Importing from China to Morocco: customs duties, VAT and IMANOR in 2026

A member of the World Trade Organization since 1995, Morocco imported 75.2 billion dollars worth of goods in 2024, of which 64.8 billion excluded agricultural products. The economic and commercial office of the Chinese embassy in Morocco highlights the setup of Chinese battery and tire factories in the country, a sign of closer industrial ties between the two economies.

The U.S. Department of Commerce's trade guide on Morocco's trade agreements does not mention any free trade agreement with China: Chinese goods enter under most-favored-nation treatment, with no preferential tariff reduction, unlike the agreements in force with the United States since 2006 and with the European Union since 1 March 2000.

Morocco does not belong to any customs union with a common external tariff applicable to China: it applies its own national tariff, identical for Chinese goods and for goods from any third country without a preferential agreement.

The World Trade Organization's 2026 tariff profile gives Morocco a simple average duty applied in 2025 of 12.9% across all goods, 30.5% on agricultural goods and 10.1% on non-agricultural goods; the trade-weighted average reaches 14.4%. These averages hide differences from one tariff line to another, to be checked product by product.

On top of that comes import VAT of up to 20%, current as of 1 January 2024 according to the U.S. trade guide, with certain products such as locally grown corn exempted. The same source puts a parafiscal levy for technical controls and economic promotion at 25% of the imported value; that rate struck us as high compared with similar practices elsewhere and had not been cross-checked against a second official source as of 27 September 2026, so it should be reconfirmed before any binding calculation.

Example on a shipment of wooden furniture, a family with an average duty of 17.0%: for a customs value of 100,000 dirhams, the duty comes to 17,000 dirhams, bringing the VAT base to 117,000 dirhams; at the full rate of 20%, VAT amounts to 23,400 dirhams. Combined duty and VAT reach about 40,400 dirhams, excluding the parafiscal levy to be reconfirmed and terminal handling fees.

The U.S. trade guide lists the documents to assemble: an import title, a commercial invoice on the supplier's letterhead describing the goods in French, with the harmonized system code when available, value, currency and the buyer's address. An import undertaking, issued by a bank authorized under the Foreign Exchange Office, authorizes the transfer of currency to the Chinese supplier.

On arrival, a customs declaration is filed for every port or air shipment. The PortNet platform, Morocco's single digital window for foreign trade, centralizes these formalities: it processes about two million declarations a year for more than 100,400 active users.

IMANOR, the Moroccan Institute for Standardization, a public body created in 2010 to replace the Moroccan Industrial Standardization Service, develops, approves and issues Moroccan NM standards, most often aligned with ISO standards, and delivers product and management-system certifications. It is the body to check with to find out whether a product imported from China must carry an NM certification before it can be placed on the market.

Morocco's Ministry of Industry set up a conformity assessment program, in force since 1 February 2020, which checks certain imported products against national quality and safety regulations. As of 27 September 2026 we found no public schedule of costs and timelines for this program or for IMANOR certifications by product: ask IMANOR directly for the list of standards applicable to your reference before starting production.

As of 27 September 2026 we found no complete official list of goods prohibited or subject to a license for import into Morocco: the website of the Customs and Indirect Taxes Administration, which normally publishes this list, was unreachable from our tools at the time of writing. Two points deserve direct verification before any shipment.

Used vehicles are subject to an age limit regularly cited as five years in the press, with no official text found to confirm it: have the current threshold reconfirmed before organizing a shipment. Products covered by the conformity assessment program described above cannot be placed on the market without this control, whatever their origin.

The Tanger Med port complex receives most of the country's containerized traffic: according to its official website, it comprises three ports over 1,000 developed hectares, handles 11.1 million twenty-foot equivalent units a year and 161 million tonnes of goods, making it Africa's leading container port and the seventeenth worldwide. It is the most likely entry point for a container loaded in Guangzhou, Shenzhen or Yantian.

We found no single, verifiable sea transit time between southern China and Tanger Med: ask your freight forwarder for it at the time of booking. FOB from southern China works if the buyer arranges transport; CIF or CFR if an intermediary handles it through to the Moroccan port. DDP remains inadvisable as long as the Chinese seller is not itself a registered customs declarant in Morocco, which is never the case for Sorva.

Since the dirham is not fully convertible, any currency transfer to a Chinese supplier goes through a bank authorized under the Foreign Exchange Office, which publishes an annual general instruction on foreign exchange operations; it is this import undertaking that authorizes the payment. The usual practice is a deposit on order followed by a balance before shipment, settled to the Chinese company's business account, never a personal account: any change of bank details received by email should be verified with a direct phone call before any transfer.

A first order follows a set sequence: specifications, factory verification, approved sample, proforma invoice with the chosen Incoterm, import undertaking, production follow-up, pre-shipment inspection, IMANOR file if the product is subject to it, freight to Tanger Med, then customs clearance handled by the client or their local freight forwarder.

Sorva is a sourcing and trading house based in Guangzhou, in the Tianhe district, backed by a Chinese subsidiary whose corporate purpose covers the purchase, resale and export of goods, and by a parent company in France. Our Mandarin-speaking team finds and vets factories, arranges visits and samples, negotiates, has quality checked before loading and organizes freight through to Tanger Med. We never act as the official importer in Morocco, we do not handle customs clearance on site, and we do not export vehicles ourselves without going through a licensed Chinese exporter. Our base offer is invoiced in dollars, with regional options priced on request.