, consignment rules and certificate. A supplier who says “we are in an FTA country” has told you nothing until the rule for that line is checked against the bill of materials.

How to get the rate for one code

The customs administration runs a free lookup that takes a tariff code and returns three of the rates.

The path is customs.gov.cn → 政务服务 → 税率查询, or directly online.customs.gov.cn/ociswebserver/pages/jckspsl/index.html. Enter the 税号, eight or ten digits, or a Chinese product name. The result row gives the ten-digit code, the MFN rate, the general rate and the provisional rate.

I queried 03021410 on 18 October 2026 and got 0302141000, 鲜或冷大西洋鲑鱼, at 10% MFN, 40% general and 7% provisional. For an MFN-origin, non-quota import, that is the whole answer.

Three gaps matter.

• The agreement rate is not in that table. It comes from 附6 of the annual plan, one column per agreement, and applies only if the origin paperwork is right.
• Quota status hides in the ten-digit code rather than a column. Querying 10019900 returns 1001990001 at 1% and 1001990090 at 65%.
• The page’s disclaimer says the rates are for reference and the customs decision at declaration governs.

The second source is the annual plan: 税委会公告2025年第11号, dated 26 December 2025, effective 1 January 2026, with six PDF attachments. 附1 is the only place where MFN and provisional rates sit side by side; 附2 covers quota goods, 附6 agreement rates. It is on gov.cn.

A rate is not the only thing that stops a shipment. The Single Window’s 参数查询 lookup gives the licence and inspection requirements on the same code, as covered in customs clearance documents.

The 2026 schedule in ten lines

On the avocado line the general rate is 80% and the provisional rate 7%, so the column matters more than the headline number.

Two rows need a footnote. The wheat pair is one eight-digit line split by quota status, with a general rate of 180% on both. Cotton’s out-of-quota duty is a formula, not a percentage: at a declared price of 14.000 yuan per kilogram or above the duty is 0.280 yuan per kilogram; below that, Ri = 9.0/Pi + 2.69% × Pi − 1, rounded to three decimals, and capped at 40%. The lookup prints 40% for that code and does not show the sliding duty. A spreadsheet that assumes percentages gets cotton wrong.

What changed on 1 January 2026

The 2026 schedule has 8,972 national subheadings and 201 subheading notes, and 935 items carry a provisional import rate.

Three products got their own lines: intelligent biomimetic robots (8479.8970), bio-aviation kerosene (2710.1913) and under-forest ginseng (1211.2031). The rate cuts cluster in three groups, on my reading of 附1: key parts and advanced materials, such as numerically controlled hydraulic cushions for presses; resource goods for the green transition, such as black mass from recycled batteries and unroasted pyrite; and medical goods, such as artificial blood vessels and diagnostic kits.

The eight quota categories kept their rates, except urea, compound fertiliser and diammonium phosphate at a 1% quota rate. Export duties continue on 107 lines, 68 at a provisional export rate. The 43 least-developed countries keep zero duty on 100% of lines.

Classification is the harder half

One wrong subheading changes the rate and the licence requirement, and the customs decision binds the importer, not the code on the supplier’s invoice.

Article 9 of the Tariff Law sets the basis: heading text, the six general rules of interpretation, section and chapter notes, subheading notes, national subheading notes and other classification notes. The rules run in order, so rule 1 governs where heading text and notes answer the question, and rules 2 to 6 only where they do not. Decisions end with phrases like 根据归类总规则一及六, which say which rules did the work.

Decisions are published as customs announcements once a year. 海关总署公告2025年第259号, dated 30 December 2025, carries the year’s decisions and the ones it retires; the retiring list matters, because a code settled two years ago may no longer be settled.

For a borderline product or a large duty, the instrument is an advance ruling. 海关总署令第236号, in force since 1 February 2018 and amended in 2024, covers classification, origin and dutiable value. Only a foreign-trade operator filed with customs can apply, so in practice the importer of record files it with the overseas buyer’s technical file. The application goes in at least three months before the import, or inside three months with a stated reason; the decision issues within 60 days of acceptance, lasts three years, and the customs office accepts matching declarations.

Duty is one of three charges at the border

Import VAT is charged on a base that already contains the duty, so the tariff raises the VAT bill too.

The VAT Law took effect on 1 January 2026. Imported goods carry 13% as the general rate and 9% for a listed set including agricultural products, edible vegetable oil and edible salt, split out by ten-digit code. The base is the dutiable value plus the duty plus any consumption tax, and consumption tax comes before VAT.

Anti-dumping duties, countervailing duties, safeguards and retaliatory tariffs sit outside this schedule under Articles 16 to 18 and stack on the applicable rate. Article 19 supplies the fallback when origin cannot be excluded: the higher of the stacked rate and the general rate.

Dutiable value is the transaction price plus freight and insurance to the point of arrival in China, before unloading (Article 24). An FOB price therefore grows before the rate is applied, and the Incoterm decides who already paid that freight, as in Incoterms in one page. Personal parcels fall under a simplified levy under Article 5 rather than the schedule, the distinction behind parcels cleared customs.

The destination tariff is a separate document

A destination country charges on its own nomenclature, its own origin rules and its own authority, and none of that is on the Chinese schedule.

An American import is classified in the HTSUS at ten digits, a European one in the Combined Nomenclature, and either may carry additional duties China’s schedule has never heard of. A Chinese provisional rate has no effect abroad, and origin is re-tested at the destination, so the certificate that won an agreement rate here is not the document the destination reads.

RCEP is the one place the two sides touch: it sets a rate for each party under one set of origin rules, so the same rulebook can be read in both markets. Outside that, the two systems are read separately, and a landed-cost sheet that mixes them goes wrong.

Where these numbers come from

Every rate and count above comes from a Chinese official source, checked on 18 October 2026.

• The legal text is the Tariff Law on npc.gov.cn; the advance-ruling rules are Order 236 in the State Council gazette.
• The 2026 plan is 税委会公告2025年第11号 on gov.cn, dated 26 December 2025. I downloaded the six attachment PDFs, converted them to text, and read the counts from the plan itself.
• Line-level rates come from the customs 税率查询 page: ten codes entered one at a time, with the product names and rates taken from what the page printed.
• The classification announcement is 海关总署公告2025年第259号. The customs site returned HTTP 412 to my client, so I read it on the commerce ministry’s mirror.

No paid tariff database, broker or Single Window login was used.

What I could not check

• The frequently quoted 7.3% average tariff level. It appears only in news reports of a State Council Information Office briefing, not in a ministry document, so it is not in this piece.
• Any single agreement rate. 附6 puts one agreement per column, and my PDF-to-text conversion split its data rows into single characters, so a row reads 89 2 004 300 0. I could not map a cell to an agreement with confidence, so the agreement rate here is described, not demonstrated.
• Whether the free lookup agrees with paid and broker systems on every line. I checked ten codes; only cotton hid a formula behind the number printed.
• Whether any anti-dumping, countervailing or retaliatory measure applies to a specific product today, and which origins fall under the general rate. Those are separate announcements and lists I did not search.
• Which 2026 provisional rates were withdrawn. The plan’s text does not list withdrawals; press coverage names three, and I found no first-party document.
• The 2025 line count, so the net change in subheadings cannot be stated as a number, and the personal-parcel levy rates, which sit in a schedule I did not open.