What is the difference between HS and HTS codes?
They are the same code at different depths. HS is the six-digit international standard. HTS is the United States extension of it, and every other market has an extension of its own with a different name and a different number of digits.
Declare the full local code of the country you are importing into. Quote the six-digit code when you are talking to somebody in another country, because it is the only part that means the same thing to both of you.
The shared part and the local part
The first six digits are agreed internationally and are identical everywhere the Harmonized System is used. Everything after them is a national addition for tariff detail, statistics, or both, and it is written by that country for its own purposes.
So a code from a supplier is usually correct and usually not usable as it stands. It carries a real classification in its first six digits and a set of trailing digits that belong to a tariff you are not declaring under.
The names you will meet
The United States calls its schedule the Harmonized Tariff Schedule and its lines run to ten digits, with the last two carrying statistical detail rather than duty. The European Union works at eight digits in the Combined Nomenclature and adds two more for measures. The United Kingdom runs to ten in its own tariff.
The digit counts are a rough guide rather than a rule, and they change. What does not change is that the six-digit prefix is the common ground and the remainder is not portable.
Where they genuinely diverge
A country can split a six-digit subheading into national lines with different duty rates, and those splits are where most of the money is. One international subheading can hold several national lines charging quite different amounts.
That is why this site records every national line it finds under a code rather than one figure. Where the lines disagree it says so instead of picking one, because picking one would be inventing a rate for whichever products fall under the others.
Editions drift too
The Harmonized System is revised periodically, and countries adopt each revision on their own timetable. For a while afterwards, two markets can be running different editions, and a subheading can exist in one and not the other.
When a subheading is withdrawn it is usually replaced by more than one, which means there is no single code to move to. This site keeps pages for the withdrawn codes it prices and says plainly what the current tariffs carry in their place.
Statistical suffixes, and the digits that carry no duty
In several schedules the last two digits do no tariff work at all. They exist so the authority can count trade in finer categories than the duty structure needs, splitting a single dutiable line into varieties by size, packaging or end use. Two goods with different final digits usually pay exactly the same.
That matters when you are reading a schedule rather than declaring against one. A line that appears to have an empty rate column has not been left blank by mistake; it inherits from the tariff line above it, and reading the blank as zero is a mistake this project made once and now guards against explicitly.
A worked example
Portable computers into the United States, where the international subheading and the national line agree on the answer.
| Goods value on the invoice | 15,000.00 |
| International freight | 500.00 |
| Cargo insurance | 150.00 |
| Value the duty is charged on (FOB basis) | 15,000.00 |
| Duty at 0% | 0.00 |
| United States charges no consumption tax at the border | 0.00 |
| Total, before commercial charges | 15,650.00 |
| Estimate uses the US customs valuation method, which excludes international freight and insurance from the dutiable value. 19 U.S.C. 1401a(b)(4)(A) and 19 CFR 152.103: transaction value is exclusive of costs incident to the international shipment, where those charges are separately identified. Rate last verified 2026-08-31. | |
Zero duty does not mean zero paperwork. The code still decides the entry, the statistics and whether any other measure applies.
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