Cost to your door

The mill price is not the cost. Three things stand between the two, and only the first of them is obvious.

Freight, which is heavier here than in garments. Home textiles are dense and bulky for their value, so a container of towels weighs out or fills up long before its value gets interesting, and freight lands as a much larger share of the final cost than a garment buyer expects. Convert the box rate you were quoted into a cost per piece before comparing anything: the freight reckoner does it at the load you will really achieve, and box rate to cents per kilo is the same sum as a table you can read across. For the whole landing in one go, the landed cost quick check takes a mill price and a freight figure and adds the duty, the United States extra layer for your origin and the VAT, each on the right base, without opening a file.

Duty, which is not one rate. Your bedroom set can contain three tariff lines. Read your own code before you order rather than after the invoice, and read it at full length: six digits will not price an import, because several headings swing by ten points or more inside themselves.

And the base each market charges duty on, which is not the same base. The United States charges on the transaction value, which is essentially your FOB price with international freight and insurance left out. Europe and Britain charge on a landed value with the freight and insurance in. So an American rate and a European rate cannot be compared as percentages at all, because they are not sitting on the same number.

Now the split that has no garment equivalent, with every rate read 1 September 2026. A duvet cover is bed linen and enters Britain at 12.00%. The filled duvet that goes inside it is a different chapter altogether and enters at 2.00%. Into the European Union the same two are 12.00% and 3.70%. One carton, one invoice, one bedroom, and the cover pays several times what the quilt pays. Blankets sit somewhere else again, at 6.00% into Britain and 7.50% into the Union. This is why the classification is a buying decision and not a paperwork decision, and why it belongs at step 8 rather than at step 16.

The rates on this page are base rates, read from the published schedules on 1 September 2026. They are not the whole bill. Additional or emergency duties can sit above the base rate, preference can sit below it, and both change without notice. Take an all in figure from a customs broker before you commit, and use the base rate to see the shape rather than to compute your final cost.

Now the whole sum, on a real order. Two of the six worked cases are home textiles and both stop at this step: a California importer buying printed sheet sets out of Karachi, where the piping on the edge moves the tariff line, and a Dubai hotel group buying bath towels, where the duty sits on a different base again. Each one is costed line by line to the warehouse door, out of the same files this page reads.

Worked case 2: A California buyer wants 3,000 digitally printed full size sheet sets United States. Costed to the warehouse door, every line shown. Opens here.

“Same sheet set, once for a hospital group and once for my shop. Why is the duty different?”

Printed cotton bed linen, heading 6302.21, made in Karachi. Pakistan shipped 32.3 per cent of what the United States imported under this heading in 2025 (UN Comtrade, our own calculation). A full size set is a fitted sheet, a flat sheet and two pillowcases, counted at the border as four pieces.

The duty question has one answer: the hospital set is plain, the shop set has a piped edge, and in the US tariff that trim moves the set from 6.7 per cent to 20.9 per cent. Both are in the table.

Landed at the California warehouse, plain set $45,162.39

Which is $15.05 a set

The same order on the other tariff line $50,274.39

That total is 12 lines. $7,512.39 of it comes from the duty rates, border charges and freight index the site holds, each printed with the day it was read; the other $37,650.00 is round placeholders you replace with your own quotes. The full case shows every line, what it was worked out from, and what the site cannot tell you.

Open case 2 in full, line by line or see all six cases side by side.

Worked case 6: A Dubai hotel group buys 20,000 bath towels The Gulf. Costed to the warehouse door, every line shown. Opens here.

“Same towel as your example, but into Dubai and for our own use. What changes?”

Cotton terry bath towel, 600 gsm, 70 by 140 cm, heading 6302.60, from Karachi to Jebel Ali. What changes from the guide’s example: duty on CIF rather than FOB, a VAT the hotel recovers only if registered, and an Emirati rate confirmed by our own check in Dubai rather than read off the schedule.

Landed at the hotel stores, before VAT $89,096.94

Which is $4.45 a towel

That total is 8 lines. $6,946.94 of it comes from the duty rates, border charges and freight index the site holds, each printed with the day it was read; the other $82,150.00 is round placeholders you replace with your own quotes. The full case shows every line, what it was worked out from, and what the site cannot tell you.

Open case 6 in full, line by line or see all six cases side by side.