Sourcing comparison · Precious Metals & Jewelry
Tariff & fee savings only, assuming equal product cost — your actual landed cost also depends on price and freight, which vary by supplier.
| Annual import value | Estimated duty & fee savings / year |
|---|---|
| $50,000 | $1,319 |
| $250,000 | $6,594 |
| $1,000,000 | $26,375 |
Savings scale linearly with volume. Enter your exact figure to model it precisely.
Calculate your exact volume →When precious metals & jewelry crosses a US border, where it was made now decides a surprising share of what it costs. The effective rate falls from 12.5% on Switzerland shipments to 10% on Germany shipments — close to $2,638 per $100,000 of imports each year. Origin is one of the few cost levers a US importer controls outright, and it has rarely mattered more. Each component of the two stacks is detailed below, alongside what it means for a real sourcing decision.
Both stacks share the same customs valuation, so the comparison is apples to apples. On the Switzerland side, Customs applies a 5.5% Most-Favoured-Nation base duty and a 7% forced-labor Section 301 duty on its precious metals & jewelry, an effective 12.5% once the $49.74 in processing fees are added. Shipped out of Germany, the product is hit with a 5.5% Most-Favoured-Nation base duty and a 4.5% forced-labor Section 301 duty on its precious metals & jewelry, an effective 10% once the $49.74 in processing fees are added. Because the MPF and HMF ($49.74 combined) track customs value rather than origin, they wash out of the comparison entirely. That leaves a $263.75 gap on every $10,000 of goods, driven entirely by the 2.5% spread in effective duty rate. That same per-dollar gap is about $659 on a $25,000 order and $2,638 on $100,000 of annual volume. Scaled to a single $25,000 PO, the gap is near $659, repeated on every reorder.
Precious Metals & Jewelry (HTS 71) covers items such as Gold bars/coins, Silver jewelry, Diamond rings, Platinum bars, Fashion jewelry, Watch cases, and Gemstones. Because precious metals & jewelry moves in volume, even a modest per-unit duty gap aggregates into a number that decides sourcing strategy. Concretely, what counts as precious metals & jewelry: gold, silver, platinum, and other precious metals in unwrought or semi-manufactured form; diamonds and gemstones; jewelry, watches components, and silverware. A Europe supplier, Switzerland concentrates its US exports in pharmaceuticals, industrial machinery, and chemicals industrial compounds. Absent a trade deal, Switzerland's precious metals & jewelry is assessed standard duties and whatever surcharges apply. From Europe, Germany's top US-bound categories include passenger vehicles, industrial machinery, and pharmaceuticals. Germany trades under the EU bilateral framework, which shapes the duties on its precious metals & jewelry. Shared Europe routing keeps logistics roughly comparable and leaves the duty gap as the decisive number. Germany clears this category at a structurally lower rate than Switzerland, an edge that persists across order cycles rather than a spot-price blip. The figures here reflect the rules in force today; in a year of frequent revisions, the value is in re-running them as policy moves, which this site is built to do.
For $100,000 a year of precious metals & jewelry, the move from Switzerland to Germany is worth about $2,638, scaling to $1,319 at $50,000, $6,594 at $250,000, and $26,375 at $1,000,000. The numbers come straight from the landed-cost engine, with product cost and shipping fixed across both origins to isolate the tariff difference. These figures reflect tariff and fee savings only, assuming equal product cost — your actual landed cost also depends on price and freight, which vary by supplier. Treat the annual saving as the ceiling on switching cost: as long as moving to Germany costs less than that, the change is accretive. Request parallel quotes from your Switzerland incumbent and a vetted Germany source, then compare landed cost with the duty gap held constant. Because rates move, treat this as a point-in-time read and re-check before committing — new proclamations and bilateral deals can shift the stack with little notice. Run your own volume — and a post-Section-122 view — through the interactive Tariff Savings Finder.
At $100,000 of annual import value, switching from Switzerland to Germany saves an estimated $2,638 in duties and fees, because the effective tariff rate falls from 12.5% to 10%. The saving scales linearly with volume. These figures reflect tariff and fee savings only, assuming equal product cost — your actual landed cost also depends on price and freight, which vary by supplier.
Germany-origin precious metals & jewelry is assessed a 5.5% Most-Favoured-Nation base duty and a 4.5% forced-labor Section 301 duty, for an effective 10% duty rate before the Merchandise Processing Fee ($36.55) and Harbor Maintenance Fee ($13.19).
Switzerland carries an effective 12.5% rate versus 10% for Germany. The gap comes from differences in the base, Section 232 and bilateral rates that apply to each origin.
Tariff rates from Tax Foundation, USITC, and Penn Wharton Budget Model; retaliatory and industry data from the ITA Foreign Retaliations Database and U.S. Census Bureau (NAICS). Last verified .
