Sourcing bicycle tyres, tubes and parts from China

The duty picture splits three ways, and the split is not intuitive

Most sector guides can give you one rate. Cycling cannot, because the UK tariff treats the rubber, the finished bicycle and the metal parts as three different problems. A retailer who assumes the bicycle rate applies to tyres will over-price the range; one who assumes the tyre rate applies to hubs can be caught by a duty more than ten times the one they budgeted for.

The rates below were read from the UK Trade Tariff on 21 September 2026. Confirm the code for what you are actually buying before you commit, because the commodity code is the importer's responsibility, and on this heading a digit changes the answer by tens of percent. Our duty calculator works out the landed figure once you have the code.

The 48.5% you can walk into without importing a single bicycle

The anti-dumping duty on Chinese bicycles has been extended to essential bicycle parts, so that a bicycle cannot be imported free of it in pieces and assembled here. That extension is why the tariff carries a separate sub-code for parts originating in or consigned from China in quantities below 300 units per month on average over a period not exceeding twelve months. Below that level the exemption applies; above it the parts are treated as a bicycle arriving piecemeal.

Read the threshold carefully, because it is monthly and it is an average, and a retailer building a consistent range across wheel sizes reaches 300 units a month of a single part sooner than they expect. It is a threshold on the part, too, not on your order value, so a cheap component can trigger it while an expensive one does not.

The rate is not a single number either. Anti-dumping duty is set per exporter, and the tariff carries a long list of Chinese companies with their own additional codes, many of them at 0%. Which rate you pay depends on which factory made the goods and on whether the paperwork proves it. That makes it a sourcing decision rather than a customs one: choosing an exempt exporter is worth more than any price negotiation on the same part. Our anti-dumping checker shows the measures sitting on a code, and the duty and VAT guide explains why nobody can quote you a rate without naming the factory.

A size range is a specification, and the label is not the size

A cycle retailer's first order is usually a range rather than a product: one tread across several wheel sizes, in a few widths. That makes the specification unusually easy to get wrong, because bicycle tyres carry two naming systems at once. There is the traditional label, in inches for mountain sizes and in the French system for road ones, and there is the ISO designation, which states the section width and the bead-seat diameter in millimetres.

The traditional labels do not map one to one onto bead-seat diameters, and two tyres sold under the same traditional label can belong on different rims. So ask the supplier for the ISO designation of every size in the range, put those designations in the order rather than the marketing labels, and check them against the rims your customers actually ride. The product spec guide covers the general principle; on tyres it is the whole game.

Ask, too, whether one tread family genuinely runs across all the sizes you want, or whether the factory is offering different moulds under one name. A tyre mould is size-specific and expensive, so a supplier's real range is narrower than their catalogue, and "we can do that size" sometimes means a new mould with its own tooling cost and its own minimum order.

What the UK requires of what you sell

The Pedal Bicycles (Safety) Regulations 2010 govern supplying a bicycle, not supplying a tyre. A person must not supply an assembled bicycle unless it meets the requirements in regulation 4, which include a bell of a category intended for use on bicycles, the right-hand lever operating the front brake and the left-hand lever the rear, reflectors on the wheels and pedals complying with the Road Vehicles Lighting Regulations, a wide-angle retro reflector or a lamp to the front, and a wide-angle retro reflector to the rear. A bicycle supplied with unassembled parts is dealt with separately, in regulation 5.

Spares and components sold on their own fall outside those regulations, but not outside product safety law in general: a tyre or a brake part still has to be safe for its intended use, and the obligation sits with the UK business placing it on the market. That is you, not the factory. The importer of record guide sets out why that responsibility cannot be handed back to a Chinese supplier.

So ask for documentation that matches what you are buying. For a tyre, that means the construction, the rated pressure range, the compound and a test report against whatever standard the factory works to, with the test house named. For a braking or load-bearing part, it means a test report and batch traceability, so that if a complaint arrives you can identify which run it came from. Our quality inspection guide covers checking the goods themselves rather than the paperwork about them.

Combining products into one shipment

A trial order of a few hundred tyres rarely fills a container, and tyres are bulky for their value, so freight per unit is high on a small order. Combining tyres, tubes and other cycling lines into one consignment is usually the right move, and it is also how a first order reaches a volume a factory takes seriously.

There are two ways to do it and they are not equivalent. One factory supplying several of your lines means one order, one inspection and one set of terms, but few tyre factories also make the rest of what a cycle shop sells. Several factories consolidated into one shipment means a wider range, but someone has to hold the goods, check them and load them together, and the consolidation has to be planned before anyone starts producing.

Either way, ask for the minimum per size and model as well as the minimum for the order as a whole, because those are different numbers and the per-size one is what constrains a range. A supplier who will do two thousand tyres in total but five hundred per size cannot give you eight sizes. Getting that on the table early saves a round of quoting.