Importing a Car Under the Baggage, Gift, or Transfer-of-Residence Scheme
Overseas Pakistanis returning home or sending a vehicle back have historically had three named import routes available through Pakistan Customs: the Personal Baggage scheme, the Gift scheme, and the Transfer of Residence (TR) scheme. Each has its own eligibility rules — how long you must have owned the car abroad, how long you must have lived overseas, and age limits on the vehicle itself — and each has historically carried its own fixed-duty treatment rather than the standard percentage-based import duty applied to commercial imports.
Why this is a genuinely fast-moving area right now
Pakistan's vehicle import policy has been in active flux through 2025 and 2026. A new SRO opened commercial import of used vehicles up to 5 years old — a real change from the prior, much more restrictive regime — with a regulatory duty specifically layered onto that channel, itself on a multi-year phase-down schedule. Separately, reports through 2025 indicated the personal Baggage scheme itself may have been discontinued or substantially tightened as part of the same reform push, with eligibility criteria under the Transfer of Residence scheme reportedly made stricter too.
Why we haven't published specific duty figures for these schemes
We researched this area specifically to build a Car Import Duty Calculator, and found the numbers genuinely difficult to pin down with confidence: depreciation-allowance formulas were reported inconsistently across sources (a 1%-per-month figure on one official page versus a 2%-per-month figure elsewhere), the official SRO documents themselves weren't retrievable in a form we could verify directly, and even the question of which of the three personal schemes currently survives in its original form couldn't be confirmed from a single authoritative source. Given that a wrong duty estimate on a vehicle import could mean a genuinely costly mistake — this isn't a case where an approximate answer is better than no answer — we chose not to publish a calculator built on unverified figures.
What to do instead
For an actual import, the reliable path is to confirm current eligibility and duty figures directly with Pakistan Customs (via the WeBOC portal or your nearest Customs House) or a licensed customs clearing agent, who will have access to the current SRO text and can quote you an exact, current figure — not an estimate. Policy in this area changes with enough frequency that even a correctly-researched figure today may not hold in six months.
What we do cover
Once a vehicle is actually registered in Pakistan, our Token Tax Calculator and the existing Advance Tax on Motor Vehicles calculator cover the recurring annual costs of ownership — those figures are considerably more stable and better-sourced than the import-stage duty stack.
Also available in Urdu: اردو ورژن