Last reviewed: September 2026. Rates change with each Finance Act; check the revenue authority’s current published rates before you price anything.
Every question an importer asks — what will it cost, what approvals do I need, how long will it sit at the port — comes back to one thing: how your goods are classified. Tanzania thinks in HS codes and tariff bands, and every cost and permit follows from where your product lands.
Tanzania applies the East African Community Common External Tariff. Since 2022 it has four bands, and the logic is deliberate: the more finished your product, the more it is taxed, because the tariff exists to encourage things to be made here rather than imported ready-made.
| Band | What it covers | Duty |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | Raw materials, capital goods and specified essential goods | 0% |
| 2 | Intermediate goods and inputs for further processing | 10% |
| 3 | Finished consumer goods | 25% |
| 4 | Extra-sensitive finished goods, protecting local industry | 35% |
The same product can attract 0% or 35% depending on the form it arrives in. Machinery to make a product is usually band 1; components and inputs band 2; the finished article band 3 or 4. If you are shipping finished goods and your competitor is assembling locally from components, the tariff is working against you by design.
Preferences can remove duty altogether. Goods originating in the EAC or SADC enter at preferential or nil rates if they satisfy the rules of origin, and AfCFTA preferences apply to qualifying goods from state parties. Origin is proved with a certificate of origin, issued through the standards bureau. Importers routinely fail to claim preferences they are entitled to, and pay full duty for want of a certificate.
Stays of application and duty remission. Tanzania regularly departs from the band rate for particular products for a year at a time, and duty remission schemes exist for specified raw materials used in local manufacture. These are gazetted annually and expire unless renewed.
Import duty is only the first layer. The full stack:
Import duty at your band rate, charged on the CIF customs value (goods plus freight plus insurance).
Excise duty on selected categories only — alcohol, tobacco, sugary drinks, fuel, cosmetics, motor vehicles.
VAT at 18% (15% Zanzibar), charged on customs value plus duty plus applicable levies. Recoverable by a VAT-registered business, but real money at the border.
Railway Development Levy at 2% of CIF value, on goods entered for home consumption in Mainland Tanzania.
Customs processing fee at 0.6% of FOB value.
Industrial Development Levy on a specified list of imports that compete with local manufacture. Rates run 5–15%: pasta and laundry soap at 15%; cement, furniture, steel bars, prefabricated buildings, plastic kitchenware, unbleached paper, optical fibre cables, road tractors and surface-active agents at 10%; starch, liquid glucose, beer, energy drinks, ceramic tiles, nails, flat-rolled steel and glass categories at 5%.
Port and handling charges unrelated to tax: wharfage, stevedoring, storage, stripping, corridor levy, transfer charges. Demurrage is the single most common avoidable cost we see, almost always caused by paperwork that was not ready before the vessel arrived.
Where the exemptions are, and their limits. A project registered with the investment board can obtain import duty and VAT relief on project capital goods, plus the duty drawback scheme. Relief on deemed capital goods is restricted to 75%, so the investor pays 25% of the import duty due on that category. A negative list excludes vehicles, office equipment, furniture, beverages, tiles, air conditioners, cement, steel bars and several other categories from any exemption — companies regularly assume their certificate covers site fit-out items that sit squarely on this list.
Duty remission is where local assembly wins. Raw materials for local vehicle and motorcycle assembly carry 0% duty, including lithium-ion battery inputs and wiring harnesses, while CKD kits for three-wheel cargo vehicles carry 10%.
Duty is the revenue authority’s business. Whether your goods may enter and be sold at all is somebody else’s. See Guide 4 for the full regulator list by category. Pre-shipment verification matters more than people expect: for regulated categories, conformity is verified in the country of export before the goods ship, not on arrival. Goods that arrive without the certificate face testing, delay, and sometimes rejection at your cost.
Clearance runs through the revenue authority’s electronic customs system, in practice through a licensed clearing agent. You will need the commercial invoice, packing list, bill of lading or airway bill, certificate of origin where claiming a preference, the conformity certificate for regulated goods, the sector permit where one applies, and your TIN.
Two pieces of advice worth more than any rate table. First, classify correctly from the start: a wrong HS code discovered later means reassessment, penalties and a cargo sitting at the port accruing storage. Second, get every document finalised before the vessel sails. Almost every expensive import problem in Tanzania is a documentation problem that became a storage problem.