What is an MFN (Most Favoured Nation) duty rate?
The most favoured nation rate is the ordinary rate a country charges on a product from any other member of the World Trade Organization with which it has no special arrangement. The name is misleading: it is the baseline, not a favour.
It is the rate this site publishes, because it is the one that applies unless you can prove you are entitled to something better. Every other rate on a tariff page is a departure from it in one direction or the other.
Where the obligation comes from
The principle is that a concession granted to one trading partner must be granted to all of them. A country cannot quietly charge one supplier less than another for the same product without bringing everybody along, unless the difference sits inside a recognised exception.
Free trade agreements are the main exception, which is why a tariff page can show a low headline rate and a long list of even lower ones underneath it. Those are agreement rates, and they are conditional on proving origin.
The trap on a tariff page
An official commodity page can list dozens of rates for one product: the third country duty, a preference for each agreement, quota rates, suspensions and trade remedies. All of them are real and only one of them is the default.
Reading the wrong row is the most common way to publish a wrong duty rate, and it is not obvious when it happens, because the number you copied is genuine and sits on the correct page. This site records which measure each stored rate is, so a preference cannot be filed as a baseline.
What the baseline does not include
Anti-dumping and countervailing duties are not part of it and are charged on top, targeted at specific goods from specific origins and sometimes at named producers. Safeguard measures work the same way.
Nor does it include the consumption tax, which is a separate charge collected by the same authority at the same moment and calculated on a different base. A quoted rate that combines the two is not a duty rate.
When the baseline is not a percentage
Some tariff lines are specific rather than ad valorem: an amount per litre, per item or per kilogram, sometimes combined with a percentage and sometimes with a floor and a ceiling. There is no honest way to express those as a single percentage without knowing the weight or the volume.
Where a stored rate is one of those, this site prints the official wording and the calculator declines to compute it rather than multiplying by a number that was never a rate.
Quotas, suspensions and the rates that are temporary
Besides preferences, a tariff line can carry measures that are not permanent. A tariff quota lets a fixed quantity in at a reduced rate each period and reverts to the ordinary rate once the volume is exhausted, so the rate you get can depend on how early in the period your goods arrive.
An autonomous suspension works differently from a quota: an authority temporarily waives duty on an input that domestic manufacturers cannot source locally, usually with a review date attached. Both are real, both appear on the same commodity page as the baseline, and neither is something to plan a year of purchasing around without checking the expiry.
A worked example
Leather goods into Germany at the baseline rate, which is what applies without a proof of origin in hand.
| Goods value on the invoice | 4,000.00 |
| International freight | 220.00 |
| Cargo insurance | 40.00 |
| Value the duty is charged on (CIF basis) | 4,260.00 |
| Duty at 3% | 127.80 |
| Germany tax at 19%, charged on the value plus the duty | 833.68 |
| Total, before commercial charges | 5,221.48 |
| Estimate uses the CIF customs valuation method, so international freight and insurance are part of the dutiable value. Union Customs Code (Reg. 952/2013) Art. 70 and Art. 71(1)(e): transport and insurance to the place of introduction are added to the price paid. Rate last verified 2026-08-31. | |
A valid origin claim under an agreement could reduce the duty line and would leave the tax line untouched.
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