The Same Camera, Six Different Countries: What You Owe When You Get Home
Japan's price is the same for everyone. What you keep is not.
All customs rules quoted here were retrieved from official government sources on 20 August 2026. We are not customs brokers. Rules change; check the current page before you travel.
Why this article exists
If you have read anything about buying cameras in Japan, you have read about the Japanese side: the shelf price, the tax refund, the exchange rate. That is one half.
The other half is the country you fly home to, and it is not a detail. Two people can buy the identical lens from the identical Tokyo shop on the same afternoon and end up several hundred dollars apart, purely because one of them lands in Los Angeles and the other in Sydney.
The reason is that countries do not just set different allowances. They handle the excess in structurally different ways — and that difference matters far more than the size of the allowance.
The one distinction that matters most
There are two ways a country can treat a purchase that exceeds your personal allowance.
Type A — tax the excess only. You get your allowance, and only the amount above it is taxed. The United States and Canada both work this way, and both add a flat, simplified rate on the first slice above the allowance.
Type B — tax the whole thing. Once you exceed the allowance, the allowance stops applying and the goods are taxed in full, not just the part above the line. Australia and the United Kingdom both state this, and we quote both below.
This is the single most expensive thing most travellers do not know. Under Type B, a purchase that lands slightly over the line is taxed as if the line did not exist.
Australia, verbatim:
Exceptions — If you bring in more than your duty-free allowance for general goods, you'll need
to pay duty on all your general goods not just on the excess. The same goes for alcohol and
tobacco/cigarettes.
Source: Australian Border Force, "Duty free", https://www.abf.gov.au/entering-and-leaving-australia/can-you-bring-it-in/categories/duty-free (retrieved 20 August 2026)
⛔ The page we are quoting carries a "Last updated: 18/03/2020" stamp — six years old at the time we read it. We did not find a more recent statement, and we did not find a statement that it has changed. Given that two of the US rules in this article changed during 2025, treat an old page as something to confirm, not something to rely on.
United Kingdom, verbatim:
If you go over an allowance, you will have to pay tax and duty on all the goods in that category.
Source: GOV.UK, "Bringing goods into the UK for personal use", https://www.gov.uk/bringing-goods-into-uk-personal-use (retrieved 20 August 2026)
The two are worded differently, and the difference is useful
Australia says "all your general goods" — and Australia tells you what general goods are. Its own list, verbatim: "gifts, souvenirs, cameras, electronic equipment, leather goods, perfume concentrates, jewellery, watches and sporting equipment." A camera is named explicitly.
The UK says "all the goods in that category" — and we could not find where that category is defined. We are not going to fill that in for you. If you are arriving in the UK near the £390 line with a camera and a lens, whether those count as one category or two is exactly the question to ask, and we cannot answer it from the published page.
The six countries, side by side
| Country | Allowance for general goods (incl. cameras) | If you exceed it | Flat/simplified rate available? |
|---|---|---|---|
| United States | $800 (also $200 or $1,600 depending on trip and destination) | Excess only is dutiable | Yes — the next $1,000 above the allowance is charged at a flat 3% |
| Canada | CAN$800 (48 hours or more away); CAN$200 (24 hours or more) | Excess only is dutiable | Yes — the next CAN$300 at a beneficial rate of 7% |
| Hong Kong | No allowance concept for general goods | — | — (see below) |
| Australia | AUD900 (adults); AUD450 under 18. Families may pool | Duty on all your general goods, not just the excess (ABF wording) | No |
| United Kingdom | £390 (£270 if arriving by private plane or boat) | Tax and duty on all the goods in that category (GOV.UK wording; category not defined on that page) | No |
| Germany (EU) | €430 by air or sea; €300 by land; €175 under 15 | Duty and import VAT apply | Yes, conditionally — a flat 17.5% may be chosen if the dutiable value is €700 or less (15% for preferential-origin goods) |
⛔ Sources are listed at the end, one per country, all official government pages. We have deliberately not converted these allowances into a single currency: we did not capture same-day exchange rates for six currencies, and a stale conversion would be worse than none. Compare in your own currency.
Hong Kong is a genuinely different case
Hong Kong does not have a smaller allowance. It has no allowance for general goods at all, because it does not levy customs duty on them in the first place. Hong Kong Customs lists exactly four dutiable commodities — liquor, tobacco, hydrocarbon oil and methyl alcohol. A camera is not on that list.
⛔ This does not mean "anything goes." It means the customs-duty question does not arise for cameras. Declaration obligations, prohibited items and any other applicable law still do. Hong Kong operates a Red Channel / Green Channel system.
Working it through
⚠ A note on the missing numbers. This section used to convert a Japanese price into dollars so
you could see the arithmetic. We have taken the conversion out. We were using an exchange rate from
a published series whose licence terms we had not read, and when we read them we found that our use
needs prior consultation, which we have not had. **We would rather show you the structure without a
currency conversion than publish a figure we are not sure we are entitled to publish.** The rules
below are unaffected — they come from the customs authorities themselves.
Take a purchase worth more than your allowance but less than about twice it — a mid-range camera lens is a good example.
Arriving in the United States, that is over the $800 allowance. The excess falls inside the next-$1,000 flat-rate band, which is charged at 3%. Your allowance did its work; you pay duty on the part above it, and only on that part.
⛔ That rests on the $800 figure still being current, and we could not confirm that it is. CBP's traveller pages still show it and we found no statement that it has changed — but we also found no statement confirming it for 2026, and one of the CBP pages we read was last modified in 2024. Two other US rules in this article changed during 2025. Check the current figure before you rely on this arithmetic.
Arriving in Australia or the UK, the same purchase is over the allowance — and under the rules those two publish, the amount subject to assessment is the full value, not the excess. We are not going to quote you a figure, because the rate depends on classification and on import VAT/GST that we have not calculated. The point is structural: the allowance stops helping you entirely.
Arriving in Hong Kong, no customs duty arises on the camera at all.
The trap nobody warns you about: parcels are not luggage
This is the mistake we expect most readers to make, and it is worth its own section.
Everything above is about goods in your own baggage, accompanying you. If instead the goods arrive as a shipment — posted, couriered, or forwarded by a proxy service — you are in a completely different regime, and it is usually a worse one.
Two concrete US examples:
One. The additional 15% duty the US applies to articles of Japan does not apply to accompanied baggage. The tariff schedule excludes "products for personal use included in accompanied baggage of persons arriving in the United States" from those additional rates. Put the same lens in a parcel and that exclusion is gone.
Two. The old $800 "de minimis" threshold for low-value shipments has been suspended. CBP published this, verbatim:
Effective Aug 29, 2025, imported goods from all countries that are valued at or below $800 will no
longer be eligible for de minimis treatment and will be subject to all applicable duties, taxes,
and fees.
Source: CBP Publication No. 5129-0825, "Suspension of Duty-Free De Minimis Treatment", updated 18 August 2025.
Note that these two $800 figures are different rules that happen to share a number. One is your personal exemption as a traveller; the other was a threshold for shipments. The second one is gone. As for the first: we checked CBP's traveller pages and did not find a statement that it has changed — but we did not find a statement confirming the current figure either. Absence of a correction is not confirmation. Check before you travel.
⛔ And a separate point, easy to miss: since 1 April 2025, Japan no longer permits tax-free goods to be shipped separately at all. If you buy tax-free, you carry it out yourself. We covered that in a separate article.
What this means before you buy
- Find your own allowance and, more importantly, find out what happens above it. Type A and Type
B are not a small difference.
- If you are in a Type B country, work out where the line is before you shop, not at the airport.
- Do not assume a parcel is treated like a suitcase. It generally is not, and in the US it
demonstrably is not.
- Declare it. Every allowance in this article is something you claim by declaring, not something
you get by staying quiet.
- Check the current page. Every rule here has a link below. Two of the US rules in this article
changed in 2025.
What we did not do
- We did not convert anything into one currency. Six currencies, and we did not capture same-day
rates for all of them. As of 21 August 2026 we have also removed the one conversion this page did carry, because we had not read the licence terms of the rate series we were using.
- We did not calculate the tax owed in Australia, the UK or Germany. That needs a tariff
classification and an import VAT/GST rate, and we are not going to guess at either.
- We could not find the UK's definition of "category". It matters, and we are not going to guess.
- We did not confirm that the US $800 personal exemption is current for 2026. We found no
statement that it changed, which is not the same thing.
- We looked at six jurisdictions. There are many more.
- We are not customs brokers, and none of this is advice about your specific purchase.
Classification and assessment are decided by the customs authority, not by us.
Sources
All retrieved 20 August 2026. One row per authority — we have not mixed sources within a country.
Source attribution — UK
Information from GOV.UK quoted on this page is licensed under the Open Government Licence v3.0, which permits commercial use provided the source is acknowledged and the licence is linked. Contains public sector information licensed under the Open Government Licence v3.0.
Source attribution — United States
CBP's copyright notice states that, unless a copyright is indicated, information on its website is in the public domain and may be reproduced without permission, and asks only that CBP be cited as the source. We cite it in the source table above.
⛔ We have not established the position for hts.usitc.gov, which is a different agency's site. We are still looking for its terms and have not assumed CBP's notice applies to it.
How we handle translation
- Where an official English version exists, we quote it and never substitute our own translation.
- Where no official English version exists, we print the original first and mark our translation as ours.
- Where the two differ, the original governs.
The German customs pages cited here are in German and have no official English version. We have summarised rather than quoted them, and we have said so.
We do not sell anything mentioned here and we were not paid by anyone named in this article.