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Landed Cost Calculator

Split freight, duty and every other shipment charge across your products, properly.

What is landed cost?

Landed cost is the total cost of getting one unit of a product to your warehouse and ready to sell. It is the supplier price plus that unit's share of freight, import duty, customs brokerage, inspection and any other charge billed against the shipment as a whole.

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Currencies

Products

Your shipment

ProductSKUQtyUnit priceLine totalWeight (kg)

Charges

Shipment charges

Freight, duty and anything else billed across the whole shipment. These are shared across your products, not charged to one of them.

Enter a quantity and a price to see your landed costs.

The allocation is the whole problem

Landed cost is simple to define and awkward to compute. The definition is uncontroversial: everything you paid to get a unit into your warehouse, divided by the units. The awkwardness is that the charges do not arrive per unit. Your forwarder bills one freight amount for a container. Customs assesses duty on the shipment. The inspection company invoices per visit, not per SKU. You are left holding four lump sums and a packing list of thirty products, and no obvious way to connect them.

Whatever you do next is an allocation choice, including doing nothing. Spreading freight evenly across SKUs is a choice, and usually a bad one, because it charges a pallet of ceramics the same freight as a box of stickers. The three defensible methods are by value, by weight and by unit count, and which is right depends on what the charge was actually driven by.

Freight is driven by space and mass, so weight is normally the honest allocation, and volumetric weight is closer still if your forwarder billed that way. Duty is assessed on declared customs value, so value is the correct basis and anything else will disagree with your own customs paperwork. Brokerage and inspection are usually per-shipment overheads with no per-product driver at all, in which case units or value are both reasonable and the difference is small. This calculator lets you set a default and then override it per charge, because a real shipment usually needs more than one rule.

Two details matter more than they look. First, freight to your country is very often invoiced in your own currency even though the goods are priced in the supplier's, so each charge here carries its own currency and only the ones that need converting get converted. Second, the arithmetic has to reconcile: your per-line landed costs must add up to the shipment total to the cent, or you will spend an afternoon hunting a rounding difference. Every column below is reconciled exactly, on purpose.

Common Questions

Frequently Asked Questions

What is the landed cost formula?

Landed cost per unit equals the line total for that product, plus its allocated share of every shipment-level charge, divided by the quantity. The allocated share depends on whether you split the charge by value, by weight or by unit count.

Should I allocate freight by weight or by value?

By weight, in most cases. Carriers price on mass and volume, so weight tracks what actually drove the bill. Value allocation overcharges expensive light items and undercharges cheap heavy ones, which is how a dense low-margin product ends up looking profitable.

Does landed cost include customs duty?

Yes. Duty is a cost of importing the goods and belongs in landed cost. Allocate it by declared value, since that is the basis customs used to assess it.

What about GST or VAT on imports?

It depends on whether you can claim it back. If you are registered and recover the import GST or VAT, it is not a cost and should not be in landed cost. If you cannot recover it, it is a genuine cost and belongs there.

How do I handle a charge billed in a different currency?

Set that charge's currency using the selector beside it. Freight is frequently invoiced locally while the goods are priced in USD, so each charge is converted, or not, independently of the others.

Why do the totals need to reconcile exactly?

Because you will reconcile them against the supplier invoice, and a rounding drift of a few cents across thirty lines is indistinguishable from a data-entry mistake. The per-line figures here sum exactly to the totals shown.