Importing a used car from China to Ghana

Almost every guide to Ghanaian car imports folds two rules into one, and that mistake is expensive. Ten years is where the tax starts. Fifteen years is where the car stops being allowed into the country at all. A twelve-year-old car is importable and pays a penalty. An eighteen-year-old car is refused at Tema, and no duty paid changes that. What follows is each line, in the order customs charges it.

Two thresholds, and they are not the same line

Two different agencies set those two numbers. The Ghana Revenue Authority collects the money. The Ghana Standards Authority decides what may enter. Since 1 October 2026 the distance between their two rules has widened, and the gap is where shipments get lost.

The third row is the one that catches people. A dealer sells an eighteen-year-old car, the buyer pays the age penalty at the port, and the car is still refused because the penalty is a tax and the age limit is an eligibility rule. One is money. The other is permission. They are not interchangeable, and no amount of the first buys the second.

What changed on 1 October 2026

GSA Public Notice GSA/DGS/PN/26/09, issued 14 August 2026, replaced the earlier guidance and set out how the national vehicle standard would be enforced. From 1 October 2026 a used vehicle is refused entry if any one of these is true:

• submerged in water, or flood damaged
• burnt or damaged by fire
• chassis or safety-cage damage — broken, cracked, bent or twisted
• assembled from spare parts
• no speedometer reading in kilometres per hour
• over fifteen years old

The fourth and fifth items are the two that surprise importers. A car rebuilt around a donor shell is excluded however good it looks, and a US-market car with a miles-only cluster is refused until the instrument reads km/h. Neither of those appears anywhere in a duty calculation, and neither can be fixed after the vessel sails. We check both before a unit is booked — not before it is loaded.

What the car actually costs

A China export purchase has two cost stacks, and importers who budget only the first one run out of money at the port. The first stack ends at the ship: the vehicle, export handling, inland transport to the loading port. The second starts when the ship sails: freight, insurance, duty, levies, VAT, certification and clearing.

Below is the whole arithmetic for one unit we ship regularly — a 2021 Hilux 2.8D 4x4 double cab, diesel, 2,755cc, five years old, so it sits well inside both age lines. Nothing here is a headline rate applied to a price; every line is charged on its own base.

Landed at Tema, that vehicle costs about 1.67 times its FOB price. The multiplier, not the sticker price, is the number to plan around — and it moves with engine size far more than most buyers expect, which is the next section.

How the tax is built

Ghana does not apply one percentage. It applies a duty band, then a set of statutory levies, then VAT on top of most of what came before. Every line below is charged on a different base — which is exactly why a car advertised at '20% duty' arrives with a bill near half its CIF value.

Three things about that table matter more than the rates themselves.

• VAT is not charged on CIF alone. It is charged on CIF plus duty plus the levies, so every line above it widens the base for this one. This is the most common arithmetic error we see in importers' spreadsheets, and it understates the bill by several thousand dollars on a large unit.
• NHIL and GETFund are not optional and not deductible. Two and a half percent each, charged on CIF plus duty. Together they behave like a second VAT, and they are the reason the total never matches the duty rate anyone quotes you.
• The examination fee is specific to used vehicles. It is small in absolute terms, but it does not appear on new-car calculations — which is why tax pages written around new imports understate what a used car pays.

Engine size moves the bill more than the price does

This is where buyers lose the most money, and it has nothing to do with the asking price. Ghana's duty band is set by displacement, and VAT compounds on whatever the duty turns out to be. Same CIF on every row below:

Read the middle two rows together, because they carry the useful fact: Ghana's petrol bands are wide. Everything from 1,001cc to 3,000cc pays the same 10%. A 2.0-litre therefore costs exactly the same in duty as a 1.5-litre, and on a 26,000 CIF the difference in total tax is zero. Buyers who pay extra for a smaller engine to 'save on duty' are buying nothing.

Then look at the last row. A diesel crosses into the 20% band at 2,500cc, a petrol only at 3,000cc — so a 2.5-litre diesel pays double the duty that a 2.9-litre petrol pays. On the same 26,000 CIF, a 2,450cc diesel is assessed at USD 9,267 and a 2,550cc diesel at USD 12,407. One hundred cubic centimetres, USD 3,140. If you are choosing between two units of the same model, this single number can be worth more than the price gap between them.

Left-hand drive, and why we will not convert a car

Ghana drives on the right and a right-hand-drive vehicle cannot be registered. Every unit we export is factory left-hand drive. We do not buy RHD stock and convert it, and we would advise against buying from anyone who offers to.

• A conversion is a steering rack, a firewall, a dashboard, a wiring loom and a pedal box. It is never invisible, and an inspector who has seen a hundred of them will find the hundred-and-first.
• The chassis number records the original build configuration. Changing the hardware does not change what the VIN says the car is.
• Resale: a converted car is priced as a converted car for the rest of its life in Ghana. The saving at purchase is handed back at sale, usually more than once.

What we check before a unit is booked

1. Build year from the manufacturer's records, not from the listing. Both age lines in this article are decided on that one number, and a borderline unit is not worth the risk on either side of it.
2. Displacement from the spec sheet, matched to the VIN. This number alone sets the duty band. 'About 2.0 litres' is not good enough when the band changes at 2,500.
3. Condition against GSA's six exclusions — water, fire, chassis or cage damage, parts assembly, km/h cluster, age.
4. Left-hand drive, factory, from the build record.
5. Whether a Certificate of Conformance can actually be obtained for this unit under the current interim rules, before we take a deposit.

From our yard to Tema

1. You send the model, the budget and the destination. We reply with units that match, each with its displacement and build year.
2. Inspection and condition report, with photographs and the VIN.
3. Export paperwork in China and loading — container or RoRo depending on the unit and the route.
4. Freight to Tema, typically five to seven weeks on the West Africa run plus booking lead time.
5. Arrival, assessment, duty payment, release. Clearing is done by a licensed Tema agent. We do not pretend to clear customs from China.

We are not a Tema clearing agent and we take no cut of your duty. What we control is the China side: which unit, at what displacement, at what build year, with which documents. That happens to be precisely the part that decides your Ghanaian tax bill.

Five things that stop a Ghana shipment

• A borderline build year taken from the model year. The car is refused, and by then it is already on the water.
• A miles-only speedometer. Refused under the new rules, and the fix has to happen before loading, not at Tema.
• An RHD unit bought because it was cheap. It cannot be registered, whatever the paperwork says.
• Duty budgeted at the headline rate with no allowance for VAT compounding. The shortfall appears at the port, when the car is already yours and already incurring rent.
• No confirmation of the current conformity process before deposit. The rules changed twice in two months. A guide written in August is not a procedure in October.

What this page does not tell you

Two numbers are still being confirmed, and we would rather say so than dress an estimate up as a fact: the exact penalty percentage for vehicles between ten and twelve years old, and whether the COVID-19 recovery levy is still collected. Published sources contradict each other on both. We are checking both against a real Tema assessment, and this page will be updated with the answer and the date it was checked. If you need either figure before then, ask us and we will tell you what we know and what we do not.

One thing this page can explain but cannot put a number on: the value Customs starts from. Every rate above is charged on CIF, but the CIF that counts is the one ICUMS calculates, not the one on your invoice. Ghana's system reads the specification from the chassis number and applies its own benchmark for that model and year, so a car bought cheaply at auction is still assessed against the benchmark. On a used car the assessed figure frequently sits above the declared CIF — commonly by around a quarter, and further on a unit bought well below local market value. That is not a rate change, it is the base moving, and no percentage table can predict it. The only way to price it is a pre-check on ICUMS with the chassis number before you commit, which is what we do before quoting a landed figure.

What will not change is the structure: a duty band set by displacement, levies on CIF, VAT on the running total, and an age penalty that is a separate thing from the age ban. That structure is the reason a car quoted at '20% duty' lands with a bill near 48% of its CIF value, and it is the one part of this page you can plan against today.