Nigeria is the corridor where the fee stack, not the tariff, decides whether the shipment was profitable. Duty is one line; CISS, the ETLS levy, the 7% surcharge and 7.5% VAT sit around it, and every one of them is charged on a different base. Add the paperwork that has to exist before the vessel arrives and you have the most easily mis-costed market on this site.
This is the structural trap in Nigeria. Most markets have one duty and one tax. Nigeria has a duty, a supervisory levy on the goods value, an ECOWAS levy on the CIF value, a surcharge calculated on the duty itself, and VAT on the duty-paid value. Multiply the wrong base and the error is not small.
Chinese suppliers normally quote FOB for Nigeria. Keep the FOB value clean and documented — Nigerian Customs works from its own reference valuation (the benchmark value) and will substitute it if your invoice looks low. An underpriced invoice does not reduce duty; it triggers a valuation query and a held container.
2026 planning figures, all in USD per container:
| Port pair | 40ft HQ | 20ft GP | Transit |
|---|---|---|---|
| Apapa (Lagos) | ~$4,200 | ~$2,650 | 32–42 days |
| Tin Can Island (Lagos) | ~$4,250 | ~$2,700 | 32–42 days |
| Onne (Port Harcourt) | ~$4,600 | ~$2,900 | 35–45 days |
| Tema (Ghana) + road to Lagos | ~$4,000 | ~$2,500 | 30–38 days + 4–7 days |
West Africa carries the highest ocean rate of any corridor on this site and the least reliable schedule. Build two weeks of slack into any promise you make to a Nigerian customer, and never quote from a rate that is more than a month old.
The ECOWAS Common External Tariff uses four bands — 5% for raw materials and capital goods, 10% for intermediate goods, 20% for final consumer goods, 35% for protected categories. Cosmetics, apparel and most finished consumer products sit at 20% or 35%. On this shipment duty is $4,555, 20% of the CIF value.
These are the lines that make a copied landed-cost sheet wrong by 5–10% of the cargo value:
Nigerian VAT is charged on CIF plus duty plus the levies, so by the time it lands, every earlier charge has been taxed. A VAT-registered Nigerian business recovers it; a trader selling through informal channels does not, and in practice this is the line that turns a 15% margin into a 5% one.
| Charge | Typical range |
|---|---|
| Terminal handling (THC) | $450–$650 per 40ft |
| Clearing agent + PAAR processing | $300–$450 |
| SONCAP certificate (per shipment) | $500–$1,200 |
| Apapa → Lagos mainland delivery | $500–$800 |
| Demurrage after free days | $80–$200 per day, rising steeply |
Budget the demurrage. Lagos terminal free time is short, the access roads are congested, and a container that misses its slot can cost more in a week than the entire CISS and ETLS lines combined.
FOB $18,500 of goods, $4,200 of ocean freight into West Africa (Lagos / Tema), 9,000 sellable units, and the reference duty rate for HS chapter 33. Every line below comes from the same engine the calculator runs:
| Component | Basis | Amount |
|---|---|---|
| Goods — FOB value | Supplier quote (FOB) | $18,500.00 |
| Main freight to destination port | Forwarder | $4,200.00 |
| Marine / cargo insurance (0.3% on 110% CIF) | 0.30% on 110% CIF | $75.16 |
| Import duty (20% on CIF) | 20% × CIF | $4,555.03 |
| CISS (Comprehensive Import Supervision) | 1% of FOB | $185.00 |
| ETLS (ECOWAS levy) | 0.5% of CIF | $113.88 |
| Port surcharge (7% of duty) | 7% of duty | $318.85 |
| Destination port, THC, brokerage & docs | Agent estimate | $1,140.00 |
| Inland delivery to final destination | Estimate | $700.00 |
| VAT (7.5%) | 7.5% × (CIF + duty) | $2,102.26 |
| Total landed cost | — | $31,890 |
| Cost per sellable unit (9,000 units) | — | $3.54 |
| Uplift over FOB | — | +72.4% |
Read the composition rather than the total. Freight and insurance together are 13.4% of the landed cost, duty is 14.3%, and VAT is 6.6%. The line that looks biggest is the one a registered importer gets back.
Nigeria assesses duty on the CIF value, so the ocean bill is taxed at 20% before the container is unloaded. Freight on this shipment is 22.7% of the goods value — one of the highest ratios on this site — which means $840 of the duty you pay is duty charged on freight. Then ETLS and VAT are charged on the same inflated base.
That inverts the advice that works everywhere else. On a FOB-basis market like Mexico a cheaper carrier is free money; here a freight bill is taxed before it is paid. What each $1,000 of ocean freight actually costs:
| Charged on the freight | Rate | Per $1,000 of freight |
|---|---|---|
| Import duty | 20% of the CIF value | $200.00 |
| ETLS levy | 0.5% of the CIF value | $5.00 |
| VAT | 7.5% of CIF + duty + levies, so it taxes the freight twice | $90.38 |
| Tax on one freight dollar | — | $295.38 |
A dollar of freight costs $1.30, and a forwarder who makes a rate look cheaper by moving cost from destination charges into the ocean leg has quietly raised your duty. It also means the usual advice to consolidate carries a penalty here that it does not carry in a FOB-basis market.
A Lagos entry carries charges that do not scale with the cargo — terminal handling, the clearing agent and PAAR processing, and SONCAP certification. On the ranges printed above they come to about $1,775 per shipment, or 9.6% of the goods value on an order this size. Ship the same volume as two entries and you pay it twice: an extra $1,775 for no extra product.
Combined, the two effects argue against the instinct to split an order. A smaller first shipment reduces inventory risk and raises landed cost per unit through the fixed charges, while a fuller container lowers freight per unit without lowering duty per unit at all — duty follows value, not volume.
A Form M must be registered through an authorised dealer bank before shipment, and a Pre-Arrival Assessment Report (PAAR) must be issued before the container arrives. No PAAR means no clearance, and no clearance means the demurrage clock is running against you from day one. This is the single most common cause of a Nigerian shipment turning unprofitable.
Regulated products need a SONCAP Product Certificate and a Certificate of Conformity, arranged in China through an accredited body. Without it the goods are stuck at the port or rejected outright. Build it into the production schedule, not the shipping schedule.
Cosmetics, food, drugs, packaged water and medical devices are regulated by NAFDAC and need product registration, which runs on months. A cosmetic licence is not a customs document and cannot be obtained after arrival.
Value honestly. The benchmark-value system means an under-declared invoice is detected, and the penalty is a valuation query plus two weeks of demurrage. The expected value of under-declaring is negative. The landed cost calculator gives you a defensible number to work with instead.
Register Form M early. Bank processing times move. Start the Form M when you place the deposit, not when the goods ship — every day saved on documentation is a day off the demurrage clock.
Weigh freight against duty. At 20% duty on CIF, freight increases duty. A $4,200 ocean rate on a $18,500 shipment is 23% of the goods value, so 20% duty is being paid on freight too. Consolidating a part container is sometimes cheaper than filling one, because the duty on the freight tail outweighs the freight saving.
Fill the box, but watch the duty interaction. Freight per unit falls with fill rate; duty per unit does not, because duty follows value. On high-tariff consumer goods the second effect dominates — check both numbers before you assume a fuller container is always better.
Price demurrage into the quote. Two weeks of contingency on a Lagos routing is not pessimism, it is the observed mean. A quote without it is a quote that will be renegotiated after arrival.
Three of the seven tools on this site are what this corridor actually needs, and they are not the same three as on the German or Nigerian route.
Freight is the highest and least stable number on this page: a 2026 planning benchmark of about $4,200 for a 40ft HQ into Apapa, roughly twice a North Europe rate for a comparable distance. Capacity into West Africa is thin, vessel turns are slow and the schedule is unreliable, so a rate older than a month is not evidence.
Duty is the ECOWAS Common External Tariff, which uses four bands — 5% for raw materials and capital goods, 10% for intermediate goods, 20% for final consumer goods, 35% for protected categories. HS 33 sits at 20% on the CIF value. The band, not the product, is what makes Nigerian duty expensive.
CISS at 1% of FOB, ETLS at 0.5% of CIF and the 7% port surcharge on the duty itself are statutory and are modelled as separate lines by the calculator. They are the part of this stack that generic templates always miss, and together they are worth more than the entire freight line on some shipments.
The fixed charges in the decision table are mid-points of the ranges printed above, used for comparison only. SONCAP in particular varies by product category and by the number of models on the certificate.
The calculator opens pre-set to Nigeria with this chapter's reference duty rate, the freight benchmark above and your unit count. Change the chapter, drop in your forwarder's real rate, and add any additional tariff programme on its own line:
For a typical consumer product at 20% ECOWAS duty, add CISS at 1% of FOB, ETLS at 0.5% of CIF, a 7% surcharge on the duty, and 7.5% VAT on the duty-paid value. The effective burden lands somewhere between 26% and 34% of the CIF value depending on the tariff band — materially more than the headline duty rate.
For regulated product categories, yes. SONCAP has two parts: a Product Certificate registered per product and manufacturer, and a Certificate of Conformity issued per shipment. Both are arranged in China before shipment. Goods arriving without a valid CoC are refused clearance.
Yes. Customs applies its own reference valuation and will substitute it when the declared value falls below it. This is why an artificially low invoice is a bad strategy rather than a clever one: it produces a valuation query, a delay, and demurrage that exceeds any duty saved.
Capacity is limited relative to demand, the round trip is slow, and port productivity constrains how quickly vessels turn. $4,200 for a 40ft HQ is a normal 2026 planning number, roughly twice a North Europe rate for a comparable distance.
The same six-layer model, with each destination's own customs basis, levies and certification: