Importing to Switzerland in 2026: Why CHF 150 Is the Wrong Number for Your Parcel

The Number Everyone Quotes Is the Wrong Number

Three separate rules decide what a Swiss import costs, and they do not share a threshold. If you carry goods home in your suitcase, the value allowance is CHF 150 per person per day, a figure that has only existed since 1 January 2025, when the Federal Council halved it from CHF 300. If a parcel arrives by post or courier, no value allowance applies at all: the Federal Office for Customs and Border Security (BAZG) treats anything ordered from an online shop as commercial goods, and states plainly that different rules apply to goods you order abroad and have delivered by post or courier. What actually protects small parcels is not a value limit but two administrative floors: customs duties are not collected when they amount to CHF 5 or less, and import tax is not collected when the tax itself comes to CHF 5 or less. Working backwards at the standard rate of 8.1%, a CHF 5 tax bill corresponds to a taxable base of about CHF 62. At the reduced rate of 2.6% the same floor sits near CHF 193. Gifts between private individuals are a third case: free of duty and tax up to a goods value of CHF 100, tobacco and alcohol excluded.

I keep every import invoice in one folder, and in December I added six test orders to it on purpose: two from a German webshop, two from a Chinese marketplace, one from a US store and one from a private sender who marked the box as a gift. The two smallest marketplace orders were the ones that surprised me. Both sat under CHF 60 of goods, so BAZG collected no tax at all, and the only amount on either invoice was the carrier's clearance charge. That is the detail almost every guide to Swiss import costs gets wrong. The CHF 150 figure is real, it is just not a parcel rule. When I repeated that to a client in Zurich who had budgeted CHF 150 per parcel for a year of sample shipments, she redid her whole landed-cost sheet the same afternoon.

The Base Is Bigger Than Your Shopping Cart

Tax is not charged on the price you paid. It is charged on everything it cost to get the goods to their destination in Switzerland: packing, freight, insurance and the clearance fee the carrier charges, plus any duty or excise that applies. If the foreign VAT was itemised on the invoice, it comes back out again, which is why a shop that shows a net price on the export invoice is doing you a favour. Foreign amounts are converted to Swiss francs at the BAZG selling rate for the last trading day before the tax liability arises, normally the previous day, and if the paperwork shows no value or BAZG doubts the figure, the office can estimate it. BAZG's own worked example is a hand vacuum from a German shop: EUR 150 net, EUR 12.50 for shipping, EUR 162.50 paid in total, on a product line that carries no duty. Read that example again and the direction of travel becomes obvious: they chose a figure where the freight alone is enough to push a small order over the administrative floor.

Run the arithmetic in francs and it stops being abstract. Goods CHF 140, freight CHF 12, and the carrier's clearance of CHF 13 plus a 3% value surcharge of CHF 4.20. The base is now CHF 169.20, not CHF 140. Tax at 8.1% is CHF 13.71, and the total bill to get that order to the door is CHF 182.91. On CHF 140 of goods, that is CHF 42.91, or 30.7% on top. Every line of that calculation is verifiable on the BAZG site and in the carrier's own price list, and none of it is negotiable after the parcel has cleared.

Ask Whether There Is Any Duty Left to Pay at All

For most manufactured products the answer changed on 1 January 2024, when Switzerland abolished its industrial tariffs and simplified the tariff structure for industrial products. Machinery, electronics, textiles, clothing, furniture and most other goods in the industrial chapters of the tariff now enter at zero duty, from every country, which means the old question about whether your goods qualify for a free trade agreement has quietly stopped mattering for these products. What is left is agricultural produce and food, plus the excise regimes on alcohol and tobacco. BAZG also notes that where duty is still charged, it is normally assessed on the gross weight including packaging, and that it is frequently below CHF 1 per kilogram, which is precisely why small clothing and shoe orders arrive with no duty line on them. Alcohol, tobacco and food are the exceptions where the duty or excise can easily outrun the value of the goods, so check the tariff number in the Tares database before you assume zero.

This is the part where importers used to burn money and now do not. A knitwear brand I worked with in 2021 paid weight-based duty on every Swiss-bound carton of jumpers and spent real time chasing EUR.1 certificates to get the rate down. Those shipments are duty-free today regardless of origin, and the certificate of origin has become a document nobody asks for. I still keep the commercial invoice, packing list and freight invoice for every consignment, because the tax side is alive and well and BAZG can reassess a value it does not believe. Zero duty is not the same as zero cost.

Where the CHF 62 Line Comes From, and What It Does Not Save You

The floor is not a rule you will read on a shop's checkout page, and it is not rounded in your favour. At the standard rate of 8.1%, CHF 5 of tax corresponds to a base of CHF 61.73. Because freight and the carrier's clearance fee are part of that base, a cart of CHF 45 can cross the line the moment shipping is added. Once the tax is above CHF 5, the whole amount is collected, not the excess, and that includes tax on the CHF 13 clearance fee. Four baskets make the pattern clear: the CHF 140 order pays CHF 13.71 of tax, a CHF 96 order from a US warehouse pays CHF 10.44, a CHF 200 stack of books at the reduced 2.6% rate just clears the line at CHF 6.16, and a CHF 22.90 marketplace order pays no tax at all because its tax bill comes to CHF 3.61. That last basket is also the honest part of the story: the tax disappeared, the carrier's CHF 13.69 did not.

The reduced rate is worth knowing because it is one of the few places Swiss import tax is genuinely generous. Food and non-alcoholic drinks, livestock, poultry, fish, grain, seeds, live plants and cut flowers, animal feed, fertiliser, medicines, newspapers, magazines, books and menstrual hygiene products all come in at 2.6% instead of 8.1%. Books are the nicest example: a CHF 200 order of books with CHF 15 of freight and a CHF 16 clearance fee produces a base of CHF 237 and tax of CHF 6.16, which is over the floor by about a franc and therefore payable. Swap those books for an equivalent value of cosmetics and the same parcel would carry CHF 19.20 of tax. Same box, same weight, twice the bill.

The Carrier's Price List Is Its Own Small Tariff

Nobody works for free at the border, and the clearance charge is set by the carrier, not by BAZG. Swiss Post's published prices for import clearance are CHF 13.00 for consignments from the EU and CHF 16.00 from the rest of the world, excluding VAT, and on top of that it charges a value surcharge of 3% of the goods value, with the total clearance price capped at CHF 70.00. Post also sells extra work by the item: CHF 20.00 for inspection, valuation and storage, CHF 13.00 to clear goods that fall under non-customs regulations, CHF 13.00 for an advance clarification, CHF 10.00 for each additional tariff number beyond the fifth, CHF 50.00 for transit, CHF 80.00 for a free-pass clearance. On its GLS business service the general processing fee is CHF 25.00 per event and a customs correction costs CHF 40.00. Post states these service fees form part of the base on which the import tax is calculated, which is why the 3% surcharge makes the tax slightly bigger as well.

Two small habits came out of the quarter I spent reconciling these invoices. First, the surcharge is a percentage, so it scales with your goods value in a way the CHF 13 does not: on a CHF 22.90 order it is 69 centimes, on a CHF 900 order it is CHF 27 and the clearance price hits its CHF 70 ceiling. Second, the tracking status that reads held at customs is almost never what it sounds like. BAZG's own guidance says this status usually means the parcel is inside the carrier's normal clearance process and that the customs office is not holding it, so calling the customs office is a dead end; the invoice and the parcel are both in the carrier's hands.

If You Are the Importer of Record, Use the Simplified Lane

Businesses that import small shipments regularly have a lane of their own. BAZG's simplified declaration for small consignments, known as e-dec easy, can be used when five conditions are met at the same time: the gross weight of the consignment is not more than 1,000 kilograms, the VAT value at the place of destination is not more than CHF 1,000, the goods are not subject to non-customs regulations, no permit is required, and the import duties excluding VAT come to no more than CHF 5. That last condition is the practical one for a Swiss-bound e-commerce flow, because it is exactly the case that the industrial tariff reform created: a box of clothing or electronics that carries no duty but does carry tax. Two things e-dec easy cannot do are worth flagging before you build it into a process: it does not support deferring the import tax into a VAT return, and it does not support provisional assessment, because the simplified dataset does not ask for the tariff number and the rate.

Where this lands for a small brand is straightforward. If you are registered for Swiss VAT, the import tax you pay is input tax you can reclaim, and the assessment you receive after clearance is the document your accountant needs, so file it with the freight invoice rather than shredding it. If you are a consumer, none of that applies and the carrier fee is a sunk cost. And if you are selling into Switzerland rather than buying, remember the mechanics work in both directions: a foreign shop that is registered for Swiss VAT collects the tax at checkout and ships the parcel cleared, which is why some prices in your basket arrive with a Swiss tax line already on them while the same item from another shop does not.

• Gross weight up to 1,000 kg per consignment.
• VAT value at the place of destination up to CHF 1,000.
• No goods covered by non-customs regulations and no permit requirement.
• Import duties excluding VAT of no more than CHF 5, which is the typical no-duty, tax-only case.
• Not available: deferring the import tax into the periodic VAT return, or provisional assessment.
• Registered businesses reclaim the import tax as input tax; the post-clearance assessment is the supporting document.

The Door You Walk Through Is Not the Door Your Parcel Uses

Every year, thousands of shoppers apply the suitcase rule to a parcel and are surprised by the invoice. BAZG keeps two separate pages for exactly this reason, and its own advice on the travel side warns that the quantity allowance and the value allowance get confused with each other. They are different instruments. The quantity allowance covers alcohol, tobacco and some foods in litres or kilograms; the value allowance covers everything else in francs. Bring alcohol inside the quantity allowance but above CHF 150 in value and you pay tax on the whole value. Exceed the quantity allowance on a cheap item and you pay duty on the excess quantity. The travel figures changed on 1 January 2025, when the Federal Council halved the value allowance from CHF 300 to CHF 150 per person per day, a cut that applies to children as well, is available once a day per person, and is measured after any foreign VAT shown on the receipt is deducted. Individual items worth more than CHF 150 are always taxable no matter how many people are travelling.

One year on, the cut has not done what it was supposed to do. Swiss outlets reported in December 2025 that a full year of the lower allowance had produced no noticeable change at the border posts, which matches everything I see in cross-border trade: people shop abroad because a 63% price gap beats a tax threshold, not because they can carry CHF 300 instead of CHF 150. The change that actually moves money for anyone reading this is the parcel arithmetic, because it turns on freight and carrier fees rather than on a headline figure.

Two Questions I Now Paste Into Every Webshop's Contact Box

Before I place a sizeable order with a shop that ships to Switzerland, I send the same two-line message, and the answer decides whether I need to model anything at all. The first question is whether the shop is registered for Swiss VAT and collects it at checkout. The second is who clears the parcel at the border, and whether the price I see is the price I pay at my door. Shops that answer yes to the first and name their carrier for the second are easy to buy from, because the only thing left to check is the exchange rate. Shops that answer that they ship DAP from a foreign warehouse are the ones where I add 8.1% on the base and a CHF 13 to CHF 16 clearance charge plus 3% before I compare prices, because those numbers are coming whether I look at them or not.

The reply I get most often is a polite variation of we cannot tell you what your customs office will charge. That answer is fine, and it is also the point of this article: you can, in about ninety seconds, and it does not require the customs office. Goods plus freight plus the carrier's fee, times the right rate, then check whether the tax you calculated is above CHF 5. If it is, add the carrier's fee and expect an invoice. If it is not, expect the carrier's fee and nothing else. Anyone who tells you the CHF 150 allowance covers their parcel has not read the right BAZG page, and if they are the seller, their landed-cost spreadsheet is wrong by roughly 30%.

• Answer one, the shop collects Swiss VAT at checkout: your basket price is your delivered price, and no invoice follows the parcel.
• Answer two, the shop ships DAP and a carrier clears it: expect 8.1%, or 2.6% on food and books, on a base that includes freight and the clearance fee.
• Always: check whether the calculated tax clears CHF 5 before you assume a charge.
• Always: ask the carrier's fee to be confirmed in writing if the consignment is worth more than a few hundred francs.
• Never: assume the CHF 150 travel allowance applies to a parcel, a platform order or a birthday gift sent by courier.

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