Importing cleaning and janitorial products from China

Why this category punishes the usual approach

Cleaning products look like a straightforward import. They are manufactured at scale in China, the UK price is high enough to leave room, and the duty is modest. What makes the category difficult is that the obligations attach to the chemistry and to the claim rather than to the product as a thing, and both can be triggered by decisions the supplier makes without telling you.

A change of surfactant to a cheaper one, or a marketing line on the bottle that says kills 99.9% of bacteria, can move you between regimes without changing anything you would notice on arrival. That is a different kind of risk from a tariff, because it does not show up as a cost — it shows up as an obligation you did not know you had taken on.

UK REACH, and the tonne that arrives sooner than expected

The Health and Safety Executive states it plainly: under UK REACH, as a registrant, you must collect information on the properties and uses of the substances you manufacture or import above one tonne a year. Registration applies to substances on their own, to substances in mixtures — which HSE calls formulated products — and in limited cases to substances in articles.

Read that against a container of cleaning chemicals. A twenty-foot container of a diluted product can carry well over a tonne of a single substance once you add up what is in the mixture, and the threshold is per substance per year across everything you import, not per shipment. A business importing steadily through the year can pass it without ever placing a large order.

This is an importer obligation specifically. A Chinese manufacturer does not register for you: it is not established in Great Britain, and the duty attaches to whoever brings the substance in. Our compliance finder will not settle a chemical question for you, but it lists which regimes attach to a product type, which is a starting point.

The claim that changes the regime

A cleaner removes dirt. A disinfectant destroys or controls organisms, and that makes it a biocidal product with its own regime. The line is crossed by the claim, so it is crossed on the label and in the listing copy rather than in the factory.

HSE defines placing on the market as making the product available on the market for the first time, and gives importer to distributor, retailer or end user as one of its examples. So the first act of supply after your container clears is the moment the obligation is tested, and it is your act rather than the manufacturer's.

Two further points catch people. Importing solely to re-export is treated differently, where the goods are not released for free circulation and have not left the importer's stocks; if it is not placed on the GB market before export, GB biocides rules do not apply to it. And treated articles are caught in their own right, which is how an importer of antibacterial cloths or chopping boards ends up inside a chemicals regime while believing they are buying homeware.

The duty, which is the small number

Read from the UK Trade Tariff on 22 September 2026 for goods of Chinese origin. Both retail-packed cleaning preparations sit at 4%, with 20% VAT.

Set that against the cost of a UK REACH registration, which runs to a fee plus data, and the arithmetic of this category becomes clear: the tariff is noise and the regulatory position is the whole question.

What to settle before you order

Get the full formulation with CAS numbers, not a specification sheet that names a product family. You cannot assess a REACH position or a biocides position without knowing what is actually in the bottle, and a supplier unwilling to give it has answered a different question than the one you asked.

Fix the claims in writing, including the artwork. If you do not want a biocidal product, the wording that would make it one has to be absent from the label, the carton and the marketplace listing, and that is a specification point rather than a marketing preference.

Then do the tonnage arithmetic for a full year at your expected run rate rather than for the first container, because that is the number the threshold is measured against.

Here is the part that loses us work. This is the category where we most often tell an enquirer that the cost of doing it properly exceeds the saving, particularly for a first-time importer buying one or two pallets. A registration obligation does not scale down to a small order, and a compliance file is the same work whether you sell a hundred bottles or a hundred thousand. If you are testing a product, this is a poor category to test with, and we would rather say so than take the order and let you find out.