Landed Cost Calculator

Everything to get a unit to your door, sellable: goods cost, international freight, cargo insurance, customs duty, non-recoverable taxes, and destination charges (terminal handling, brokerage, drayage, port fees, demurrage if any). Some models also load inbound handling and a share of financing/risk. What it excludes: recoverable VAT/GST and your own downstream costs (marketing, last-mile to customer). It's the cost basis for pricing and margin, not the full P&L.

Only if you can't reclaim it. For VAT/GST-registered businesses that recover import VAT as input tax, it's a cash-flow item, not a cost — including it overstates landed cost and understates margin, sometimes enough to kill a viable product on the spreadsheet. Include only non-recoverable taxes and irrecoverable duty. The calculator's tax field is there for the non-recoverable cases (unregistered importers, exempt-output businesses); set it to zero when you reclaim.

Because most importing countries assess duty on CIF value — goods plus freight plus insurance — so a higher freight cost raises the dutiable base and the duty on top of the freight itself. (The US and a few others use a freight-excluded transaction value, where this doesn't happen.) It's why a cheap-goods, expensive-freight sourcing option can land dearer than the headline suggests: the freight is taxed twice over, as cash and as duty base.

Ask the forwarder for an all-in destination quote (THC, documentation, clearance, drayage to your door) — not just the ocean rate — and ask your broker for their fee schedule. First-time lanes warrant a worst-case estimate (10–15% of CIF) until you have real invoices; after a few shipments, your freight-spend log gives you actuals. The discipline is never building landed cost on freight alone: the destination tail is where the margin leaks.