What it really costs to import a car from Korea
Car price, freight, duty, VAT and clearance — the full chain, with worked numbers for a $20,000 saloon landed in Jeddah and Jebel Ali.
The single most common mistake in this trade is budgeting from the car price. A $20,000 saloon does not cost $20,000 to put on your driveway, and the gap is not small — depending on the destination it can be a third again on top.
Start with the vehicle itself, quoted FOB Korea. On top of that sits our commission, agreed as a flat percentage before we bid so there is no markup hidden inside the car price. Then inland transport from the auction house to Incheon or Pyeongtaek, plus export declaration and port handling — modest, but real.
Ocean freight is the next line, and it varies more by route than most buyers expect. Jebel Ali is the cheapest and fastest Gulf destination at around $1,120 and sixteen days from Korea. Jeddah runs about $1,200 over eighteen days. Umm Qasr in Iraq is nearly $1,500 and twenty-eight days. Marine insurance is optional and costs one to two per cent of the vehicle value; we advise taking it.
Now the part that catches people. Customs duty is not charged on the car price — it is charged on the CIF value, meaning the car plus insurance plus freight. On our $20,000 saloon with $1,200 freight, duty is assessed on $21,200 or more. VAT is then applied on top of that total including the duty, so the two compound.
Finally there is the local side: broker fees, port storage if the paperwork is slow, inspection and registration. These are the costs we cannot quote precisely because they depend on your broker and how quickly clearance moves, but they are rarely trivial.
The practical advice is simple. Ask any exporter for a landed figure to your specific port, not an FOB price. If they will not give you one, they are leaving the expensive half of the calculation for you to discover later. Every price we quote is landed to the port you choose, with the breakdown visible.