Import duty in Cameroon

This page is not built from the Treasury's catalogue, because the Customs Directorate is not in it. The catalogue holds 405 services across 36 publishing bodies. The Ministry of Transport has 55 of them. The Ministry of Finance has one. The Directorate General of Customs has none.

We searched the catalogue for douane, customs, dédouanement, droit de douane, import duty and tarif extérieur. Nine records matched on any of those words, and not one is an import duty. The only record that carries the word Customs in its title is a meat circulation tax published by the Livestock, Fisheries and Animal Industries ministry. Searching for shipping, fret, maritime and port returns 106 records, all of them transport licences: approval to manage an intercity road transport terminal, approval to practise a maritime profession, fines in the river and lake transport sub-sector. None of them is freight.

So the register has no import duty rate, no tariff band, no clearing fee and no port charge. Everything below is read from the Finance Laws, the General Tax Code, the World Trade Organization's review of Cameroon's trade policy, and what the single window publishes about itself.

The tariff changed on 1 January 2026

Most of what is published about Cameroonian import duty describes a tariff that stopped applying on 31 December 2025.

The 2026 Finance Law, Law No. 2025/012 of 17 December 2025, does it in two articles. We read them on the certified true copy filed by the Presidency at prc.cm.

Article twenty-one gives legal force in Cameroon, from 1 January 2026, to the Harmonised CEEAC-CEMAC Customs Code, adopted by Decision No. 5/CEEAC/CCEG/XXV/24 of 18 October 2024.

Article twenty-two implements in Cameroon, from the same date, the Harmonised CEEAC Common External Tariff, adopted by Decision No. 14/CEEAC/CCEG/XXV/24 of 18 October 2024.

Both decisions were taken by the eleven member states of the Economic Community of Central African States on 18 October 2024. The Directorate General of Customs, quoted by the National Shippers' Council of Cameroon, describes the new tariff as running from 0% to 40% depending on the product. The council gives worked illustrations: 0% on cereal seed and on aircraft and air transport machinery, 5% to 20% on live animals, passenger vehicles, tractors, dairy and cement, 20% on pork and beef, fish, toys, musical instruments, weapons and furniture, and the 40% maximum on cocoa powder, tobacco products, mineral water, cotton and polyester fabric and ready to wear clothing.

We could not verify the band structure of the new tariff from a primary source. We did not find the text of Decision No. 14/CEEAC/CCEG/XXV/24, or a published nomenclature, on any host we could reach. The 0% to 40% range and the examples above come from the customs administration as relayed by the shippers' council, which is a public body but not the issuing authority. Until we read the decision itself, this page gives you the range and not a list of bands.

What the old tariff was, and why it still matters

The tariff that applied until 31 December 2025 was the CEMAC common external tariff. The World Trade Organization's Secretariat described it in its trade policy review of the CEMAC countries, WT/TPR/S/445 of 16 August 2023.

The tariff ran to 6,064 ten digit lines, every one of them ad valorem. Just under half of the lines, 45.5%, sat at 10%, and 37.1% sat at 30%. The simple average applied rate was 18.3%. Only 0.7% of lines were duty free.

We hold the Commission's own printed tariff, and it does not agree with that table. The book is the January 2009 edition, typeset for the Commission under an ISBN, and the tariff in it was adopted by Act No. 16/96-UDEAC-556-CD-57 of 1 July 1996. Its rate schedule prints four categories rather than five, and it puts 10% against category three, "biens intermédiaires et divers", where the WTO says 20%. The same line of the same document spells category four "biens e consommation courante".

The book contradicts itself, which is how we can tell which of the two figures is wrong. We counted the rates on its own tariff lines. 5,503 of them carry a ten digit code, we could read a duty against 5,229, and 644 of those are at 20%, a rate the summary table says does not exist. So the 10% is a dropped digit, and we are telling you that rather than reprinting it without comment. It is not the only one: line 4407.29.25, sawn moabi, prints 3% where every sawn timber line around it prints 30%.

Counting those lines told us something more useful than the misprint. The 2009 book puts 278 lines at 5%, 2,407 at 10%, 644 at 20% and 1,895 at 30%, and the simple average is 18.22%. The WTO, describing the tariff as applied fourteen years later, gives 45.5% of lines at 10%, 37.1% at 30% and an average of 18.3%. Ours are 46.1% and 36.3%. That is the same schedule. The tariff Cameroon applied until 31 December 2025 was, line for line, substantially the book printed in January 2009. The visible difference is at the bottom of it: the WTO found 0.7% of lines duty free, and the 2009 book has no duty free lines at all.

Five of our readings fell outside the four bands. Four are our own text extraction lifting a figure out of a product description, which we checked by eye. The fifth is the moabi line above.

This matters for two reasons. First, almost every aggregator still publishes these five bands as current, and some publish only four of them. Second, Cameroonian law still points at the old code. The 2026 edition of the General Tax Code, article 138, defines the taxable value for import VAT and excise by reference to "articles 23 to 26 of the CEMAC Customs Code". The customs code those articles belong to was replaced on 1 January 2026 by the instrument that the same year's Finance Law enacted. The tax code and the Finance Law, both for 2026, name different customs codes. We cannot tell you which the counter applies.

Everything that rides on top of the duty

The duty is the smallest part of what an importer pays. Each line below gives the rate, the base it is calculated on, and the instrument that sets it.

CGI below is the General Tax Code, 2026 edition. LF is the Finance Law for the year named. CIF is the customs value.

Four of these need explaining, because the published figures do not agree.

VAT is 19.25%, not 17.5%. Article 142 (1) a of the tax code sets the general VAT rate at 17.5%. Article C 83 (1) adds a council surtax of 10% of the VAT principal. Together they come to 19.25% of the base. Article 142 (2) says in terms that the surtax included in the general rate applies to imported goods as well as local ones. The WTO's reviewers noted that 19.25% sits above the 15% to 19% range the CEMAC directive allows.

The council surtax on excise is 5%, not 10%. This is the detail almost nobody carries. Article C 83 (2) sets the surtax on excise duty, special income tax and public procurement registration duty at 5% of the principal, against 10% for income tax, corporation tax and VAT. An excise rate of 12.5% therefore costs 13.125% of its base.

The customs IT fee is published at two different rates. The 2023 Finance Law, Law No. 2022/020 of 27 December 2022, article nine, sets it at "1% of the taxable value of the goods" and caps it "at 15,000 F CFA per export declaration". The WTO's August 2023 review says the rate is 0.45%, capped at 15,000 FCFA per declaration. We hold the Finance Law and read that line on it. We cannot reconcile the two, and the 0.45% figure is what circulates on commercial sites, sometimes relabelled as a CAMCIS fee. Note also what the cap says: it is written against export declarations, which on its face leaves the 1% uncapped on imports. The 2026 Finance Law, article twelve, reopened this article to change how the proceeds are split and marked the rate "unchanged".

We could not verify an African Union import levy in Cameroon. A 0.2% African Union levy is widely attributed to Cameroon. The document most often cited for it is a newsletter instituting the levy at 0.2% from 1 July 2017 under "Ordinance No. 2017-425 of 28 June 2017". That newsletter is Ivorian, not Cameroonian. It was issued by Côte d'Ivoire's state and private sector consultation committee, it gives Abidjan telephone numbers and the address www.douanes.ci, and the levy it describes replaces a reduction in the Community Solidarity Levy, which is a West African instrument and does not exist in CEMAC. We found no Cameroonian law, decree or circular creating the levy. The 2026 tax code, in the article listing the import charges a public partnership contract carries, names the common external tariff, VAT, the council surtax, the community integration contribution and the OHADA tax, and no African Union levy. This page carries no figure for it.

The community integration tax, by contrast, is one of the few figures on this page with a clean instrument. Additional Act No. 03/00-CEMAC-046-CM-05 of 14 December 2000 creates it, article 4 sets the base as "the customs value or the CIF value", and article 5 sets the rate at 1% and allows the Council of Ministers to change it by Regulation. The act says the tax forms an integral part of the CEMAC customs tariff. We read it in the Commission's own tariff. The one thing we cannot confirm is whether a later Council Regulation has moved the rate off 1%.

One further disagreement we cannot settle. The tax code names the Community Integration Contribution, the 0.4% levy that funds the Economic Community of Central African States, among the charges borne on imports. The WTO's 2023 review says that levy is "currently collected by the Congo, Gabon, the Central African Republic and Chad". Cameroon is not on that list. Both statements are about the same levy and they do not reconcile.

A rate is not a sum: the order the charges are stacked

The arithmetic depends on the order, and the order is set by article 138 of the tax code.

For excise, the base is the taxable value as defined by the customs code, plus the amount of the customs duty. For VAT, the base is the taxable value plus the customs duty plus the excise. So the duty is taxed twice over, once through excise and once through VAT, and where excise applies the VAT falls on the excise as well.

Article 141 then rounds the base down to the nearest thousand francs before the tax is computed.

The community levies work differently. The community integration tax, the OHADA levy and the customs IT fee are each taken on the customs value alone, not on the duty inclusive figure. The inspection tax is taken on the FOB value, which is the customs value before freight and insurance are added, so it is a smaller base than everything else on the page.

A worked example

A container of goods falling in the 20% band. FOB value 20,000,000 FCFA, freight and insurance 2,000,000 FCFA, so a customs value of 22,000,000 FCFA. No excise, because the goods are not in Annex II of Title I of the tax code. The importer is a company taxed under the régime du réel.

The duties and taxes come to 46.0% of the customs value. With the advance corporate tax, 48.0%.

Two things about that last line. The advance corporate tax is not a duty. It is a payment on account of corporation tax, set by article 21 of the tax code, and a company taxed under the régime du réel credits it against the corporation tax it owes. It is cash at the counter and it is not a cost. The rate is 2% under the régime du réel and 5% under the Impôt Général Synthétique. It is 10% for taxpayers not on the register of a tax centre, and 10% for simplified regime taxpayers who import. The WTO's 2023 review gives 1% and 5% on a base of CIF increased by duties and taxes including VAT. The 2026 tax code gives 2% and 5% on the customs value. We publish the tax code.

And the 0.95% inspection tax has a floor. The minimum is 110,000 FCFA per delivery or shipment, so on a small consignment the effective rate is much higher than 0.95%. The WTO worked the example: on an import of 2,000,000 FCFA, which is the threshold at which the programme bites at all, the 110,000 minimum is 5.5%.

None of the above includes what the port, the terminal, the shipping line or the clearing agent charges. Those are below, and they are not duties.

What the state charges, and what a private company charges

This is the distinction the register exists to hold, and Cameroonian law draws it for us.

Article 149 quinquies of the General Tax Code, introduced by the 2025 Finance Law, Law No. 2024/013 of 23 December 2024, sets out how VAT on port operations is collected. In doing so it lists, as taxable supplies by private parties, "the fees of licensed customs brokers" and "stevedoring, handling, scanning, inspection and control charges", and separately "the agency fees of ship consignees and maritime agents and the port charges invoiced by intermediaries".

Read that twice. The law treats the clearing agent's fee as an invoice from a business, bearing VAT, liquidated through the customs computer system when the declaration is validated. It is not a duty. Nobody remits it to the Treasury as a tax on the goods. The same is true of handling and storage.

So when a figure circulates for "the cost of clearing a container at Douala", most of it is not a government charge, and an increase in it is not a tax rise.

The clearing agent

Using a licensed customs broker is not optional. The 2025 Finance Law, article eleven, requires any import with an FOB value above 1,000,000 FCFA to be covered by an import declaration lodged on the single window platform "through a licensed customs broker". The single window repeats it: "Using a CDA is a regulatory requirement, it is not optional."

What the broker charges is where the sourcing gets thin, and we are going to say so plainly.

A document titled "Barème officiel des HAD au Cameroun", under the heading "I - Honoraires d'agréés en douane", circulates widely and sets a scale by bracket of CIF value: 50,000 FCFA below 1,000,000; 80,000 up to 2,000,000; 163,000 up to 6,000,000; 240,000 up to 10,000,000; and 245,000 plus 0.5% of the CIF value above that. It fixes a file opening fee at 25,000 FCFA per file whatever the operation, caps a loyalty discount at 15%, requires disbursements to be re invoiced at cost against receipts, and sets a single 1.50% ad valorem rate for cargo to or from Chad, the Central African Republic and the Congo.

We could not reach that document, and we could not establish who issued it. The host did not resolve from here. The copy that circulates carries no decree number, no date and no issuing authority. We publish the figures because they are what importers are quoted against, and we publish the gap with them.

What is certain is that the state now channels the fee. A June 2025 instruction of the Directorate General of Customs is reported to require that broker fees be liquidated and paid exclusively through the CAMCIS customs platform and carried on the customs liquidation bulletin, with billing outside that framework prohibited. The single window and the brokers signed a protocol on collecting the fees through its payment platform in June 2024. The shippers' council was petitioned in March 2024 over double billing of the same fees. A freely negotiated price is not normally liquidated inside a government system, sanctioned by protocol and audited for scale compliance. But we did not find the decree, arrêté or decision that creates or caps the scale, and one widely read commercial guide states flatly that no mandatory official scale exists and that fees are freely negotiated. The legal status of the scale is unresolved on this page.

Port and handling charges at Douala

Tariffs for port services are not set by the operator alone. The National Port Authority, created by Law No. 98/021 of 24 December 1998 and organised by Decree No. 2019/172 of 5 April 2019, approves port service tariffs and controls their application. The tariffs it approves are reported to be ceiling tariffs, which means a published figure is a maximum and not a fixed price.

The container terminal at Douala has been run since 1 January 2020 by the Régie du Terminal à Conteneurs, a delegated public operation, after the previous concession ended on 31 December 2019. Handling and stevedoring prices at that terminal are reported to rest on an arrêté of the Minister of Commerce of 21 September 2000, amended by arrêté No. 036/MINCOMMERCE/CAB of 27 January 2006, which would make them a price set by a minister rather than by the terminal. Tariffs are quoted exclusive of VAT. Empty containers are charged at half the full rate.

Goods have a free period at the port before storage charges start. It is reported at eleven days, under article 44 of Decree No. 85/1278 of 26 September 1985, with the terminal's own operating rules counting eleven working days from the vessel's arrival. Calendar days and working days are not the same thing and the sources do not agree on which applies.

We publish no storage, handling or demurrage figure. The amounts we found are of 2018 and 2021 vintage, come from trade compilations and news reports rather than from a tariff, and the one attempt to read the terminal's own schedule produced two mutually inconsistent readings of the same table. An out of date number presented as current is worse than no number.

One distinction is worth carrying even without figures. Demurrage and detention are paid to the shipping line for keeping its container. Storage and ground occupation are paid to the port. They are different charges from different parties and they are routinely conflated.

The cargo tracking note

The electronic cargo tracking note, the BESC, is issued by the National Shippers' Council of Cameroon and has been required since November 2022. Its tariff is denominated in euros for imports. The schedule the authorities gave the WTO for 2022 sets conventional bulk and food products at 100 euros per bill of lading from anywhere, containers at 55 euros per bill of lading per tranche of 10 TEU from Africa and Europe and 100 euros from the rest of the world, and vehicles at 20 euros from Africa and Europe and 100 euros from the rest of the world. That schedule is four years old and we did not find a current one.

The customs procedure

Every imported good must be declared, whatever its value, under the customs code administered by the Directorate General of Customs within the Ministry of Finance.

The system. Declarations are lodged in CAMCIS, the Cameroon Customs Information System, in use since 2020. The authorities told the WTO that declarations are made almost exclusively electronically and that every customs office is equipped with it. Upstream of it sits e-GUCE, the single window for foreign trade, which interconnects the customs administration, the brokers, the banks, the ship consignees, the stevedores and the ministries that issue permits.

Who may lodge one. A licensed customs broker, approved by a national advisory committee chaired by the Director General of Customs. The profession is open to Cameroonians and foreigners. Owners of used vehicles, public administrations and diplomatic missions may declare in their own name and on their own account.

What you need first. Registration in the importers' file or a special authorisation from the Ministry of Commerce. Then an import declaration lodged on e-GUCE through your broker, which is mandatory above 1,000,000 FCFA FOB value and must come before any clearance formality. Lodging none, above that threshold, carries a fine of 50% of the taxable value of the goods.

The documents. The final invoice, the freight invoice, the cargo tracking note, the insurance certificate, and the bill of lading or air waybill. Then, where they apply, the import declaration, the inspection report and any duty exemption certificate. Insurance with a local company is compulsory for imports of 500,000 FCFA or more. Particular regulations add their own: certificate of origin, health or plant health certificate, fumigation certificate, temporary admission authorisation, importer's licence.

Inspection. Under the Import Verification Programme, created by Decree No. 2015/1875/PM of 1 July 2015, goods with an FOB value of 2,000,000 FCFA or more are inspected on arrival for origin, value and tariff classification, and a report on value and tariff classification is issued before the goods reach Douala. The authorities describe that report as an aid to the customs administration's decision, not a binding valuation. Imports below 2,000,000 FCFA are exempt, as are crude oil and oil exploration equipment, works of art, precious stones and metals, and free zone imports.

Clearance channels. Risk management sorts declarations into four channels. Green is immediate release. Blue is automatic liquidation with deferred control. Yellow is documentary control, with a scan if there is doubt. Red is documentary control plus a scanner inspection, and a physical examination where there is suspicion. Scanning at the Port of Douala was integrated into clearance procedures by Decision No. 000749 of 30 November 2016.

Time limits. An import declaration must be discharged by actually importing the goods within six months. The Finance Minister may extend that exceptionally by three months, not renewable, or by up to six months for machinery and capital goods with long production lead times. Declarations with an FOB value above 5,000,000 FCFA must also be domiciled with an approved financial intermediary, and failing to do so carries a fine of 10% of the transaction.

The customs administration's own website cannot be read securely

We tried to read douanes.cm, and we will not disable certificate checking to do it.

The host presents a certificate whose subject and issuer are both "C=DE, ST=Berlin, L=Berlin, O=Apache Friends, CN=localhost". Apache Friends is the XAMPP project, and that is the self signed development certificate XAMPP ships with. It was issued on 1 October 2004 and expired on 30 September 2010. We checked it on 21 October 2026, which makes it sixteen years out of date, and it was never valid for douanes.cm in the first place because it was issued for localhost.

The site does answer over plain HTTP, which is not a way round the certificate but an unauthenticated channel, so nothing served there is cryptographically attributable to the administration. It does not help in any case. The pages that hold the customs tariff and the customs code render them inside a JavaScript flipbook viewer. No document URL appears in the markup, and the content interface is closed. The official tariff cannot be downloaded even over HTTP, which is why this page gives you the range of the new bands and not the list.

So the Directorate General of Customs cannot be read over a verified connection at all, and its two central documents cannot be read over any connection. That is a large part of why this page leans on the Finance Laws, the tax code and the WTO rather than on the administration that actually sets the rates. We record it as a finding rather than working around it.

What this page does not tell you

The band your particular goods fall in. That is a tariff classification question, it turns on a ten digit code, and the nomenclature of the tariff now in force is not published anywhere we could reach.

What a clearing agent will actually quote you. What storage costs past the free period. What handling costs at the terminal. What a scan costs. We have given you the structure and named the parties, and where we could not source a current figure we have left it out.

Sources

Every document was read on 21 October 2026 unless another date is given.

• Law No. 2025/012 of 17 December 2025, Finance Law for 2026, articles twenty-one and twenty-two. Certified true copy filed at prc.cm, held in this repository. The archived copy is a scan with no text layer, so these articles were read from the page images and checked against the finance bill published by the Budget Directorate on 26 November 2025, which carries identical wording.
• Law No. 2024/013 of 23 December 2024our copy, Finance Law for 2025, article eleven on import declarations and article introducing article 149 quinquies of the tax code. Certified true copy, held in this repository.
• Law No. 2022/020 of 27 December 2022our copy, Finance Law for 2023, article nine on the customs IT fee. Certified true copy, held in this repository.
• General Tax Code, 2026 editionour copy, published by the tax administration at impots.cm. Articles 21, 135 to 142, C 82 to C 84, and the partnership contracts annex. Held in this repository.
• Tarif des douanes de la CEMAC, the January 2009 edition published by the CEMAC Commission, 551 pages. Its rate schedule, its nomenclature, and Additional Act No. 03/00-CEMAC-046-CM-05 of 14 December 2000 on the community integration tax, reproduced in it. Read from the copy the Gabonese customs administration serves as a plain PDF at douanes.ga, because Cameroon's own customs site cannot be read over a verified connection and serves its tariff only inside a flipbook. Our copy is sha256 eb8bf1347f35a4b2fe524eb76e5f6616c237acee0e04c361ce615db250d9cade, so you can check that the file you have is the file we read. We hold it and we do not republish it: unlike the Cameroonian laws in this archive it is a commercial edition under an ISBN with the Commission's rights expressly reserved.
• World Trade Organization, Trade Policy Review, CEMAC countries, WT/TPR/S/445, 16 August 2023. The common report for the tariff structure and the community levies, and Annex 1 Cameroon for the national procedure, the inspection programme and the VAT rate.
• Decision No. 5/CEEAC/CCEG/XXV/24 and Decision No. 14/CEEAC/CCEG/XXV/24, both of 18 October 2024. Cited in the 2026 Finance Law. We did not locate either text.
• National Shippers' Council of Cameroon, cncc.cm, on the entry into force of the CEEAC common external tariff, quoting the Directorate General of Customs.
• Guichet Unique du Commerce Extérieur, guichetunique.cm, notice to used vehicle importers, updated March 2026.
• Directorate General of Customs, douanes.cm. Not read. The host serves an expired self signed certificate issued for localhost, described above. We did not bypass verification.
• "Barème officiel des HAD au Cameroun", circulating copy. Not read, host did not resolve. Issuing authority not established.
• The Treasury catalogue itself, feed of 18 October 2026, 405 services across 36 bodies, searched as described at the top of this page.

There is no online Journal Officiel for Cameroon. prc.cm is the de facto gazette, and it is where the Finance Laws above are filed.

If a figure here is wrong, tell us. The method is written out at how we verify.

Page updated 21 October 2026