What is an HS code?
An HS code is the number customs uses to decide what your product is. It has six digits, it means the same thing in every country that has signed up to the Harmonized System, and it is the input that decides your duty rate. Get it right and the rest of the paperwork follows. Get it wrong and you can pay the wrong duty for years without anybody telling you.
The Harmonized System is maintained by the World Customs Organization and revised every five years or so. The current edition dates from 2022, which matters more than it sounds: subheadings get created, merged and withdrawn at each revision, and a code that was correct under an earlier edition can simply cease to exist.
How the six digits are built
Read the code from the left and it narrows as you go. The first pair is the chapter, a broad family of goods. The second pair is the heading, a product group inside that family. The third pair is the subheading, which is usually where the duty rate finally attaches.
Because each pair is a narrowing of the one before it, two products that share the first four digits are related in a way customs recognises, and two that share only the first two are not really neighbours at all. That is why a classification argument is nearly always about the last two digits.
Where the extra digits come from
Six digits is where international agreement stops. Every country then adds its own detail underneath for its own tariff and statistics, and those extra digits are not comparable between countries. A declaration is made against the full local code, not against the six.
This is the single most common source of confusion for a first-time importer. A supplier in one country and a broker in another can both be quoting a correct code and still be quoting different numbers, because only the first six digits of each are the same object.
Who decides, and who is liable
The importer of record is responsible for the classification, not the supplier and not the freight forwarder. A code printed on a commercial invoice is a starting point and nothing more; it was chosen by somebody exporting from a different tariff, sometimes for a different product specification.
Where the answer is genuinely arguable, most customs authorities will issue a binding ruling in advance. It costs time rather than money and it moves the risk off you, which on a product you intend to import repeatedly is usually the cheapest thing you will do all year.
Finding yours
Search by what the thing is, not by what it is marketed as. Classification follows material, function and construction: the fibre that predominates by weight, whether a display has a tuner, whether footwear is technically sports footwear rather than a trainer with a sporty name.
This site holds a searchable set of codes with per-destination duty tables. Start from the product name, confirm the description matches your goods rather than something adjacent, and then read the duty table for the destination you are shipping to.
A worked example
A worked case on televisions, where the classification question is whether the screen has a broadcast tuner, and the answer decides the rate.
| Goods value on the invoice | 1,200.00 |
| International freight | 60.00 |
| Cargo insurance | 12.00 |
| Value the duty is charged on (CIF basis) | 1,272.00 |
| Duty at 14% | 178.08 |
| United Kingdom tax at 20%, charged on the value plus the duty | 290.02 |
| Total, before commercial charges | 1,740.10 |
| Estimate uses the CIF customs valuation method, so international freight and insurance are part of the dutiable value. HMRC UK Trade Tariff: the customs value is the price paid plus transport and insurance to the UK border. Rate last verified 2026-08-31. | |
The classification did all the work here. The duty rate follows from the code, and everything after that is arithmetic.
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