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About duty242

duty242 works out what an imported product will cost to land in The Bahamas, including the duty, the fees and the VAT, before you buy it.

Who built this

My name is George. I'm a software developer and I was born here in The Bahamas. I built duty242 because I got tired of watching people order something online, think they'd found a good price, and then get hit with the duty bill when it landed. I've done it to myself plenty of times.

I write and fact-check every guide on this site myself, and I check the rates and worked examples in them against the bundled schedule before they go live. If I've got something wrong I'd rather hear about it, so corrections are welcome.

The frustrating part is that none of this information is secret. It's just buried. The rate for whatever you're buying is sitting somewhere in a 940-page tariff schedule, and even once you've found it you still have to add up the duty, the processing fee, the environmental levy, and then VAT on top of all of that. Nobody's doing that before they click buy, so most people just guess. The guess is almost always low.

So I built this. Paste a link, see what Customs is actually going to charge you, and make the call with that number in front of you instead of finding out at the counter. It's free, there's no account, and all the math is laid out further down if you want to check it yourself.

Why the estimates you already see are off

Amazon shows Bahamian shoppers an "Import Fees Deposit" at checkout. It is an estimate produced by one global product-to-tariff mapping applied to every destination country, and it does not know the particulars of the Bahamian schedule: that computers are duty-free here, that mattresses are 60%, that headphones and speakers sit 45 points apart. Sometimes it over-collects and you wait for a refund; sometimes it under-collects and the balance appears at the border.

This site computes the Bahamian figure directly and shows it next to Amazon's, so the number you plan around is the real one.

Where the data comes from

  • The Bahamas Tariff Act: all 6,702 tariff lines, parsed from the 940-page official schedule PDF published in 2023, currently at schedule version 2026-2027 effective 2026-07-01. The most-imported categories have been checked line by line against the current schedule and are tagged verified; the rest are as published.
  • The Tariff (Amendment) Acts of 2024, 2025 and 2026, applied on top of the 2023 schedule, so rates reflect what Parliament has changed since.
  • The Customs Management Regulations, for the environmental levy on each item and the processing fee.
  • The Excise Act, 2023 (as amended 2025), for the ~500 lines taxed under excise, most of which are free of customs duty, including vehicles, fuel and spirits.
  • The Bahamas Customs "Frequently Imported Items" brochure, used to check the commonly bought lines and as the source of the worked example in our fee guide.
  • Spot-checks against the Customs Tariff Search tool for individual rates.

The schedule is re-parsed and diffed against the previous year whenever a new one is published; changes are reviewed by hand before they go live.

How classification works

Working out the landed cost is easy arithmetic. Working out which tariff line a product falls under is the hard part, and it is where nearly every wrong estimate comes from. There's more on that in the guide on classification.

duty242 matches a product against the full schedule, then applies the fee math to the line it lands on. Every classification carries a confidence level, and lines individually checked against the current schedule are marked verified. Where a real charge exists that can't be computed from a price, such as excise charged per gallon, it is flagged as an extra rather than shown as zero.

The arithmetic is not secret

Import duty at the line's rate, a 1% customs processing fee (minimum $10, maximum $1,500), any fixed environmental levy, excise where it applies, and 10% VAT on the resulting landed cost. The same code computes it on this website, in the public API and in the browser extension, so the three never disagree. You can check any figure yourself in the calculator.

What this site is not

It is not a customs broker, it is not affiliated with the Bahamas Customs Department, Amazon.com, Inc. or eBay Inc., and it cannot advise on a specific entry. Final classification and charges are determined by Bahamas Customs. Treat the figures here as estimates to plan with, and see the disclaimer.

How it is paid for

duty242 is free to use. There are no affiliate links on the site: outbound links to Amazon and eBay are plain product links that earn nothing. Running costs are intended to be covered by display advertising. What is collected, and what is not, is set out in the privacy policy. In short, no user identifier is ever attached to a lookup.

Get in touch

Corrections are welcome, especially on rates. You can reach me through the contact page.