Importing furniture: why the chair costs more than the desk
Chapter 94 is small — 66 tariff lines across six headings — which makes it one of the few chapters you can genuinely hold in your head. It is also one of the most volatile. Total Tax Incidence runs from 17.88% to 159.8%, a nine-fold spread, and the dividing lines are not where most importers expect them.
Three questions decide your rate: is it furniture or equipment, is it a seat or not a seat, and is it upholstered.
The hospital exemption sets the floor
The cheapest things in chapter 94 are medical. Hospital beds (94029010) and shadowless operating lamps (94054910) both come in at 17.88% — CD 5%, SD 0%, RD 0%. Other medical and surgical furniture (94029090) sits at 33.63%.
Two industrial lines go lower still on customs duty. Cutting tables designed for use with cutting machines (94032030 and 94036020) carry CD 1%, giving 28.73% — the capital-machinery rate that dominates chapter 84. These are garment-industry inputs, and the tariff treats them as machinery that happens to have legs rather than as furniture.
Solar-related lighting is also protected: photovoltaic LED fittings (94054110) at 33.63%, and prefabricated sandwich panel buildings (94069010) at the same.
Then ordinary furniture arrives, and so does supplementary duty
Outside those protected lines, chapter 94 runs on CD 25% almost without exception. What moves the total is SD and RD. Four bands cover 56 of the 66 lines:
- 64.25% — CD 25, SD 0, RD 5. Plain seats: aircraft seats, bamboo and cane seats (94015200), modular steel building units.
- 80.18% — CD 25, SD 10, RD 5. Bedding: mattresses (94042900), mattress supports, quilts and duvets (94044000), sleeping bags.
- 118.15% — CD 25, SD 20, RD 20. This is the big one: all of heading 9403, meaning office, kitchen and bedroom furniture, wooden and metal alike — and parts thereof (94039900).
- 135.91% — CD 25, SD 45, RD 5. Upholstered and framed seats, plus most decorative lighting.
At the top, two LED luminaire lines (94051100 and 94051900) carry SD 60% and reach 159.8%.
The seat rule is the one that catches people
In the Harmonized System a seat is not furniture. It has its own heading — 9401 — and the rest of furniture sits in 9403. The tariff then taxes them differently, and not in the direction you would guess.
Compare a wooden office desk with a wooden office chair:
- Wooden office furniture, 94033000: SD 20%, RD 20% → 118.15%
- Upholstered seat with wooden frame, 94016100: SD 45%, RD 5% → 135.91%
The chair is 17.76 points more expensive than the desk. And within seats, upholstery itself is not the trigger — 94016900, a wooden-framed seat not upholstered, is also 135.91%. What matters is whether the seat has a wooden or metal frame at all. A bamboo or cane seat (94015300) stays at 64.25%; put a metal frame on it and 94017100 takes you to 135.91%.
That is a 71.66-point swing decided by frame material.
A worked example: furnishing an office
Say you import a container with BDT 3,000,000 of wooden desks and BDT 1,000,000 of upholstered metal-framed chairs.
- Desks, 118.15%: approximately BDT 3,544,500
- Chairs, 135.91%: approximately BDT 1,359,100
- Total duty and taxes: approximately BDT 4,903,600 on BDT 4,000,000 of goods
The tax bill exceeds the invoice. That is normal for finished furniture in Bangladesh and it is the reason the domestic furniture industry is as large as it is.
Parts do not help you
A common assumption is that importing components and assembling locally drops you into a lower band, as it does for vehicles under CKD rules. In chapter 94 it does not. Furniture parts of wood (94039100) and other furniture parts (94039900) both carry the full 118.15%, identical to assembled furniture. Lamp parts (94059900) carry 135.91%, identical to lamps.
There is no knocked-down incentive in this chapter. If local assembly is your plan, the saving has to come from somewhere other than the tariff.
The shape of the chapter in numbers
Chapter 94 contains 66 ad-valorem tariff lines averaging 95.36% total incidence — one of the most heavily taxed chapters in the schedule, and nearly three times the chapter 84 average of 35.72%. The structure explains why:
| Feature | Lines | Share |
|---|---|---|
| Customs duty at 25% | 56 | 85% |
| Carrying regulatory duty | 55 | 83% |
| Carrying supplementary duty | 43 | 65% |
| VAT-exempt | 3 | 5% |
Compare that with chapter 84, where 73% of lines sit at 1% customs duty or below and only 5% carry supplementary duty. Furniture is treated as a finished consumer product almost without exception. Two thirds of the chapter carries supplementary duty, and that is what pushes the average into the nineties.
The most common single outcome is 135.91%, which 17 lines share, followed by 118.15% on 14 lines. If you are budgeting for a furniture import without knowing the exact code yet, those two figures are the realistic planning assumptions — not the 25% customs duty.
Lighting is taxed harder than furniture
Chapter 94 covers lamps and lighting fittings as well as furniture, and the lighting headings are the most expensive part of it:
| Code | Goods | CD | SD | TTI |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 94051100 | Lighting fittings for LED lamps | 25% | 60% | 159.8% |
| 94059200 | Lighting fittings, plastic parts | 25% | 45% | 135.91% |
| 94016900 | Seats with wooden frames, not upholstered | 25% | 45% | 135.91% |
| 94033000 | Wooden office furniture | 25% | 20% | 118.15% |
LED lighting fittings at 159.8% are the highest lines in the chapter — higher than any desk, cabinet or bed. There is a certain irony in LED fittings, an energy-efficient technology, carrying 60% supplementary duty while a hospital bed carries none. The tariff is classifying by who buys the product, not by what it does.
The medical floor
Three lines in chapter 94 are VAT-exempt, and they set a floor far below everything else:
| Code | Goods | CD | VAT | TTI |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 94029010 | Hospital beds | 5% | 0% | 17.88% |
| 94054910 | Shadowless operation lamps | 5% | 0% | 17.88% |
| 94032030 | Cutting table for cutting machines | 1% | 15% | 28.73% |
A hospital bed at 17.88% against an office desk at 118.15% is a hundred-point gap between two pieces of furniture. The shadowless operation lamp is the sharper illustration: it is a lighting fitting, the same broad category as the LED fitting at 159.8%, and it pays 17.88%.
The cutting table at 94032030 is worth noting separately. It is furniture by construction but industrial equipment by use, and the tariff gives it 1% customs duty — the chapter 84 treatment rather than the chapter 94 one. If your goods are furniture that forms part of a production line, check whether a specific line exists for them before accepting the general rate.
Before you quote
Three checks are worth making every time:
Confirm whether your item is a seat. It changes the heading, and in chapter 94 the heading changes the tax more than the material does.
Watch RD 20% in heading 9403. It is the only heading in the chapter where regulatory duty sits at 20%, and because RD feeds the VAT and AT bases, those 15 extra points of RD cost more than 15 points of final TTI.
Check for a medical or industrial carve-out. The gap between 33.63% and 118.15% is large, and the qualifying lines are narrowly drafted — "specially designed to receive" and "of a kind used with" are doing real work in those descriptions.
Browse the full chapter at chapter 94 and read the segregated breakdown on your specific code. Whether a particular carve-out applies to your consignment is a question for your C&F agent, since it can depend on end-use evidence and any SRO in force.