Merchandise Processing Fees and Harbor Maintenance Fees add up fast. How the caps, minimums, and filing choices change what DTC importers actually pay.
Every formal customs entry carries a Merchandise Processing Fee, currently 0.3464 percent of the entered value, and every ocean shipment carries a Harbor Maintenance Fee of 0.125 percent of the cargo value. These are not duties and they do not care about your product's classification; they apply to the value on the entry, which makes them a pure function of how you ship and how you file.
For a DTC brand importing a $200,000 container, the MPF runs about $693 and the HMF about $250, before any duty is calculated. Spread across 5,000 units, that is under 20 cents a unit and easy to ignore. But the fees have minimums and maximums that make the per-unit math swing wildly with shipment size and entry strategy, and brands that never think about them leave real money on the table.
The MPF has a maximum, currently just under $700 per entry, and a minimum around $31. That structure creates a powerful consolidation incentive: one $500,000 entry pays the same MPF as ten $50,000 entries would pay ten times over. Every time a brand splits what could be one entry into several, it pays the fee again for no reason.
The practical move is entry consolidation. Work with the broker to combine shipments arriving together into single entries wherever the rules allow, and time purchase orders so containers fill rather than sail half empty. The HMF has no cap, so it scales linearly with value, but it is assessed on the ocean shipment itself, which means the filing choices that matter for HMF are about valuation accuracy rather than consolidation.
Informal entries, available for lower-value shipments, carry a flat MPF instead of the ad valorem rate, which can be dramatically cheaper for small shipments. The tradeoff is that informal entry is not available for all goods and does not work for every situation, so the brand needs to know per-SKU which shipments qualify and route them accordingly.
Drawback changes the picture too. MPF paid on entries for goods that are later exported may be recoverable through drawback claims, and HMF has its own recovery path through the courts that has paid out for exporters. These are not quick wins; they are accounting projects. But for a brand with meaningful export or return-to-origin volume, the recovered fees compound year after year.
The optimization belongs in the purchasing calendar, not in a year-end review. When the buying team plans container loads, the landed-cost model should show the MPF and HMF per unit under different consolidation scenarios, so the decision to split a shipment is made with the fee cost visible. A standing rule helps: no entry under a value threshold without a documented reason, and a monthly review of entry counts versus container counts.
None of this requires new systems, just attention. Pull a year of entry summaries, total the MPF paid, and compare it against what the same value would have cost at maximum consolidation. The gap is the savings opportunity, and for most growing DTC brands it is large enough to fund the process changes that capture it.
Shipments under the de minimis threshold that qualify for informal procedures historically avoided the full MPF, but the de minimis landscape has changed and the rules keep moving. Model the current reality per shipment type rather than relying on old assumptions, and have the broker confirm the treatment.
The HMF obligation follows the importation, and under DDP terms the seller or their agent is the importer of record, so the fee lands on them. In practice it gets priced into the DDP quote, which is why brands should ask suppliers to break out the fee components instead of accepting a blended number.
MPF paid on entries covering goods later exported can be claimed through duty drawback, subject to drawback's documentation rules. HMF on exports has been recoverable through litigation-driven processes. Both require records most DTC brands do not keep unless they set up for it, so the first step is always the recordkeeping.