US Landed Cost & DDP Price Calculator
Fold duty, freight and fees into one honest landed cost — then either check the margin on a price you already have, or work backwards from the margin you want to the DDP price you need to charge.
What do you want to solve for?
Cost breakdown
Everything that has to be paid before the sale can earn you anything.
| Item | Amount |
|---|
Why landed cost suddenly matters so much
For years, low-value parcels into the United States travelled under a de minimis allowance, and a great many small sellers priced as though duty simply did not exist. That allowance is gone. A parcel that used to clear untouched now carries a duty charge, and somebody has to pay it. If you have not rebuilt your prices since, the duty is coming out of your margin whether you planned for it or not.
On top of that, marketplaces are increasingly pushing sellers onto delivered-duty-paid terms, where the buyer's checkout total already includes the import charges and the seller settles them upstream. Etsy, for example, requires DDP on orders that non-US sellers ship into the United States from 9 July 2026. DDP is genuinely better for the buyer — no surprise bill on the doorstep, far fewer refused parcels — but it moves the entire duty liability onto your side of the ledger. Your list price is now the only place that cost can live. Our guide to pricing for the US after DDP became mandatory covers what happens if you ship DAP anyway, whether duty belongs in the item price or the shipping price, and why carrier handling fees hurt cheap items most.
That is all this calculator does, carefully. It adds duty to your goods and freight, adds whatever broker or insurance fees you carry, and shows you the single number that your price has to beat. Then it runs the same maths backwards so you can start from the margin you actually need and read off the price that delivers it. Currency is cosmetic — the arithmetic is unit-free, so keep every field in the same currency and the answer is in that currency too.
One shipment, cost by cost
The calculator works in units, not consignments, which is the first thing to get right: every field above is one unit's share. So take a real shipment and divide it down. Say you have bought 200 units at $9.40 each ex-works, air freight door to door came to $760 for the whole consignment, you insured it for $60, and your broker charges $140 to file the entry. That is $3.80 of freight per unit, and $1.00 per unit once the insurance and the broker's fee are added together into the tool's "other fees" box. Suppose your classification carries a 12% rate — an illustrative figure, not a claim about any product — and leave the duty base on its default of goods only.
| Line | Whole shipment | Per unit |
|---|---|---|
| Goods, 200 units ex-works | $1,880.00 | $9.40 |
| Air freight, door to door | $760.00 | $3.80 |
| Insurance | $60.00 | $0.30 |
| Broker / entry filing | $140.00 | $0.70 |
| Other fees & insurance, as the tool takes it | $200.00 | $1.00 |
| Customs value the tool derives (goods only) | $1,880.00 | $9.40 |
| Duty at an illustrative 12% | $225.60 | $1.13 |
| Total landed cost | $3,065.60 | $15.33 |
The 12% is an input, not a rate we hold. Your own rate depends on classification and origin — see the disclaimers above the fold.
The line that catches people out is freight. At $3.80 a unit it is more than three times the duty, on a shipment where the duty rate is the number everyone was anxious about. Worth noting too that the duty is really $1.128 — the table shows $1.13, but the total carries the unrounded figure, which is why the four displayed lines still reconcile to $15.33 here rather than drifting a cent.
What that $15.33 means for a listing is simply that it is the floor. Type a DDP price of $29.00 into the first mode and the tool reports $13.67 of profit and a 47.1% margin; flip to the second mode, ask for 40%, and it tells you to charge $25.55, of which $10.22 is yours. Anything below $15.33 loses money on every unit, however good the listing looks. What that margin does not carry is the marketplace's cut — Etsy and Amazon take theirs out of the same $29.00 — so read it as pre-commission unless you folded a fee estimate into the other-fees box, and put the real numbers through our Etsy and Amazon fee calculator for that side. Where that number belongs — folded into the item price or shown as shipping — is a separate decision, and our guide to pricing for the US after DDP became mandatory works through the trade-offs.
Which input moves the total most
Take that same shipment and move one thing at a time. Start with the duty rate, since it is the input sellers worry about hardest. Drop it to zero and landed cost falls to $14.20. Push it to 20% and it rises to $16.08. The entire span between no duty at all and a fairly punishing rate is $1.88 a unit, and the specific jump from 12% to 20% costs 75 cents. That is real money, but it is not the number deciding whether this product works.
Now change how much you ordered, holding the same $760 of freight and the same $200 of insurance and broker fees, because those barely move with volume. Buy 100 units instead of 200 and freight becomes $7.60 a unit while the fixed fees become $2.00: landed cost goes to $20.13, up $4.80. Buy 400 and the same lines fall to $1.90 and $0.50, taking landed cost down to $12.93. The spread between a 100-unit order and a 400-unit one is $7.20 a unit — close to four times the entire duty range above. At a $29.00 price that is the difference between a 30.6% margin and a 55.4% one, from a decision that has nothing to do with tariffs. Switching the duty base from goods to goods-plus-shipping, by comparison, moves the total from $15.33 to $15.78: 46 cents.
So the arithmetic says the thing to sweat is order size and freight, not the tariff line. What the calculator cannot help with is the input that carries the actual risk. It does not know your product's classification, and classification is what sets the rate — a judgement about what the goods are, made against a schedule that is far less obvious than it looks, and one where the exposure sits with the importer of record rather than with whoever supplied the arithmetic. The same is true of the broker line in the ledger: whether you need one at all depends on how the shipment enters, which our guide to mail imports under $2,500 and the CBP entry process unpicks. Get the rate from the tariff schedule or a licensed broker, then bring it back here.
Frequently asked questions
What is landed cost, exactly?
Landed cost is the total it costs you to put one unit in the buyer's hands: the goods themselves, the freight, the duty assessed at the border, and every handling, broker, insurance and processing fee along the way. Written out, it is product cost + freight + duty + other fees, where duty is your rate applied to whichever base your entry uses — goods only, or goods plus shipping. It is the number your sale price has to clear before a single unit of profit exists. Pricing off product cost alone is the single most common way small importers end up shipping at a loss.
What does DDP mean, and why is Etsy requiring it?
DDP stands for delivered duty paid — an Incoterm where the seller is responsible for import duty and clearance, so the goods arrive with nothing left to collect. The marketplace-side push toward DDP is about buyer experience: parcels that arrive with an unexpected customs bill get refused, refunded and reviewed badly. From the seller's side it means the duty is a cost of goods, not a buyer problem, and it belongs in your price from day one.
Where do I find my duty rate?
The rate depends on your product's HS (Harmonized System) classification and its country of origin, and it can be modified by trade remedies that change without much warning. The authoritative source is the Harmonized Tariff Schedule published by the USITC, and CBP's rulings database if the classification is genuinely ambiguous. If your volume is meaningful, a licensed customs broker will classify it for you and is worth the fee. This tool deliberately ships with no rate table — an out-of-date rate that looks authoritative is worse than no rate at all.
Is duty charged on my shipping cost too?
It depends on the valuation basis your entry uses. US entries are commonly assessed on the transaction value of the goods, with international freight and insurance excluded — which is why this calculator defaults to duty on product cost alone. Other regimes and some entry types use a CIF basis that includes freight and insurance, so the tool lets you switch. If you are not sure which applies to your shipments, ask your carrier or broker rather than guessing: it changes the duty figure directly.