We wrote 23 apparel duty rates by hand. Six were wrong.
Not guessed carelessly — written from sources that looked authoritative, by someone paying attention. Then checked against the published CBSA schedule.
The most expensive error
Babies' garments under headings 6111 (knitted) and 6209 (woven) are duty-free into Canada. The plausible figure — the one that matches the neighbouring headings, and the one a confident answer will give you — is 17–18%.
On a CAD 50,000 order, that single error invents roughly CAD 9,000 of duty that does not exist. Budget it and the style looks unviable. It isn't.
The others
- Man-made-fibre shirts and blouses under 6205.30 and 6206.40 are 18%, not the 17% that the cotton lines might lead you to expect.
- 6110.11 is not a national tariff line at all. It splits on value — at $20/kg — so a single rate for it is not wrong so much as meaningless.
That last one is the pattern worth internalising. The failure is not usually a wrong number. It is a number where the schedule does not have one.
Why plausible is the dangerous case
An obviously wrong rate gets caught. A rate that sits neatly among its neighbours, in the right range, on a code that reads correctly, is invisible — through the spreadsheet, the margin model, and the purchase order.
The 6111 case is exactly this shape. Babies' garments are duty-free for a policy reason. Nothing about the surrounding headings hints at it. Any system reasoning by resemblance will produce 17–18% and look completely reasonable doing it.
What to do about it
- Use the published schedule, not a summary of it. Canada's is the CBSA Customs Tariff; the US is the USITC HTS. Both are free.
- Record which version you used and when. A rate without an effective date cannot be checked later, and rates change.
- Treat non-ad-valorem lines as a separate case. Rates expressed per kilogram, or split by value, break any model that assumes a percentage.
- Be suspicious of confident round numbers on headings you have not personally looked up.
Tariffwright loads both national schedules directly from the official sources, records the version and effective date on every suggestion, keeps non-percentage rates as their published text rather than coercing them into a number, and refuses to serve a source whose last refresh failed.
Sources
- CBSA Customs Tariff — the Canadian schedule
- USITC Harmonized Tariff Schedule — the United States schedule
- CBSA D10-17-15 — information required for textiles and apparel
Not legal advice
Tariffwright provides product-data organization, classification suggestions, and cost-planning tools. Suggestions are based on the information and source versions shown and may be incomplete or incorrect. They are not legal advice, a customs ruling, or a guarantee of duty treatment or admissibility. The importer remains responsible for its declarations and should obtain qualified customs or legal review where appropriate.