How we calculate

1. Values first. The car's CIF and FOB are established in naira — either entered directly, or built from the foreign-currency price, freight and insurance at the exchange rate you enter (see the exchange-rate rule below). 2. The valuation uplift, if you set one, is applied to both values: Customs assesses on its own table, and every percentage charge follows the assessed value. 3. The regime gate: your Form M date selects one of three dated bands (before 1 April 2026 · 1 April–30 June 2026 · from 1 July 2026), and each band carries its own set of charges — the transition band is priced as it actually stood, not as either neighbour. 4. Each charge is worked out on its own base — duty, NAC levy, Green Tax and ETLS on CIF; the surcharge on the duty; the FOB levy (or CISS in the old band) on FOB — and rounded to the nearest naira. 5. VAT is charged last, on the duty-paid value (below). 6. Totals add up the rounded charges. Port-side market charges are never inside the customs total; they join only the landed figure, labelled.

The calculators work VAT out as 7.5% of (CIF + duty + NAC levy + Green Tax + surcharge + ETLS). The FOB levy is not in the base. Status: Rate SETTLED; base composition UNVERIFIED. The 7.5% rate is settled law. The exact make-up of the base could not be confirmed against a real post-July-2026 assessment, so the base this calculator uses is printed in full on the methodology page for any agent to check against an assessment. If your assessment shows a different base, this definition is the first place to look — and we would rather print it and be corrected than hide it and be wrong quietly.

There is no fetched “live rate” anywhere on this site, deliberately. Customs converts a car's value at the official rate applied on the Form M and the assessment; a rate scraped from the internet today would be the wrong basis presented with false precision. So the calculator asks for your rate — the one on your Form M, or your bank's rate for a pre-purchase estimate — and does the arithmetic on that. Dealers who already hold a naira figure from an agent can enter the CIF and FOB in naira directly and skip the conversion entirely.

Before this site launched, we attempted to read the primary tariff sources directly: the Gazette annex to the 2026 Fiscal Policy Measures and the Nigeria Customs Service tariff table for the car heading (HS 8703), and to find a real post-July-2026 assessment. The Customs website refused direct fetches and its tariff page returned no readable content; the national trade hub presented an empty index; the Ministry of Finance site links no circular; and the Gazette annex itself circulated only as press reporting of the document. No source contradicted the stack we ship — the 40% total, the April and July dates, the Green Tax exclusion list and the duty rate were all corroborated across independent reporting of the circular — but the primary text was not sighted, and this page records that as a residual risk, not as a clearance.

Three items therefore carry flags wherever they appear: the IAT decomposition of the 40% total (UNVERIFIED — priced at zero, with the reasoning on the rates page); the VAT base composition (above); and the NAC levy rate on new cars (REPORTED). The moment better evidence surfaces — a sighted annex, a published tariff table, a real assessment — the rates change as data, the worked examples are recomputed, and the check date on the rates page moves. A stale date on that page is a defect, by design.

Every worked example printed on this site — the ₦3,185,400 small tokunbo, the ₦984,000 regime difference, the ×1.2 uplift case, the ₦585,000 electric-car case — is an acceptance test the calculators must reproduce exactly, worked out by hand from the rates table before any of them was allowed to print its own answer. If a rate changes, the examples are recomputed by hand first. The full set lives in the specification record for this site (SPEC-F3 §4), and the rates behind them are on the rates page.