The one thing this will never tell you
We will not tell you what customs code your goods belong under. Not a better one, not a cheaper one, not a ranked list, not a hint. Working that out for somebody else is, by name, part of what United States law calls customs business, and doing customs business for anybody other than yourself needs a customs broker’s licence. We do not hold one.
That is not caution. It is the law, read out of the published text and re-checked on every build. All 5 quoted sentences below were searched for word for word in the copies of the statute and the regulation we fetched and saved ourselves. One mismatch and this page does not build.
Take this to your licensed customs broker. We are not one, so we may not pick a customs code for you, and we have not tried to.
What the law actually saysUnited States Code, 2024 edition; Code of Federal Regulations title 19 as issued 2026-08-20; both read 2026-08-24
| In plain words | The text itself | Where |
|---|---|---|
| Working out which customs code somebody's goods belong under is, by name, part of what the law calls 'customs business'. | The term "customs business" means those activities involving transactions with U.S. Customs and Border Protection concerning the entry and admissibility of merchandise, its classification and valuation, the payment of duties, taxes, or other charges assessed or collected by U.S. Customs and Border Protection upon merchandise by reason of its importation, or the refund, rebate, or drawback thereof. | 19 U.S.C. § 1641(a)(2) |
| You need a customs broker's licence to do customs business for anybody other than yourself. We do not have one, and that is why this product never picks a code for anybody. | No person may conduct customs business (other than solely on behalf of that person) unless that person holds a valid customs broker's license issued by the Secretary under paragraph (2) or (3). | 19 U.S.C. § 1641(b)(1) |
| The same sentence carves out doing it for yourself. An importer classifying their own goods needs no licence - which is why handing them a list of questions about their own records is a real product and not a workaround. | No person may conduct customs business (other than solely on behalf of that person) unless that person holds a valid customs broker's license | 19 U.S.C. § 1641(b)(1) |
| The customs regulation defines the same phrase the same way, and classification is in it. | “Customs business” means those activities involving transactions with CBP concerning the entry and admissibility of merchandise, its classification and valuation, the payment of duties, taxes, or other charges assessed or collected by CBP on merchandise by reason of its importation, and the refund, rebate, or drawback of those duties, taxes, or other charges. | 19 C.F.R. § 111.1 |
| The regulation names a kind of checking that is NOT customs business - making sure documents are prepared with reasonable care, without preparing or filing them. Read it before assuming it covers us: it is written for a business checking a RELATED business, and we are neither. | “Corporate compliance activity” means activity performed by a business entity to ensure that documents for a related business entity or entities are prepared and filed with CBP using “reasonable care”, but such activity does not extend to the actual preparation or filing of the documents or their electronic equivalents. | 19 C.F.R. § 111.1 |
The five kinds of disagreement it looks for
Every one of them is a question about your own paperwork, and every one of them is answerable out of the two documents you already have: your list, and the published table. None of them says a code is wrong.
| The question it asks | Found in the example below | Printed here |
|---|---|---|
| The code filed is not in this edition of the published table at all. | 1 | yes |
| What was paid per dollar is not the rate the published table prints for that code. | 1 | yes |
| The same code on two lines, with two different amounts of duty per dollar. | 1 | yes |
| The same item number, or the same description, filed under two different codes. | 1 | yes |
| Their words for the item and the table's words for the code share nothing. | 3 | no — see below |
The fourth one is missing from this page on purpose. To ask whether your words and the table’s words describe the same thing, we have to print the table’s words — and those belong to the people who publish the table. 3 of them were found in the example below and none is printed. The section after next says why.
A worked example, on a list we made upinvented list, real codes, real published rates
Every item number and every description in the list below is invented. Nobody sent us this. What is real is the codes — they are genuine lines out of the published table — so the comparisons underneath are against real published rates and a real published list of codes.
| Item no | Their description | Code | Origin | Entered value | Duty paid |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| W-11 | BLUE WIDGET ASSY 24V | 8543.70.98.10 | CN | $12,400.00 | $322.40 |
| W-11 | BLUE WIDGET ASSY 24V | 8543.70.45.00 | CN | $8,000.00 | $208.00 |
| W-12 | amp board v2 | 8543.70.98.10 | MX | $10,000.00 | $900.00 |
| W-13 | SPARE BRACKET, STEEL | 9911.22.33.44 | VN | $5,000.00 | $150.00 |
| W-14 | touch panel 7in | 8543.70.95.00 | KR | $40,000.00 | $0.00 |
Run through the real checker at the moment this page was built, that list produced 7 findings. 4 of them are printed here. 3 are held back because they would have carried the publisher’s own words.
| What it found | On which lines |
|---|---|
| On code 8543.70.98.10 your records show duty at 2.6% and 9.0% of value on different lines. Same code, different rate. | 2, 4 |
| Your own list gives the same description — “blue widget assy 24v” — two different customs codes: 8543.70.45.00 and 8543.70.98.10. Is that on purpose? | 2, 3 |
| On line 4 you paid 9.0% of value in duty. The published general rate for 8543.70.98.10 is 2.6%. Those are different numbers. | 4 |
| Code 9911.22.33.44 is not in the published tariff we read (2026 HTS Revision 17). Where did this one come from? | 5 |
Notice what is not here. Nowhere does any of that say which code is right. It says your own list disagrees with itself in four places and asks you about it. What you do with that is between you and somebody who holds the licence we do not.
The published table we read, and the words we may not reprint2026 HTS Revision 17, fetched 2026-08-24
| What we counted | How many |
|---|---|
| Lines in the published file we saved | 35,796 |
| Codes we hold from it | 29,852 |
| Ten-digit codes — the kind you actually file | 19,949 |
| Of those, carrying a duty rate of their own | 8,112 |
| Of those, inheriting the rate from the line above | 11,836 |
| Of those, with no rate anywhere | 1 |
| Codes named by an extra-duty heading in chapter 99 | 2,723 |
- Most codes do not carry their own rate11,836 of the 19,949 ten-digit codes take their rate from the eight-digit line above them. Read the line you filed literally and most of the table comes back ‘no duty rate’, which is false. Wherever a rate is used here, the code it was actually taken from is recorded beside it.
- The published rate is not the whole dutyChapter 99 adds trade measures on top, and 2,723 codes in this edition are named by one. So a rate that disagrees with what you paid is not evidence you overpaid. Both numbers go side by side and neither is called the right one.
- We could not read the publisher’s terms, in either directionOn 2026-08-24 we asked their site for its terms as ourselves, and asked it for an address we invented as a control. Both came back refused, and their table’s own site served a three-word page a browser can read and we cannot. That is an unknown, and unknown is never permission. So this page prints no line of their prose.
- That is checked, not promisedBefore this page is written, every one of the 35,934 distinct pieces of description text in our copy of the table is held against it. That is more pieces than there are codes because every code carries two: its own few words, and the full heading path they hang under. If any of them appears in full, or if any run of 8 words is shared with one, the page does not build. Code numbers and your own words need nobody’s permission; their prose does.
Six things the code refuses to do
- It never picks a code. The finished document is searched for 20 phrases that only turn up when somebody is choosing a code for somebody else, and a single hit stops delivery. That same search is run over this page, on every build, including its address.
- A rate that disagrees is never called an overpayment. Both numbers, side by side, neither one called right.
- A compound rate is never turned into a percentage. A rate charged partly by weight cannot become a percentage without knowing the weight, so those lines are simply not compared.
- No finding rests on a field the two readings disagreed about. Your list is read twice, by two methods. Where they disagree the answer is unknown, and unknown is a complete answer.
- An inherited rate is never quietly presented as the line’s own. The code it came from is printed next to it.
- A zero in the extra-duty count never means ‘no extra duty’. Chapter 99 also bites by country and by description, and those name no code at all. The three answers are named, not named, and unknown.
Where the words on this page came from
- The law, quoted in full — and we may quote itThe publisher of the United States Code says so in writing, in a notice we fetched and read on 2026-08-24: “The intent of the section is to place in the public domain all work of the United States Government, which is defined in 17 U.S.C. § 101 as work prepared by an officer or employee of the United States Government as part of the person's official duties. By virtue of the foregoing, public documents can generally be reprinted without legal restriction.” Credit is customary, not required. Both saved texts are re-searched for every quote above on every build.
- The table of codes — counted, never quoted2026 HTS Revision 17, taken from the publisher’s own release address and saved on 2026-08-24. The edition is a fact about the document, not the day we ran. Every number about it on this page is our own count of our own copy.
- The example list — ours, and worthless as dataWritten for this page. No importer sent it, it describes nobody, and the only real things in it are the code numbers.
- Nobody’s name is on this pageThe estate’s own person-detector is run, before this page is written, over every cell of the example list and every cell of every finding built from it — the places a real name could arrive if this were ever pointed at somebody’s actual records. One hit and the page does not build. It is not run over the ordinary prose here, because it is built to grade a cell that is meant to hold a name and it reads ‘United States’ as a person.
There is nothing to buy here yet
No pay button on this one yet. Email operations@ustechautomations.com. There is no address to send an import list to and we are not pretending there is one. The checker above is working code and the law behind it is read and re-checked on every build; neither of those is a service you can use today. If you want to be told when it is one, or if you think we have read the law wrong, say so.
Email us about this pageWe hold one dated copy of the published table of codes and one dated reading of the law behind it. Both dates are printed above and both come from the documents, not from the day you are reading this.