Cross-Border Trading in Zimbabwe (2026): The New Import Rules, Fees and Limits
The rules changed in March 2026, and most traders found out at the border
For decades the Zimbabwean cross-border trade worked on a settled understanding. You travelled to Musina, Johannesburg, Francistown or Lusaka, you bought stock, you brought it back on a bus, you paid something at Beitbridge, and you sold it. The rules were scattered across a couple of dozen statutory instruments that almost nobody had read in full, and enforcement was uneven.
That understanding no longer holds. On 25 March 2026 the Minister of Industry and Commerce gazetted Statutory Instrument 59 of 2026 — the Control of Goods (Import and Export) (Commerce) (Amendment) Regulations, 2026 (No. 15) — in a Government Gazette Extraordinary. It repealed sixteen earlier notices going back to 2017 and replaced them with one consolidated regime.
The practical effect is that several ordinary trading lines now require a paid licence, one long-standing trade is prohibited outright, and the quantity of household goods an individual may bring in without a licence is now written down to the kilogram. This guide sets out what the instrument actually says.
The licence: what it costs and how you apply
SI 59 inserts a new fee section into the principal regulations. The figures are unambiguous:
- An import licence application fee of one hundred United States dollars (US$100), or the equivalent in local currency at the prevailing interbank rate of exchange, payable by an applicant before the licence is issued.
- An export application fee of fifty United States dollars (US$50), on the same basis.
Two details matter more than the amounts. First, these are non-refundable application fees — the instrument says so expressly. You pay to be considered, not to be approved. Second, the Secretary shall not process or issue any licence until the applicant has produced proof of payment. There is no pay-later route.
Applications go by letter to the Permanent Secretary for Industry and Commerce, at the Harare or Bulawayo provincial offices. Critically, a separate application must be submitted for each different product category. A trader dealing in three unrelated lines is looking at three applications and three fees.
If you apply as a company, you must include a brief company profile stating your line of business, plus, for the consignment: the product description and relevant tariff code; the quantity in the appropriate unit of measure; the purchase or selling price per unit; the total value of the consignment and the country of origin or destination; and a statement that the goods cannot be sourced locally. You must attach a Certificate of Incorporation and Form CR14, a valid Tax Clearance Certificate, a copy of your Standards Development Fund (SDF) levy receipt, and a proforma invoice.
If you apply as an individual, you attach a certified copy of your National Identity Document or valid passport, and a written justification for the import.
That "cannot be sourced locally" requirement is the heart of the policy, and it is worth being clear-eyed about it: the regime is designed to say no to imports that compete with local manufacturing. The instrument also gives the Secretary express grounds to reject an application where the goods do not meet national quality or safety standards, where the importation is deemed prejudicial to the economic interests of Zimbabwe, or where the applicant has previously contravened the regulations.
If you are trading at any scale, this pushes you towards formalising. Our guide to registering a company in Zimbabwe covers the CR14 and incorporation side, and business taxes in Zimbabwe covers the tax clearance certificate you will now need in hand before you can even lodge an application.
What now needs a licence
The First Schedule lists the goods requiring an import licence, partly by description and partly by tariff code. Reading it against a typical Zimbabwean trader's basket, the items most likely to affect you are:
- School uniforms, including socks, and furniture and steel kitchen units, both named expressly;
- Footwear — essentially the entire range, across tariff headings 6401 to 6406, including parts of footwear;
- Blankets and travelling rugs, of wool, cotton or synthetic fibres, and long pile and looped pile fabrics;
- Stationery and printed matter — exercise books, registers, notebooks, order books, receipt books, file covers, printed books, dictionaries and encyclopaedias, textbooks, children's colouring books, calendars and postcards;
- Toilet paper, cartons and boxes of corrugated and non-corrugated paperboard, and sacks and bags;
- Plastic bags and polymers, and retreaded or used pneumatic tyres;
- Food lines including live poultry, poultry meat and offal, meat of swine, retail-packed milk and cream, infant milk formula, fermented milk, onions, potatoes and noodles;
- Building materials — cement clinkers, white cement, other Portland cement, flat-rolled iron and steel, bars and rods, angles and sections, steel doors, windows and frames, barbed wire, wire nails, screws and bolts;
- Agricultural equipment including ploughs, no-till planters, disc harrows, cultivators and groundnut shellers.
Fuel is also on the list when imported in a container other than a vehicle's own fuel tank by anyone other than the National Oil Company of Zimbabwe.
If your line is footwear, blankets, school uniforms or stationery — four of the most common informal trading lines in the country — you are now inside a licensing regime that did not previously bind you in this form.
We are deliberately not publishing duty rates. They vary by tariff code, by origin and by whether a trade-agreement preference applies, and a single percentage printed here would mislead more readers than it helped. Get the tariff code for your specific product and confirm the rate with ZIMRA or a licensed clearing agent.
What one person may bring in without a licence
Part II of the Third Schedule is the provision every traveller should photograph and keep. It says an individual may, once per calendar month, import the following goods for personal use without an import licence, provided the quantities do not exceed:
- Cooking oil — 4 litres
- Sugar — 4 kg
- Cereals — 2 kg
- Jam — 2 kg
- Peanut butter — 2 kg
- Margarine — 2 kg
- Laundry bar soap — 1 box of 24 bars
- Washing powder — 4 kg
- Blankets — one (1) blanket
- Cotton woven fabric — four (4) pieces
- Body creams or petroleum jellies — 1 case of 6
Read the framing, not just the numbers: this is an allowance for personal use, once a month. It is not a trading allowance, and quantities beyond these lines fall outside it entirely.
Separately, no import licence is required for personal goods belonging to deceased estates (inheritance goods), diplomats based abroad, returning residents with immigrant status, and returning residents who have resided continuously outside Zimbabwe for not less than six months — a provision that matters a great deal to the diaspora.
The traveller's rebate is a different thing, and it is smaller than people assume
Traders routinely conflate the licensing exemption above with ZIMRA's traveller's rebate. They are separate rules and you must satisfy both.
ZIMRA's rebate gives a duty-free allowance of US$200 per person, granted once a month, on the date of that person's first entry into Zimbabwe in that calendar month. It is available to returning residents, tourists and visitors, immigrants and diplomats, but not to a pilot, master or member of a crew.
Two conditions do most of the work:
- The goods must be properly declared.
- The goods must not be for resale or of a commercial nature. A trader's stock is, by definition, commercial. The rebate is not designed for you.
There is also a list of goods ZIMRA says attract duty regardless of value — no rebate applies at all. It includes stoves, refrigerators, blankets, cooking oil, laundry soap, beds, mattresses, flour, maize meal, sugar, meat, fish, powdered milk, yoghurt, cheese, eggs, corn puffs, jam and honey. Note the overlap with the monthly licensing exemption: you may be permitted to bring 4 kg of sugar in without a licence and still owe duty on it. Permission to import and exemption from duty are two different questions.
Alcohol has its own limit: not more than five litres, of which no more than two litres may be spirits, for a traveller aged 18 or above.
At the border, use the red route if you are carrying dutiable or restricted goods, and complete Form 47. Use the green route only if you are carrying none. ZIMRA's own guidance is explicit that a traveller who is not sure which route to follow should use the red route. Through 2026 there have been widely reported delays at Beitbridge as officers stepped up luggage searches to enforce the rebate cap, with buses held for many hours — a strong argument for declaring properly rather than gambling on the green lane.
Two outright prohibitions
Second-hand clothing. SI 59 prohibits the importation of second-hand clothing, except where the importer has obtained a valid permit authorising importation for charitable purposes only, subject to conditions the Secretary may prescribe to ensure the goods go to charitable distribution. The importation of second-hand undergarments is strictly prohibited under all circumstances.
For the bales trade — a livelihood for a very large number of Zimbabwean traders — this is not a tightening. It is a closure of the commercial route. If that is your business, the instrument requires you to change what you sell, not how you clear it.
Second-hand vehicles aged ten years or more. Vehicles ten years and above from the date of manufacture, falling under the Second Schedule headings, shall not be imported, and no import licence shall be issued for them. The Second Schedule covers passenger vehicles carrying ten or more persons, motor cars and station wagons, double cabs, and light goods vehicles up to five tonnes.
The consequences are severe and worth stating plainly. A vehicle imported in contravention must be re-exported by the owner, at the owner's own expense. If it is not re-exported within sixty (60) days, it is deemed forfeited to the State, subject to the Customs and Excise Act .
The instrument carves out narrow exceptions for vehicles belonging to deceased estates (inherited vehicles), to immigrants as defined in the Customs and Excise regulations, to diplomats returning from postings, and for vintage vehicles as defined in the Vehicle Registration and Licensing Act .
If you were budgeting for an older import, that plan is gone. Our guide to buying a car in Zimbabwe walks through the local-purchase alternative, and deliberately publishes no prices, because they move too fast to be useful.
Clearing commercially: BPN, ITF 263, and the 10% trap
Once your consignment is commercial rather than personal, ZIMRA's clearance machinery applies:
- You need a Business Partner Number activated for Customs purposes.
- Typical documents include the Bill of Entry (Form 21), suppliers' invoices, consignment notes, freight statements, cargo manifests, insurance statements, certificates of origin where a preference is claimed, port charge invoices, and any permits or licences for controlled goods.
- ZIMRA encourages the use of professional clearing agents, citing the complexity of customs valuation and Harmonised System classification. That is fair warning: misclassifying a tariff code is how traders end up with unexpected assessments.
Then there is the provision that catches informal traders hardest. If the importer has no tax clearance certificate (ITF 263), Informal Cross Border Traders Tax of 10% of the value for duty purposes becomes due — payable together with any duties and other charges before ZIMRA will release the goods.
That is a straight 10% penalty for being unregistered, charged on the duty value of every consignment. For a trader running regular monthly consignments, obtaining an ITF 263 is not administrative tidiness — it is one of the highest-return pieces of paperwork available. Work out what 10% of your annual import value is, and compare it with the cost of getting your tax affairs in order.
What this does to the money side of a trading business
Three things change in the arithmetic, and none of them are optional:
Working capital now front-loads further. A non-refundable US$100 per product category, paid before approval, plus possible clearing agent fees, plus duty, all land before a single item is sold. Traders who previously turned stock weekly on thin margins need a larger buffer simply to operate. If that buffer does not exist yet, build it deliberately rather than borrowing into it — see building an emergency fund in Zimbabwe, and treat business borrowing as a considered decision rather than a reflex.
Formalisation stops being optional. Tax clearance, incorporation documents and an SDF levy receipt are now entry requirements for a licence application, not nice-to-haves. Our guide to running a side business covers the transition from informal to registered trading.
Payment costs deserve a second look. Traders paying suppliers and clearing agents electronically carry the 2% intermediated money transfer tax on USD transactions; our IMTT calculator shows what any given payment costs, and it compounds quickly across a supply chain. If you are funding stock purchases from family abroad, the corridor guides — including sending money from South Africa to Zimbabwe — are worth revisiting, because transfer costs and IMTT together are a real line item, not a rounding error.
The penalties
SI 59 inserts a new offence provision. Any person who imports or exports goods in contravention of the regulations, makes a false statement in a licence application, or sells a licence or permit issued under the regulations, is guilty of an offence and liable to a fine not exceeding level twelve, or imprisonment for a period not exceeding one year, or both.
The inclusion of licence-selling as a named offence is a signal. Where licences are scarce and fee-bearing, a secondary market appears — and the instrument anticipated it.
Before your next trip
- Identify your tariff codes. Everything downstream — whether a licence is required, what duty applies — follows from correct classification.
- Check whether your line appears in the First Schedule. If it does, budget the US$100 per category and the lead time, and remember each product category needs its own application.
- Get an ITF 263 if you import commercially at all. The 10% Informal Cross Border Traders Tax is avoidable.
- Keep the monthly personal quantities on your phone. Four litres of oil, 4 kg of sugar, one blanket, and the rest of the list above.
- Declare, and use the red route if in any doubt. ZIMRA says so itself.
- Stop planning around second-hand clothing or ten-year-old vehicle imports. Both routes are closed, and the vehicle rule carries forfeiture.
Frequently asked questions
Do I need an import licence to bring goods into Zimbabwe for resale? If the goods appear in the First Schedule to SI 59 of 2026 — which includes footwear, blankets, school uniforms, stationery, several foodstuffs and a long list of building materials — yes. The monthly personal-use exemption does not cover goods for resale.
How much does an import licence cost? The application fee is US$100, or the local currency equivalent at the prevailing interbank rate. An export licence application is US$50. Both are non-refundable, payable before issue, and a separate application is required for each product category.
What can I bring in each month without a licence? For personal use, once per calendar month: 4 litres of cooking oil, 4 kg of sugar, 2 kg each of cereals, jam, peanut butter and margarine, one box of 24 laundry bar soaps, 4 kg of washing powder, one blanket, four pieces of cotton woven fabric, and one case of six body creams or petroleum jellies. Duty may still apply to some of these.
Is the US$200 traveller's rebate the same as the monthly exemption? No. They are separate rules under separate instruments and you must satisfy both. The rebate is a duty allowance of US$200 on your first entry each calendar month, and it applies only to goods that are not for resale and not of a commercial nature.
Can I still import second-hand clothes to sell? No. Importation of second-hand clothing is prohibited except under a permit for charitable purposes only, and second-hand undergarments are prohibited in all circumstances.
What happens if I import a vehicle older than ten years? No import licence will be issued. A vehicle imported in contravention must be re-exported at the owner's own expense, and if it is not re-exported within 60 days it is deemed forfeited to the State. Narrow exceptions exist for inherited vehicles, immigrants, returning diplomats and vintage vehicles.
What is the Informal Cross Border Traders Tax? It is 10% of the value for duty purposes, charged by ZIMRA where the importer has no valid tax clearance certificate (ITF 263), and payable along with duties before goods are released.
Last reviewed: August 2026. General information, not financial, tax, customs or legal advice. Import controls change by statutory instrument and tariff classification is technical — confirm your specific position with ZIMRA, the Ministry of Industry and Commerce, or a licensed clearing agent before committing money to a consignment.
