You paid duty on 1,000 units and 900 arrived. What now?

The rule, and the line it turns on

GOV.UK states it in one sentence: no duty is due on your goods if you can show they were short-shipped or lost in transit before release from customs charge into free circulation. That last clause is the whole test. Goods that never made it into free circulation were never properly dutiable. Goods that cleared and then went missing from your own warehouse are a loss, not a customs matter.

So the first question is not what your supplier says, it is when the shortfall happened. A container sealed at origin with 900 cartons inside and 1,000 on the packing list is a short shipment. A pallet that went astray after clearance is not, however unfair that feels.

Where the goods arrived but arrived damaged, a different route applies. If you can prove the damage happened before release into free circulation, you can ask for the customs value to be amended rather than claiming the duty was never due.

Time limits, which are the part people miss

The limits run from the date your customs entry was accepted, not from the date you noticed. HMRC gives three years for short shipments or goods lost in transit and one year for damaged or defective goods. The general repayment page gives the same three years for overpayments, one year for rejected imports, and ninety days for withdrawal of an import declaration.

One more condition sits underneath all of it: you must not claim more than the original declared value of the imported item. HMRC also reserves the right to verify and to ask for the documents before paying.

What counts as evidence

HMRC says it cannot list every acceptable form, and then gives examples: a credit note from the seller, a statement from the customs officer who examined the goods, a certificate of condemnation, a statement from the Port Health Official, a statement from an independent expert such as a surveyor, and details of settlement of a claim against an insurer or carrier.

Notice what is at the top of that list. A credit note from the seller is both the commercial remedy and the customs evidence, which is why the email you send your supplier on the day you count the cartons is worth more than the one you send a month later.

Count on arrival, photograph the seal before it is cut, and keep the tally sheet. Our guide on what to do when goods arrive wrong covers the supplier side of the same morning.

How the claim is actually made

Where the declaration was made in the Customs Declaration Service and you have an EORI number, the claim goes in there. Form C285 is for people without an EORI registered to them, private individuals, and a short list of other cases. Repayments of import duty and VAT can only be made to a UK bank account.

Import VAT works differently and this catches people out. If you are VAT registered, GOV.UK is explicit that you cannot reclaim overpaid import VAT on the C285 form or the online services. You adjust your VAT return by reducing the output tax due in Box 1, and keep the records to support it. You cannot recover it as input tax, because overpaid import VAT was never due to HMRC in the first place.

Here is the part we would rather not put in writing. On a short shipment of a hundred units of a low-duty product, the duty you get back may be a few pounds, and the afternoon you spend assembling the evidence is worth more than the cheque. We will tell you when a claim is not worth making, which is not what a firm billing by the hour has any reason to tell you. Reserve the effort for consignments where the duty rate is high or the shortfall is large, and spend the rest of that morning on the credit note instead.