Brazil Import Tax Calculator (Remessa Conforme)

The question always comes at the same moment: the cart at the overseas store closed at forty-something dollars, shipping pushed it a bit higher, and there is no way to know what will be charged when the parcel lands. This page does that arithmetic under Brazil's Remessa Conforme programme, in force for individuals since August 2024. You enter the goods, shipping and insurance in dollars plus the day's exchange rate, and it returns the import duty, the state ICMS and the total you actually pay, with a table showing where each part comes from — because what confuses people is not the number, it is the order the pieces are calculated in.

The first thing customs looks at is not the price of the goods, it is the customs value: goods plus shipping plus insurance, added together. That total decides the band. Up to fifty dollars the import duty is 20%; above that it becomes 60%, minus a flat twenty-dollar allowance. That allowance exists precisely so there is no cliff at the border: without it, a fifty-dollar-and-one-cent purchase would cost far more than a round fifty. With it, the difference at that point is pennies, which is easy to check by nudging the value on this page.

Then comes ICMS, the state tax, and this is where mental arithmetic goes wrong. It is charged on a base that already includes the tax itself. At a 17% rate the sum is not multiplied by 0.17: it is divided by 0.83 and 17% taken from that, which comes to noticeably more. A hundred-dollar purchase at five and a half reais to the dollar gives a customs value of R$ 550, import duty of R$ 220 and ICMS of R$ 157.71. The rate field is editable because, although 17% is the nationally agreed figure, it is worth checking your own state. What the page does not cover: product-specific taxes, postal handling fees, and anything under the corporate import regime.