plainfreight/china-usa-freight-price-index

China to USA Freight Price Index

Dated, real prices for shipping goods from China to the United States, published by Plain Freight and free to reuse with attribution.

Every figure is generated from the rate card that prices Plain Freight's own customer quotes. Nothing here is typed by hand, estimated, or averaged from other companies' marketing pages, which is the reason the dataset exists: almost every published "China to USA shipping cost" figure is an untraceable range.

Canonical page, with the method written next to the numbers: <https://plainfreight.com/data/china-usa-shipping-price-index>

Configs

from datasets import load_dataset

prices = load_dataset("plainfreight/china-usa-freight-price-index", "price_index")
cartons = load_dataset("plainfreight/china-usa-freight-price-index", "chargeable_weight")

The headline, 15 September 2026

Shipping 20 kg of general goods from China to a US address door to door, with US customs clearance and import duty included, cost $299.20, which is $14.96 per kg, in 6 to 12 working days.

At the ends of the range: 0.5 kg cost $9.53 ($19.06/kg) and 1,000 kg cost $3,137.46 ($3.14/kg). Small parcels cost the most per kg because every shipment carries the same fixed handling and customs work regardless of size.

Method

• —Lane: China to the United States, supplier pickup to a US door, including export handling, freight, US customs clearance and delivery.
• —Goods: general goods, meaning unbranded, no electronics, nothing restricted. Branded goods and anything with a battery or a screen price on separate channels and are not in this series.
• —Duty: included on the door-to-door lanes and marked per row. From roughly 50 kg the cheaper lane is air consolidation, where the customs entry is included but the duty itself is paid at import, so a like-for-like comparison has to add duty back.
• —Chargeable weight: the greater of actual weight and volume in cm³ divided by 6,000. Every row in the index is dense cargo, where the two are equal, so the table is a floor that a bulky load can only exceed.
• —Not included: cargo insurance (the customer arranges it separately), storage beyond the free period, customs exams, and any duty-rate change between quote and entry.
• —Currency: USD.

Honest limits

One forwarder's rate card is not a market average, and this is not a survey. It is a real, buyable, dated price for small China to USA shipments, which is exactly the number missing from most published guidance. Use it as a reference point and a floor, not as an index of the whole market.

A new dated file is added when the rate card moves, and old files stay, because the point of a series is being able to see what changed.

Citation

Air freight from China to the USA, door to door with US customs and import duty included, cost $299.20 for 20 kg ($14.96 per kg) on September 15, 2026, according to the Plain Freight China to USA Shipping Price Index.

@misc{plainfreight_china_usa_price_index,
  title  = {China to USA Freight Price Index},
  author = {Plain Freight},
  year   = {2026},
  url    = {https://plainfreight.com/data/china-usa-shipping-price-index}
}

Related

• —Chargeable weight reference, the arithmetic behind the second config
• —US import rules timeline, every de minimis and entry change since May 2025 with its Federal Register citation
• —GitHub mirror, with a refresh script
• —Plain Freight MCP server, if you would rather have an assistant quote a real shipment than read a table

Questions, or a figure this series does not cover: hello@plainfreight.com