Duty-Free but Not Tax-Free: The Excise Trap
By George · updated 2026-08-24 · checked against the 2026 Bahamas tariff schedule
Read the tariff schedule literally and a car imported into The Bahamas is duty-free. Every line under heading 8703 (motor cars) carries a 0% customs import duty. This is true, and it is one of the most expensive misunderstandings available to a Bahamian importer.
Those goods are not taxed under the Tariff Act. They are taxed under the Excise Act instead — a separate statute, a separate schedule, and a charge that is collected at the border just the same.
What carries excise
Around 500 tariff lines have an excise rate, and roughly 440 of them are customs-free. The pattern is consistent: goods the state wants to tax heavily for revenue or policy reasons are moved out of the duty schedule and into the excise schedule. In practice that means vehicles, fuel, alcohol, tobacco and firearms.
Vehicles are the headline case
Motor cars pay 0% customs duty and excise of 10% to 65% depending on what they are:
- Electric golf cars: 10%
- New motor vehicles, small engine: 25%
- New motor vehicles, mid-range engine: 45%
- Used motor vehicles: 65%, regardless of age — including vehicles over ten years old, and antique and vintage vehicles
The used-vehicle rate is the one that catches people. A used car imported at $12,000 is "duty-free" and still owes roughly $7,800 in excise before VAT and fees enter the picture.
Two kinds of excise, and only one of them can be estimated from a price
Ad valorem excise is a percentage of value, like duty — 478 of the 500 lines work this way, and a calculator can compute them exactly.
Specific excise is charged per unit of quantity, and 22 lines work this way: unleaded motor gasoline at $1.15 BSD per US gallon, diesel at $1.15 BSD per US gallon, vodka at $13.00 BSD per imperial gallon. No price-based calculator can produce these figures, because the charge does not depend on the price. It depends on how many gallons you brought in.
This is why duty242 will tell you an excise charge applies and refuse to put a number on it, rather than quietly showing zero. A zero would be a wrong answer presented as a right one.
The base is different too
Excise is charged on the customs value plus the fees and charges payable on entry — so the processing fee and any environmental levy are inside the excise base, while customs duty is not. Since excise lines are almost always customs-free anyway, that distinction rarely changes the arithmetic, but it does mean excise is not simply "duty by another name."
How to avoid being caught
Treat "0% duty" as an incomplete answer for anything in these categories. Check chapter 87 (vehicles), chapter 27 (fuels), chapter 22 (beverages and spirits) and chapter 93 (arms) on this site — the chapter and heading pages flag every excise line and show the rate where one is published.
For everything else — the electronics, clothing and household goods most people are actually importing — excise does not apply, and the four ordinary charges are the whole bill.