Which products are actually worth importing from China?

The question people ask, and the one that decides it

Most lists of what to import from China compare factory prices with UK shelf prices and stop there. That comparison is the easy half. The half that decides whether a container makes money is what the tariff does to it, and the tariff does not treat a category as a category.

Duty is set per commodity code. So are anti-dumping and countervailing duties, which are not percentages of the invoice in every case — several are fixed amounts per unit, which means they hit cheap goods hardest. A measure that adds a flat sum per item can cost more than the item.

The practical consequence is that "is this category worth importing" is usually the wrong question. The right one is whether the specific thing you are buying sits on a clean code.

Tyres, where the line runs through the middle

Tyres are the clearest example we have found, and it is worth walking through because the same shape appears in other categories. All figures below were read from the UK Trade Tariff on 22 September 2026 for goods of Chinese origin.

One step in load index — 121 — separates a 4% duty from a bill that can exceed the value of the goods. Nothing about the product description tells you that. Only the code does.

The same shape, one subheading down

The tyre case is not a quirk of tyres. The two largest bulky chapters after furniture are iron and steel articles at £1,979m a year and plastics at £1,964m, and both are genuinely fragmented — 226 and 195 separate commodity lines, with the largest accounting for about a fifth of each. That is the profile of a category a smaller buyer can work in, and most of it is clean: structural steel at 0%, wind tower sections at 0%, other plastic articles at 6%, none carrying a trade remedy naming China when checked on 22 September 2026.

Then there is subheading 7323 93, stainless steel table and kitchen articles. It contains exactly two codes. One of them is ironing boards. The other is everything else.

An ironing board carries 3.20% duty and, on top of that, a definitive anti-dumping duty of 42.30% at the residual rate under Statutory Instrument 2019 No. 450 — so roughly 45% all in for an exporter without its own additional code. The stainless steel pan sitting beside it on the same subheading is 0% with nothing on it at all.

Nothing about the two products suggests that gap. They are the same metal, the same chapter, often the same factory. The difference is that somebody once brought a trade case about ironing boards and not about saucepans, and the tariff still carries the result.

Read the residual rate carefully

The figures above for bus and lorry tyres are the residual rate, which applies to exporters that do not have their own additional code. Named exporters have their own codes and their own amounts, and some are materially lower. The Hankook group, for example, appears on the same commodity with a separate additional code.

That turns a compliance detail into a commercial one. On a product carrying per-unit remedies, which factory you buy from changes the landed cost by more than any negotiation on the factory price will. Asking a supplier for its additional code is a reasonable question and the answer is checkable against the tariff.

It also means a quote that looks too good may simply be assuming an additional code the shipment will not qualify for. Our anti-dumping duty checker shows what is on a code, and the 2026 duty rates guide covers where anti-dumping sits relative to the headline rate.

The line moves, and it moves differently in each market

The tyre category also shows why a category assessment has a shelf life. On 7 July 2026 the European Commission imposed definitive anti-dumping duties on passenger-car and light-lorry tyres from China — that is, tyres with a load index below 121 — at rates ranging from 4.3% to 45.3%, with an anti-subsidy investigation on the same products still running and conclusions expected in December 2026.

So the tyre segment that is currently clean in Great Britain is the one the EU has just acted on, and the segment Great Britain has acted on is a different one. If you import into the UK and sell on into the EU, those are two separate questions with two separate answers, and our guide on selling on into the EU covers the product-safety half of the same journey.

Nothing here predicts what the UK will do next, and this page will not pretend to. The point is narrower and more useful: a category you checked a year ago is not a category you have checked.

What tends to survive, and why

Three things decide whether a gap survives, and only one of them is the tariff.

Value density is the first. Freight is charged on space as much as weight, so a cubic metre of bulky low-value goods carries the same freight as a cubic metre of dense valuable ones. Takeaway containers and similar foam and plastic packaging are the standard example of a category where the arithmetic rarely works: you are paying to ship air, and the UK price is already low because everyone else worked that out. Our sea versus air calculator prices the trade-off on your own figures.

The tariff line is the second, covered above. The third is whether the saving is yours to keep: a category where UK distribution is concentrated in two or three hands will defend its price, and a category sold on marketplaces will compete the saving away. Neither is visible in a factory quotation.

On the evidence above, dense industrial consumables at zero duty are the quiet winners: fasteners at 0% with no remedies found, repeat purchase, and enough value per cubic metre that freight is a small share. That is duller than a trending-products list, and it is what the numbers actually say.

How to check a category yourself in ten minutes

Find the commodity code for the exact specification you intend to buy, not for the category name — our guide on finding your commodity code covers the difference. Open the code on the UK Trade Tariff and read the Measures section, not just the headline rate, because trade remedies are listed separately from duty.

Then do the arithmetic on landed cost rather than on unit price, including the freight your volume actually consumes. The duty calculator and shipping volume calculator do the two halves.

So the working rule from three separate cases now — tyres, bicycles and ironing boards — is that the trade-remedy line sits inside a product family rather than around it, and it is drawn by history rather than by logic. There is no way to reason your way to it from the product. You look it up, on the code, for the thing you are actually buying.

That is a ten-minute job and it is the highest-return ten minutes in sourcing. A category can look clean at chapter level, at heading level and at subheading level, and still contain one code that takes 45% off the top.

Here is the part we would rather not write, because it costs us the work. A great many enquiries we receive are for categories where the honest answer is that the margin has already gone — bulky low-value goods, or codes carrying per-unit remedies, where no amount of sourcing skill recovers it. We would rather tell you that in the first email than take a project we know ends in a thin container. If a sourcing agent is enthusiastic about every category you name, you have learned something about the agent rather than about the categories.