Home › Guides
Nigeria car import duty 2026: the full stack, line by line
Most explanations of car import duty in Nigeria list three or four charges and stop. The real bill has seven lines, two regime changes inside one year, and one dead charge that refuses to die in print. Here is the whole stack, in the order it is charged.
The stack at a glance (from 1 July 2026): duty 20% of CIF · NAC levy 5% used / 10% new (reported) · Green Tax 0 / 2 / 4% by engine size · surcharge 7% of the duty · ETLS 0.5% of CIF · FOB levy 4% of FOB (contested) · VAT 7.5% on the duty-paid value. Total effective tariff on the car itself: 40% of CIF, per the 2026 Fiscal Policy Measures circular of 1 April 2026.
1 April 2026: the tariff moved
The 2026 Fiscal Policy Measures, issued by the Federal Ministry of Finance in a circular dated 1 April 2026, superseded the 2023 measures and restated the fully built passenger car — cars, four-wheel drives, station wagons — at a total effective tariff of 40%, down from the 70% figure carried since the 2015 policy. Importers who had opened Form M before that date were granted a 90-day grace to clear at the previous rates. The assessed duty line inside the total remains the ECOWAS Common External Tariff rate for cars (heading 8703): 20% of CIF. One honest caveat, printed on our rates page and not hidden: the Gazette expresses the 40% as duty plus an Import Adjustment Tax element, and whether a separate IAT line is charged at the port on top of the 20% duty could not be pinned down from the sources available — the stacks importers were actually charged after July show duty, NAC and Green Tax, so the calculator prices the IAT at zero and says so.
1 July 2026: the levies moved
Three months later the second half of the package commenced. The NAC levy — the National Automotive Council charge that funds the local assembly programme — was cut from 15% to 5% on used cars, and from 20% to 10% on new cars as reported by the same implementation coverage. And the engine levy began to be collected under its new name, the Green Tax Surcharge — same bands as the 2023 measures had charged under the Import Adjustment Tax: 0% under 2,000cc, 2% to 3,999cc, 4% at 4,000cc and above, with fully electric cars, mass-transit buses and locally manufactured vehicles exempt. It is worth being precise here, because most coverage was not: the Green Tax is a rename, not a new tax, and the 2026 saving on a typical car comes from the NAC cut — ₦1,200,000 on the ₦12 million example the comparator works through.
The lines that did not change
The surcharge — 7% of the duty amount — and the ETLS, the ECOWAS levy at 0.5% of CIF, run through both regimes untouched. VAT at 7.5% applies on the duty-paid value: the CIF plus duty, NAC levy, Green Tax, surcharge and ETLS. The base composition is stated in full on the methodology page, flagged as the one piece of the arithmetic that could not be confirmed against a real post-July assessment.
The dead line and its replacement
CISS — the Comprehensive Import Supervision Scheme charge of 1% of FOB — was abolished when the Nigeria Customs Service Act 2023 replaced it with a 4% FOB levy. Any calculator or guide that charges CISS in a current stack is teaching a dead line. The replacement has its own problem: collection began in August 2025, was suspended by a Finance Ministry directive that September, and has since been alleged both ways, with October 2026 guides listing it as charged but unconfirmed. Our calculator includes it by default, prints that status on every result, and lets you switch it off — which is the only honest way to ship a contested charge.
What the stack adds up to
Three hand-worked cars, all priced on the post-July stack with the FOB levy in: a 1,490cc tokunbo at CIF ₦8,000,000 pays ₦3,185,400 (39.8%); a 2,494cc tokunbo at ₦12,000,000 pays ₦5,036,100 (42.0%); a new 4,460cc car at ₦40,000,000 pays ₦19,797,000 (49.5%). Port-side charges come after all of this — the clearing planner covers them, separately, as market charges rather than tariffs.
Questions
What is the total duty on a car imported into Nigeria in 2026?
The charges together — duty, NAC levy, Green Tax, surcharge, ETLS, the FOB levy and VAT — come to roughly 40–50% of the car’s CIF value for most petrol and diesel cars under the stack in force from 1 July 2026: about 39.8% on the small-engine example worked on this page, 42.0% on a mid-size engine, 49.5% on a large-engine new car. The 40% figure quoted in the 2026 measures is the total effective tariff on the car itself; the levies and VAT sit around it.
Why do different websites give different rates for the same car?
Because Nigeria’s vehicle charges changed twice in 2026 and many pages were never updated — some still present the pre-2026 stack (NAC levy 15%, CISS) as current law, and at least one major site runs the new rates in its calculator while its own guides still apply the old ones. The fix is to ask of every figure: which regime, from what date, from what source? The rates page here answers all three for every line.