Importing from China to Thailand

It is worth being exact about the evidence, because "check for yourself" is easy to say and easy to ignore.

The Thai Customs Department publishes its notifications in a list on its own site. In that list, the low-value regime appears as a notification about the criteria and customs procedures for exemption of customs duty on imports valued at not more than 1,500 baht — and it appears there as (ฉบับที่ 2), a *second edition*, dated 25 October 2024.

That single detail is the whole argument. It is not a rumour about Thai policy and not a prediction: it is the authority's own record that this specific rule had already been amended. A threshold that has been amended once is a threshold with a maintenance schedule, and a guide is the worst possible place to store one.

So the page refuses it. No threshold, no duty rate, no VAT rate. This site has now declined to publish a number thirty-five times, and this is the largest of them — an entire page's expected headline figure — because publishing it would do the exact damage the article is warning about.

And there is a live change worth naming without asserting. During 2025, professional tax advisories reported that the Customs Department had announced the ending of the duty exemption for goods valued at no more than 1,500 baht, with duties to be collected from 1 January 2026, and that an arrangement dating from June 2024 had already separated duty relief from excise and VAT. This page does not restate any of that as fact, because the operative notification text could not be verified against the Department's own publication from here. It is named precisely so that you check it — if it is right, it changes the economics of every small consignment on this route, and that is not something to learn from a customs bill.

The single most useful habit on this route is to stop saying "tax" and start naming which one.

Import duty is the charge for bringing goods across the border. It is set against your commodity code, it is a permanent cost rather than a recoverable one, and it is the tax that low-value relief schemes usually address.

Excise tax is a separate charge on particular categories of goods, imposed for reasons that have nothing to do with trade policy. It is easy to forget entirely because most products never meet it — and expensive to forget if yours does.

Value-added tax is charged on imports as it is on domestic supply, and — unlike duty — it is the one that a registered business may be able to recover. That difference is why "how much tax" is a bad question and "how much of this is a cost and how much is a cash-flow item" is a good one.

Now the point. Because these are three different instruments, they can be relieved separately — and in Thailand they have been. So a guide that reports one threshold has told you about at most one of the three, and the reader who acts on it discovers the other two at the border. Ask about all three by name.

The Customs Department's own notification list is the primary place. It is published on its website, it is dated, and amendments appear as new editions of the same notification — which is how you can tell that a rule has moved rather than guessing.

Second, your customs broker. Ask a specific question rather than a general one: *for commodity code X, CIF value Y, arriving on date Z, what duty, what excise and what VAT apply?* That gets an answer in minutes. "What does it cost to import from China?" gets a shrug, and deserves one.

Third, the courier or forwarder's own current notice. Carriers publish operational notices when a collection mechanism changes, because their systems have to change too — and those notices are usually dated and specific, which makes them a useful cross-check even though they are not the law.

And check the date on everything, including the page you are reading. An undated article about a threshold is not information; it is a photograph of somebody's afternoon.

You, or a Thai company you control, are the importer of record, and the accuracy of the declaration is that party's responsibility however the goods arrive and whoever typed the entry.

Your commodity code decides almost everything downstream. The duty rate, whether an excise category applies, whether a restriction applies, and whether any relief scheme reaches your goods at all — every one of those hangs on the code. Getting it right early is cheaper than getting it right during an inspection.

Restrictions and permits are a different system from tax. A shipment can be perfectly priced and still be stopped, because the ministry that regulates your product category is not the ministry that collects the money. Settle the permission question before the goods are made, not before they are shipped.

Thailand is close to South China, which changes the mode calculation in the same way it does for Malaysia: the sea leg is short, so the fixed steps at each end are a larger share of the elapsed time than the general "sea is slow" rule implies. Decide on your own density and value rather than on a rule of thumb.

And whatever the current low-value rule says, do not build a business model on it. Every country in this region has moved its low-value treatment in the last three years, in the same direction, for the same reason. A model that only works while a small-parcel exemption exists is a model with somebody else's policy inside it.