per unit at 1,000 units — goods, agent fee, freight, US import fees and delivery. Duty is not included; see below.
Basis: Aggregated from 54 current wholesale listings in this category, costed with our standard import model. duty excluded, because the rate depends on how your product classifies — the table below shows what any rate adds. figures as of 1 September 2026. individual figures are not attributable to any one supplier.
What duty adds
We do not publish a single duty rate for this category, because classification depends on the product's construction and materials rather than on what it is called. Rather than print a number that would be wrong for some readers, here is what any given rate does to the figures above.
| Duty rate | Landed per unit | Versus no duty |
|---|---|---|
| No duty | $30.71 | — |
| 5% | $31.48 | +2.5% |
| 12% | $32.57 | +6.0% |
| 25% | $34.57 | +12.6% |
| 37% | $36.43 | +18.6% |
Establishing your own rate is your responsibility as importer rather than your supplier's — our guide to classification sets out how, including requesting a binding ruling if you intend to import repeatedly.
An office chair is mostly air, and ocean freight is billed on the space a carton occupies. Whether the factory ships it assembled or knocked down changes your landed cost by more than any price negotiation you are ever going to win — and unlike the price, it is entirely your decision.
Where the money goes
Almost every other page on this site is about the factory price. This one is not. Look at what happens to the same chair, at the same sourcing price, under three packing configurations:
| Packing | Volume per chair | Freight per chair | Landed before duty |
|---|---|---|---|
| Assembled | 0.36 CBM | $46.80 | $63.99 |
| Partly knocked down | 0.18 CBM | $23.40 | $40.03 |
| Fully knocked down, flat packed | 0.11 CBM | $14.30 | $30.71 |
Shipped assembled, the freight on this chair is more than three times what the chair itself costs to buy. At the median sourcing price, the goods are around $14 per chair and the ocean freight on an assembled unit is around $47. Knocking it down flat cuts the landed cost by more than half.
No negotiation available to you comes close to that. A hard round of price bargaining on a category like this might move the factory price by a few percent; the packing decision moves the landed cost by 50%. If you take one thing from this page, take that.
What drives cost in this category
Assembled or knocked down
The single biggest lever on landed cost. Knock-down packing changes the economics of the whole shipment, but moves assembly — and assembly errors — to your end of the chain.
Gas lift class and certification
The gas cylinder is a pressure vessel under a person. Tested cylinders from a named maker cost meaningfully more than unmarked ones, and this is not a line to save on.
Mechanism and base material
A nylon base, a reinforced nylon base and an aluminium base sit at very different price points and very different failure rates. The difference is invisible in a listing photo.
Test reports
BIFMA or EN 1335 testing is a real, quotable cost paid per model, not per unit. It is usually discovered late, after the buyer has already agreed a price.
Minimum order quantities
| Existing model, factory's own colours | Lowest floor in the category. You are buying into a run the factory already makes. |
| Existing model, your fabric or colour | Rises with the fabric supplier's own minimum, which is often the real constraint rather than the chair factory's. |
| Your logo on the base or backrest | Adds a mould or plate charge that only amortises at volume. |
| Custom mechanism or new mould | Highest floor, plus tooling quoted separately and usually owned by whoever paid for it — get that in writing. |
Where these are made
Office seating concentrates heavily around Foshan in Guangdong, where the furniture supply chain is dense enough that a chair factory can buy mechanisms, gas lifts, castors and foam within a short drive. That density is why lead times there are shorter than the raw factory count would suggest, and why component substitution is easy for a factory to do without telling you.
What goes wrong
- Gas cylinder substitution. The most serious failure in the category, and the least visible. Specify the cylinder maker and class by name and check it at inspection.
- Foam density reduction. A lower-density foam feels almost identical for the first month and then flattens. Specify density, not "high quality foam".
- Castor quality. Cheap castors mark hard floors and seize on carpet. They are a small part of the cost and a large part of the returns.
- Fixings and assembly instructions. Missing or wrong-length bolts generate more support tickets than any actual defect, and they are trivially catchable before shipping.
All four are catchable at pre-shipment inspection, but only against a specification that named the cylinder, the foam density and the base material in the first place.
