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How to Check a Customs Declaration
Customs Compliance · September 2026 How to Check a Customs Declaration: A Practical Guide A transposed digit in a Commodity Code is still a valid
14 September 2026
If the UK has a trade deal with the country you're shipping to or from, you can often pay a lower rate of import duty, sometimes none at all. But new figures show a fair number of businesses aren't getting that lower rate, even when they're entitled to it. Here's what's going on, and how to check your own shipments.
Most goods coming into or leaving the UK are charged a standard rate of import duty. This standard rate is called the MFN rate (short for "Most Favoured Nation"), and it applies no matter which country you're trading with.
But where the UK has a trade agreement with another country, goods that qualify can be charged a lower rate instead, sometimes 0%. This lower rate is called preference, and using it is called "claiming preference."
To claim it, the goods have to meet that agreement's own rules about where they were made or produced. This is called "rules of origin," and it's a bit more involved than it sounds, more on that below.
HMRC's most recent figures show that 90% of eligible goods imported into Great Britain from the EU claimed preference in 2024, meaning they got the lower rate. That's a good result, it's a well-established trade deal that's easy to use. But turn that round: roughly one in ten importers who could have paid less duty on their EU goods didn't claim it.
Research from the UK Trade Policy Observatory found the picture is patchier on other trade routes, and that UK businesses tend to be less consistent about claiming preference than their EU counterparts, especially on smaller or occasional shipments.
This usually isn't carelessness. Most businesses missing out aren't ignoring the trade deals they have access to. They're claiming preference reliably on their regular, high-volume shipments, and missing it everywhere else, often without realising.
There are a few reasons a business ends up paying full duty when they didn't need to. Here are the most common ones.
Just because something is made in the UK doesn't automatically mean it qualifies for preference under a trade deal. Each agreement has its own rules about how much of the product has to be made or processed in that country. You have to check the specific rule for your product, not assume it applies.
If you buy in parts or materials from other suppliers and use them in what you make or sell, you usually need a document from that supplier confirming where their part of it came from. You don't need to hand this over at the point of import, but you do need to keep it on record. If HMRC checks the claim later and the paperwork isn't there, the claim can be unpicked retrospectively, even if the goods genuinely did qualify.
Every product has a code that customs uses to work out the duty rate and the origin rule that applies to it. If the code is wrong, the wrong rule gets applied, sometimes the goods get marked as "doesn't qualify" when actually they do.
On smaller or one-off shipments, some businesses decide the paperwork isn't worth doing, without actually working out what they'd save. In practice it's rarely much work: check the origin claim is genuinely justified, then instruct your forwarder or customs agent to apply it on the declaration. That instruction is the part that's easy to skip.
A forwarder or customs agent can only claim preference if you tell them to, clearly, and give them what they need to do it. Sending an invoice and assuming they'll spot it isn't enough. And the legal responsibility for getting it right stays with you as the importer or exporter, even when someone else is filing the declaration on your behalf.
Say you're exporting a machinery part worth £40,000 to a country the UK has a trade deal with.
That £2,400 is paid or saved depending entirely on whether the origin claim was justified, evidenced, and actually instructed on the declaration. Now multiply that across a year of regular shipments on the same product, and it stops being a small thing. It's real money, sitting unclaimed.
Worth ten minutes if you haven't looked at this recently. For each country you trade with:
That final number is usually the clearest sign of whether it's worth getting your origin paperwork properly sorted, and making sure whoever's filing your declarations knows to claim it.
No. Each trade agreement has its own rules about what counts as "made" in the UK for that product. You need to check the specific rule, not assume it applies just because manufacturing happened here.
More often than not, it's that the forwarder or customs agent handling the declaration was never clearly instructed to claim preference. Brokers can only act on what they're told, and legal responsibility for the claim stays with the importer or exporter regardless of who filed it. Missing supplier paperwork is a real risk too, but it tends to surface later, at audit, rather than being the reason a claim doesn't get made in the first place.
Yes, generally. Goods can transit through, or be stored in, another country without losing their origin, as long as they stay under customs supervision and nothing is done to them beyond things like unloading, reloading, or storage. What breaks a claim is if the goods are processed, worked on, or altered while they're there. Simply passing through isn't the problem.
Five things to work through, roughly in this order.
Getting the export process right, documentation, commodity codes, preference paperwork prepared properly at the point of shipment, is where this starts. Our Guide to Exporting & Export Documentation course covers it end to end.
If you want to go further into the origin calculation itself, applying product-specific rules, working with supplier declarations, using cumulation properly, our Rules of Origin course is built for exactly that.
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Whether you need immediate help with a trade issue, want to strengthen your internal processes or are looking for the right training or service, we can point you in the right direction.
