Motorcycle gear import duty & landed cost calculator

Riders assume a European store means European duty rules, or that a trade agreement between their country and the seller’s makes the parcel duty-free. Neither is how customs works. Duty is assessed on the country of manufacture, and motorcycle gear is overwhelmingly made in Vietnam, China, Pakistan, Indonesia and Cambodia.

Trade agreements do reach those factories, and it is worth being exact about why they usually still do not help you. Canada and Vietnam are both in the CPTPP, along with Australia, Japan and — since it acceded — the United Kingdom, and Vietnamese-made goods can enter those countries at a preferential rate. What normally loses the preference is the route, not the factory. The agreement’s Article 3.18 lets a good keep its originating status while it passes through a country outside the agreement only if it undergoes nothing there beyond “unloading; reloading; separation from a bulk shipment; storing; labelling or marking” — or whatever is needed to preserve it or move it along — and only if it “remains under the control of the customs administration” of that country. A jacket that was imported into Germany or Ohio, cleared customs there, sat in a retailer’s ordinary stock and was then sold on to you has left customs control. It arrives at your border as ordinary goods, at the most-favoured-nation rate.

Where a preference can genuinely apply is gear made in the seller’s own country or bloc and shipped straight to you: an Italian-made suit bought from an Italian store under CETA, a British-made jacket from a British store under the Canada–UK agreement. That is a small minority of what is on sale, and a listing almost never tells us where a garment was sewn — so we do not model any preferential rate and always quote the most-favoured-nation one. Where a preference would have applied, your real bill comes in under the figure here rather than over it.

The practical consequence: switching stores does not change your duty. It changes your shipping, your exchange rate, whether the store strips its own VAT, and whether it clears customs for you — which is exactly the set of things this calculator separates into their own lines.

A leather jacket and a textile jacket look like the same purchase and sit on different tariff lines. Leather garments are classified with leather apparel; woven and knitted textile outerwear lands in the apparel chapters, which carry the historically protected rates. Into Canada that is 18% against 13%; into the United States the base rates are 27.7% against 6% before any policy overlay. That is why the calculator asks you to choose, for jackets and pants, rather than guessing — the material is worth more than the shipping.

One-piece suits split the same way — a textile or rain suit is an apparel-chapter garment, a race suit is leather apparel. Boots are single-rate here: the schedule line we use for them is the leather one, because that is what the overwhelming majority of the category is. Helmets, body armour and base layers are not classified by material at all, so offering a material control for them would be a switch that changes nothing. Gloves are the one category where the answer depends on where you live — Canada splits them by shell material and the other four destinations do not — which is why that control appears and disappears with the destination.

The United States splits textile outerwear on a laboratory test, and the two halves are not close. A man-made-fibre jacket that passes it is classified “water resistant” at 7.1%; the otherwise identical jacket that does not is “other”, at 27.7%. That gap — 20.6 percentage points — is larger than the difference shipping makes, and larger than most people’s idea of what duty even is.

The test is specific. Additional U.S. Note 2 to Chapter 62 requires the garment to hold back water under a head pressure of 600 millimetres, letting no more than 1.0 gram through in two minutes — and the resistance has to be “the result of a rubber or plastics application to the outer shell, lining or inner lining”. In riding-gear terms that means a laminated or coated membrane: Gore-Tex, Drystar, D-Dry, H2Out, Sympatex, AbsoluteShell and their siblings.

What does not qualify is the interesting part. A durable-water-repellent finish sold as “water resistant” or “water repellent” is the failing side of that same test. A softshell is not a waterproof shell. And a removable waterproof liner is genuinely arguable rather than plainly qualifying — so when the answer is unclear we charge the higher rate, on the principle that an estimate should surprise you in your favour rather than at the door. If you are not sure which you have, leave the control on “not sure”: that is the conservative answer, not a missing one.

The same split runs through riding trousers. Heading 6203 for men’s and 6204 for women’s carry water-resistant trouser lines at 7.1% against 28.6% for “other” — a 21.5 percentage-point gap, on the same 600 mm test and the same Additional U.S. Note 2. Waterproof over-trousers and laminated adventure pants are exactly the garments it was written for. It does not reach base layers: a knit thermal top or bottom is a different chapter of the tariff altogether and never qualifies, whatever the name claims, so the calculator keeps it on its own rate.

Men’s and women’s garments carry identical rates on the water-resistant side of this split, so it is not a gender question. (On the “other” side the schedule does differ slightly for trousers — men’s 27.9%, women’s 28.6% — and we publish the higher of the pair, because we cannot know which one you are buying.) And it is a United States rule only — Canada, the EU, the UK and Australia do not distinguish waterproof from non-waterproof outerwear in their schedules, which is why the control disappears when you change destination.

When Canada classifies a motorcycle glove, it looks at the material of the outer shell and ignores the protection. CBSA’s Memorandum D10-14-29 on the tariff classification of gloves sets out the rule from two tribunal decisions — one of which went to the Supreme Court of Canada — and describes them as classifying gloves using “only the constituent material or materials of the outer surface (shell) of the gloves, despite the addition of tufting, padding or other materials (e.g., plastics) in other areas.” A TPU knuckle cage, a palm slider, a scaphoid puck: none of them move the heading.

So the shell material is the whole question, and the two answers are 18% for a textile shell and 15.5% for a leather one. Textile gloves — mesh summer gloves, Cordura touring gloves, knit winter gloves — are classified in headings 61.16 and 62.16, and those headings have no cheaper rate available at all: there is no sports carve-out to reach for. Leather gloves land in heading 42.03, where one subheading covers gloves “specially designed for use in sports” duty-free; a genuine race glove may qualify and enter Canada free, so a track glove can cost less than this calculator says. A road glove is the contested case, and we quote the ordinary line rather than the free one.

Two honest caveats. Gloves with a synthetic “imitation leather” shell — Clarino, coated microfibre — are kept out of the leather heading by the same memorandum and arguably belong in plastics at a lower rate; we quote them on the textile line instead, because a name rarely tells us which coating is on the shell and we would rather over-quote than under-quote. And the whole Chapter 95 “sports equipment” route is closed to gloves outright: Legal Note 1(w) excludes gloves, mittens and mitts from that chapter and sends them to their constituent material, which is why the armour cannot rescue the rate.

An EU or UK shelf price normally includes that country’s VAT — 19% in Germany, 21% in Spain and the Netherlands, 22% in Italy, 20% in the UK. Once the parcel leaves the VAT bloc that tax is not owed, so an export order can be cheaper than the shelf price suggests. The catch is that the store has to actually deduct it, and most consumer shops do not — they charge international buyers the full VAT-inclusive price and keep the difference. ALLR only removes VAT for stores verified at a live checkout to do so, which is why picking a store above gives a different answer from describing a generic one.

Two cases where VAT never comes off: an EU store shipping to another EU country (the sale never leaves the bloc), and a store that prices delivered-duty-paid, where the import charges are already inside the quote.

Every destination has a low-value threshold, and several moved in 2026. These are the figures the calculator applies:

Customs brokerage is charged only on parcels above the threshold, because it models the full customs entry. Carrier handling fees on the simplified low-value declarations below it are not modelled — we hold no verified figure for them, and inventing one would be worse than leaving it out.

The total is item + shipping + import duty + customs brokerage. Three things are deliberately not in it:

• Destination sales tax. Canadian GST/HST, US state sales tax, EU and UK import VAT, Australian GST. It is collected at the store’s checkout or by the carrier, and adding it here would double-count what you already see there. ALLR excludes it on every surface, so the numbers agree.
• Carrier handling fees on low-value parcels. Below a destination’s duty threshold, couriers often charge a small disbursement or advancement fee. We hold no verified figure for it and will not invent one.
• Returns. Shipping a jacket back across a border, and recovering the duty you paid on it, is its own cost — and the reason a domestic store that is $40 more expensive is sometimes the better buy.

This is an estimate, not customs advice. Your customs authority classifies the goods, assesses the declared value, and applies the rate for the actual country of manufacture. Where that origin decides a trade-policy overlay, we apply the conservative floor rather than the best case; and where a trade agreement might have given you a lower or zero rate, we do not model it — so a real bill is more often a little under this figure than over it. For a binding answer, ask the carrier or a licensed customs broker.