List the fee stack for one real shipment, from the documents: the customs value, the duty paid, MPF with its minimum and maximum behaviour, HMF for ocean at its ad valorem rate on the shipment value, the broker's entry and line fees, the disbursement percentage if duty was advanced, and any single entry bond premium where a continuous bond is not in place. Seeing one shipment fully loaded teaches more than a quarter of averages, because it shows which lines scale with value, which with lines, and which are flat.
Flat fees are the allocation problem. An entry fee is the same on a shipment of 200 units and 20,000, so per unit brokerage cost is a function of shipment size. A model that assumes one per unit fee has silently assumed one shipment size forever.
Match each cost to what drives it. Duty and ad valorem fees follow value, so allocate them by line value. Per line charges follow the entry's line count, so allocate per line. Flat entry and bond costs follow the shipment, so allocate across the shipment's units or value consistently, and state the convention in the model. Consistency matters more than the particular choice, because the next shipment must land the same way or comparisons are fiction.
Exam and extraordinary handling costs need a policy, not a surprise. Some businesses load them into the affected product's cost, others pool them across imports as a cost of the trade lane. Either is defensible. What is not defensible is deciding per incident, which guarantees the examined product looks cursed and the pool looks clean for reasons nobody can reconstruct.
When a broker pays your duty at entry and invoices you later, the disbursement fee is the price of that short credit. Duty direct debit arrangements and periodic monthly statements change the picture: duty paid from your own account on a statement cycle removes or reduces the advancement, and with it the fee, at the cost of managing the cash timing yourself. Compare the fee against your actual cost of cash before romanticising either route.
Whatever route you choose, reconcile it monthly: duty per the entry summaries against duty per the broker invoices against duty in the cost model. Three numbers that should agree, and in most businesses quietly do not, because one fee line was mapped to freight in the ledger two years ago and nobody moved it.
A landed cost used for pricing should carry a fee assumption per shipment profile: typical value, typical line count, typical unit count, with the flat fees divided accordingly. When order patterns change, a new supplier filing forty lines where the old one filed six, the assumption is revisited, because the per line charges just changed your unit cost without a single rate moving.
Report fee cost per unit as its own line in margin reviews. When it creeps, the cause is findable: smaller shipments, more lines, more exams, a broker schedule change. When it is buried inside freight, the creep is just margin weather, and nobody fixes weather. Confirm current MPF and HMF rates and caps with your broker, because the caps are adjusted and old figures linger in models for years.
Keep reading: Reverse landed cost: what a returned import really costs to bring back, Dimensional weight: when the box is light and the freight bill is not.
A charge for the broker advancing duty and fees on your behalf at entry and collecting from you afterward. It is priced like short term credit, often as a percentage with a minimum. Paying duty by direct debit or statement processing can remove the need for the advance.
By a stated convention, commonly across the shipment's units or value, recalculated per shipment. A flat fee divided by more units costs less per unit, so shipment size is part of unit cost and the model should show that honestly.
Yes. The Merchandise Processing Fee applies to most formal entries with minimum and maximum caps, and Harbor Maintenance Fee applies to ocean cargo value. Both are real per shipment costs of importing and belong in the model at current rates.
Because its drivers change: shipment size, line count, exam frequency, and whether duty is advanced. Track the fee stack per shipment for a quarter and the variation resolves into those specific causes.