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Personal allowances arriving in Great Britain: 42L beer, 18L still wine, 4L spirits (or 9L sparkling/fortified wine under 22%: shared allowance, not shown separately here), 200 cigarettes or 250g tobacco, plus GBP 390 of other goods. Go over ANY limit and you must declare and pay duty on the full amount in that category, not just the excess. NI follows EU-style rules.
What The Duty-Free Allowance Calculator Works Out
- Verdict: compares each category against the Great Britain personal allowance: 42 litres of beer, 18 litres of still wine, 4 litres of spirits and 200 cigarettes per adult. Exceeding any category's limit does not tax the excess; it forfeits the whole allowance in that category, so 20 litres of wine owes duty and VAT on all 20, not on 2.
- Your haul vs the limits: each category as carried against its limit, so you can see which box of wine is the expensive rounding error.
- Adults travelling (advanced): allowances are per person aged 17 or over, so the limits scale with the adults in the car. They are individual and non-transferable in the strict reading: the teetotal passenger cannot officially carry your surplus, and under-17s get no alcohol or tobacco allowance at all.
- Sparkling or fortified wine (advanced): shares the spirits allowance: 4 litres of spirits or 9 litres of sparkling or fortified wine under 22%, or a proportional mix, so 2 litres of spirits plus 4.5 litres of sparkling uses exactly 100%.
- Hand-rolling tobacco (advanced): shares the cigarette allowance in the same way: 200 cigarettes or 250g of tobacco (or 100 cigarillos or 50 cigars), or a mix.
- Other goods (advanced): clothes, electronics and gifts up to GBP 390 per adult, or GBP 270 arriving by private plane or boat, one of the statute book's more cinematic distinctions. A single item worth more than the limit cannot be split between travellers, and duty plus import VAT fall on its full value.
- Room left to buy (advanced): how much more of each category the party can bring in without crossing a cliff edge, which is the number to take into the hypermarket.
- Allowance table (advanced): the per-adult and whole-party limits beside what you are carrying. Declare through the online service up to 72 hours before arrival or in the red channel; undeclared goods over the limit risk seizure, and commercial quantities risk the vehicle. Northern Ireland follows EU-style guide levels instead. The allowance resets per trip, not per year.
Current limits: GOV.UK: bringing goods into the UK.