Importing from India to the EU in 2026: Don't Wait for the FTA

The duty range nobody quotes: 4% to 26%

India's own commerce ministry put the number in writing on 27 January 2026, in the factsheet it published the day the EU and India finished negotiating. Textiles, apparel, leather, footwear, chemicals, plastics and rubber, sports goods, toys, gems and jewellery - more than USD 33 billion of Indian exports - are, in its words, "currently subjected to import duty between 4% and 26%" in the EU. That is the honest starting point for anyone pricing an Indian order. Not zero, and not the single 12% figure most blog posts hand you.

I have been buying knitted cotton out of Tirupur and leather goods out of Kanpur since 2021, and the spread matters far more than the average. A container of plain cotton T-shirts and a container of leather boots can leave the same berth on the same vessel and land with duty bills in completely different places. Anyone who tells you Indian goods are simply "12%" has never had to explain a EUR 2,245 customs line to a finance director who has already booked the margin.

Concluded is not the same word as in force

The EU and India concluded negotiations on 27 January 2026 at a summit in New Delhi. That is a genuine milestone and it is not a legal fact you can clear goods against. Before the agreement enters into force it needs approval by the Council of the European Union, consent from the European Parliament, and approval by India's Union Council of Ministers. It has not been signed yet. The European Commission's own trade page still shows the FTA status as "Concluded", with the investment protection and geographical indications agreements beside it still marked "Being negotiated".

Compare that with the other big deal of the year. The EU-Mercosur interim trade agreement was signed on 17 January 2026 and has applied provisionally since 1 May 2026. No provisional application has been announced for the India agreement. So a container of Tirupur knitwear that clears in Rotterdam this month pays the tariff as it stands - and when the FTA does apply, it will apply to goods declared from that date. EU agreements do not, as a rule, hand you a refund on shipments that already cleared. Price the order you are placing, not the treaty you are hoping for.

• July 2022: negotiations relaunched after a nine-year stall.
• January 2026: about 20 of the 24 negotiating chapters agreed; both sides had set a target to finish.
• 27 January 2026: negotiations concluded at the New Delhi summit. Leaders called it the mother of all deals.
• Next: legal scrub, translation, signature, then Council approval, European Parliament consent and India's Union Council of Ministers.
• After that: entry into force, and only then does the tariff schedule bite.
• No provisional application announced, unlike EU-Mercosur, which has applied provisionally since 1 May 2026.

My position: stop treating the FTA as a plan, start treating it as a clause

There are two lazy reactions to the India deal, and both cost money. The first is to hold orders back until duty hits zero, on the theory that you are saving 12 points. You are not: you are paying rent, warehousing and a lost selling season to chase a saving that arrives on a date nobody has yet fixed. The second reaction is to file the FTA under "someday" and keep pricing your Indian orders the way you priced them last year. That is worse, because the saving is real - roughly 8 to 9 points of duty on a container of apparel, which on my current knitwear runs is around EUR 2,245 a box. My position is narrower and less exciting than either: keep shipping at today's duty, and write the FTA into your contracts now so the money lands in your pocket the month it applies instead of six months later.

I got this wrong once already, on the other side. When talk of the EU-Vietnam agreement started circulating in 2018 I parked a footwear programme for nine months waiting for the tariff to disappear. It took until 1 August 2020 for the EVFTA to apply, the buyer went to a Turkish factory in the meantime, and I never got the programme back. The duty I avoided over those nine months was smaller than the margin I lost. That is the single most expensive lesson I have paid for in this business, and it is why I now treat trade agreements as a contract term rather than a launch date.

What actually changes on day one, and what gets phased

India's factsheet is unusually specific for a document of this kind, and it is worth reading the staging rather than the headline. The deal gives India preferential access across 97% of tariff lines, covering 99.5% of trade value. But that is the destination, not day one. What happens immediately is narrower, and it happens to be aimed squarely at the labour-intensive goods that European importers actually buy.

The discount you already have: India is on the EU's GSP

This is the part almost nobody selling you an India sourcing plan mentions. India is a beneficiary of the EU's Standard GSP arrangement. Under that scheme, non-sensitive products get their duty suspended entirely, and sensitive products get a reduction of 3.5 percentage points, across roughly 66% of EU tariff lines. Textiles and garments are the exception on the sensitive side: under the scheme that starts on 1 January 2027, they get a cut equal to 20% of the duty rather than 3.5 points. The GSP rules run to 31 December 2026 and are then replaced by Regulation (EU) 2026/1395 - and India is listed as Standard GSP in Annex I of that new regulation, so the preference carries on into 2027.

The practical consequence is that the FTA's gain is smaller than the 4%-to-26% headline. Take a sensitive apparel line at a 12% most-favoured-nation rate. With a GSP statement on origin your supplier is already clearing it at 8.5%. The FTA takes that to zero - a real 8.5-point saving, not 12. And GSP preferences are not automatic: the exporter has to give you a statement on origin, and larger exporters have to be registered in the REX system. I have lost a preferential rate twice because a supplier's export clerk did not attach the statement and we only found out when the C88 landed. If you do not know what your line pays today with a statement on origin, you cannot judge what the FTA is worth to you.

• Non-sensitive tariff lines: duty suspended entirely under Standard GSP.
• Sensitive lines: 3.5 percentage points off. Textiles and garments: a 20%-of-duty cut under the 2027 scheme.
• Coverage: roughly 66% of EU tariff lines.
• Current legal basis: Regulation (EU) 978/2012, running to 31 December 2026. Then Regulation (EU) 2026/1395, in force from 1 January 2027 for ten years.
• India's status in the new regulation: Standard GSP, Annex I. Confirmed, not assumed.
• Price-adjustment risk: GSP rates are set for the year and the scheme carries safeguard rules that can suspend a preference, so re-check rather than caching a rate.

The paperwork question your Indian supplier will get wrong

Both routes to a lower duty run through the same bottleneck: the exporter's paperwork. GSP needs a statement on origin. The FTA will need its own origin rule and its own proof, and Indian exporters will have to learn it exactly as Vietnamese exporters had to learn the EVFTA's - where a 2026 circular moved the product-specific rules onto HS 2022 and exporters had to re-issue certificates. Ask these questions before you negotiate price, not after the container sails.

• Are you registered in the REX system, and can you put your REX number on the invoice?
• Which HS code will you actually declare on the shipping bill - and does it match the code I am clearing under?
• Can you issue a statement on origin with the invoice, as a standard step, and keep the records for the retention period?
• Who in your office signs it, and what happens when that person is on leave?
• If customs rejects the origin claim, will you reimburse the duty difference - and will you put that in the contract?

Mundra, Nhava Sheva or Chennai: the port choice that moves your invoice

India's container export does not run through one gateway. It runs through three clusters, and picking the wrong one adds time and money without adding value. Mundra on the Gulf of Kutch is India's largest commercial and container port and handles roughly 33% of the country's container traffic, which is why it has the deepest direct-service coverage to Northern Europe. Nhava Sheva, also known as JNPT, is the country's second-largest container port and the natural gateway for western and central India. Chennai serves the south. The transit ranges below are the ones our own India route pages publish, so they match what you will see in the calculator.

The choice is usually made for you by where the factory actually is, and the trap is letting the supplier pick the port and then comparing the resulting quote with one you built from a different port. Inland trucking to Mundra runs about 18 to 24 hours from the Delhi NCR belt; the same load takes 36 to 42 hours to Nhava Sheva. That is a real cost, and it is usually cancelled out by better direct sailings. For northern India - Moradabad, Panipat, Jaipur, Jodhpur, Varanasi - Mundra wins. For Rajasthan, Gujarat and Maharashtra factories, Nhava Sheva wins. For Tamil Nadu and Kerala, Chennai. Ask which port is in the quote before you compare two of them.

Worked example: EUR 24,000 of Tirupur knitwear, landed

Here is the arithmetic on a real order shape - 40-foot high cube out of Nhava Sheva into Rotterdam, goods valued at EUR 24,000 free on board. I have left VAT out of the landed cost row on purpose, because a VAT-registered importer recovers it, but I have shown it because it moves with the duty and it is the number that surprises people. Duty is charged on the customs value, which is the goods plus the freight and insurance to the EU border.

The verdict: what I would actually do this quarter

Strip the politics out and there are only three questions that matter: how much of your basket is on the day-one zero list, how much duty you pay today with a statement on origin, and how badly you need the goods in the next twelve months. Answer those and the decision falls out, because the FTA is worth a predictable amount per container and the cost of waiting is not.

On the numbers above, one container of Tirupur knitwear carries EUR 2,245.70 of avoidable duty. If you ship eight a year, that is nearly EUR 18,000 annually - which is why the deal is real, and why it is worth engineering for. But the same arithmetic says something less comfortable. Freight on that same lane, India to Northern Europe, sat anywhere from USD 2,000 to USD 2,600 per 40-foot container inside the first quarter of 2026 alone, and the global container index was up 135% year on year in September. A booking timed to hit a fixed entry-into-force date is a booking you do not control. Ship now, price at 8.5%, and put the FTA in the contract as a price-adjustment clause with a date trigger.

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