I know there are threads on this, but cannot find the answer to my oh-so-special and - obviously - unique question...

How does the cross-border tax allowance work?

For food/wine, it is per person (in the car). What I want to know is: what is the total on other non-consumable goods?

Specific case: we plan on buying a fair whack of stuff for our house from Germany and bringing it back cross border. Is the limit 300 CHF per load or is it per person in the car?

If the former, then we would be better off buying stuff in chunks of 300 CHF and ferrying it across. If the latter, then we'd save time by having as many people crammed in the car (we have a family of 5) with up to 1500 CHF of materials.

Thanks for any help (or pointing me to the right post/thread )

Anyone?

Pretty please with a cherry on top?

Will this 'bringing stuff across the border" Thread keep you happy while I try to find the other one...?

Not sure if this gives a different link, but it is the best I can do.

You, as always, are a star.

http://www.ezv.admin.ch/zollinfo_pri...x.html?lang=en

I was just getting ready my dog-begging picture. It does however, leave me a little confused, as there is some room for interpretation.

For example, we want to lay some flooring (laminate) in our cellar (3 rooms), but each room is different - we could have 1 room per person, but somehow, I doubt the border folk'll see it that way.

This is why I nearly always give links and very rarely give 'real' information. I can't understand half of what they are saying! Safer to let them say it themselves and leave the interpretation to the poor EFer!

By the way, thanks for the complement and the Thanks.

So far as I understand the allowance 300ch is per person so if you buy, for example, a piece of furniture between 2 of you @ 600CHF then it will not be duty free. If you buy 2 pieces of furniture & they are each not more than 300chf then the 2 of you are OK.

That's what I hope I understand too, but the tyre example has me worried. If I buy enough laminate flooring for all three rooms, why should the border folk believe me when I say it is for 3 people's room, likewise if I buy all the lights for the house...

I guess I'll have to try it out and see.

It is not what you plan to do with it - it is all about how many people are sitting in the car at the border.
Of course there is always the risk that you will get a "difficult" border guard.
The example does mention sets & parquet which is pretty similar to laminate.

I guess to be safe you should make several trips with only 300chf laminate purchased on each trip.

Yes, I saw that but think that they are refering to packets, so they mean "sharing" one packet between two (or more) is a no. So if you had two, you could have one each. But to be honest, I'd struggle to buy a pack of laminate flooring worth more than 300 CHF

Any opinion on whether children count (all aged <6 years!)...

Age Limit for alcohol is clear but in spite of skimming through the 112 pages of the German 'law' text, I cannot find any reference to age for other goods.

For folk who have only a nodding aquaintance with the rulings about shopping over the border, click on this and on the right there is a link to 'Clearing Swiss Customs without Delay' in a PDF. It's a leaflet with the basic Info on it. Useful to print out to check on stuff if you don't do it often too. I'm sure we've had it on here before, but I've no idea where.

It's not per packet. It's per purchase. So you can buy CHF300 worth of flooring, the second person buys 300CHF worth of flooring and the third person another 300CHF, ie. three separate transactions. Three of you can't have one receipt for 900CHF and say each of you chipped in 300CHF.

I'm not sure kids count. Can kids buy another 300CHF of flooring? Ah, Longbyt, I also didn't find age reference beside alcohol & tobacco.

Don't see why children shouldn't count for flooring. I bet it was the kids who mucked up the old floor so that it needed redoing.

Kids count for meat allowance, so I don't see why the shouldn't for your laminate allowance.

Yes. My point was just using a single "pack/set" example. You cannot divide a package into parts to reduce the allowance - as I said though, one would be unlikely to buy a single pack of laminate flooring worth 300 CHF though

We asked a lawyer who said that it was for over 18s only... I guess because they are goods, whereas anyone can eat food. To be honest if we could get our son to eat his allowance of meat we'd be happy...

Anyway, we'll ask next time we go through customs. My worry would be, though, that you could ask one person and get a different answer when you ask a different one the next time.

From my reading of the zoll.ch website, but without reading the relevant article in the Swiss legal code, I'd say your lawyer friend is wrong.

Actually, he's definitely wrong about 18.

http://www.ezv.admin.ch/zollinfo_pri...x.html?lang=de says that persons 17 and over have an allowance for Tobacco and Alcohol. ( Which is just like it used to be in the UK before erm... Mastricht?)

The next paragraph says: for other goods there is a limit of 300CHF per person. Taking the two together indicates to me that kids do have an allowance.

Sorry, having never bough laminate flooring I don't know what you are saying. Does each packet cost more than CHF300?


Great. Now I know there is no need for me to adopt a couple kids!

Maybe I'm not seeing it right but it doesn't seem to me that your concern about the 300 CHF limit is really the main issue - you're already getting a good deal by buying from abroad instead of from Switz. THEN you're getting an even better deal by reclaiming the German tax. So you've already saved a lot of money.

Now you also want to consider the 300CHF limit so that you also avoid paying the much lower Swiss duty - it seems to me that you'd have to go to a lot of extra effort (making several trips, filling in lots of little German tax reclaim forms, getting each one stamped, etc etc) to avoid paying the Swiss duty, even if you were successful in doing so, when after all it's just 7.6% instead of a whopping 17.5% or 20% or whatever. It's still a bargain.

But why pay an extra 7.60 per 100CHF, when you don't have to. When you live as close to the border as we do, it's not even extra trips. We're in France or Germany 2-3 times a week.

Closer to between 3.00 and 30.00 CHF