People have been trading goods since time immemorial. Nowadays, this activity involves huge volumes of goods that travel very long distances from their place of origin to the final consumer’s home. As can be seen from the above, there is a whole process behind it that makes possible and gives legal certainty to trade between parts of the globe. One element of this activity is the Harmonized System Nomenclature.
This classification of products is regulated by the World Customs Organization. It is usually revised every five years and was last updated in 2022. This system seeks to define a standard of codes and definitions for the most common goods. It consists of four levels: section, chapter, heading and subheading. The first level is expressed in Roman numerals and the remaining ones by two pairs of digits each. For this reason, today we describe these concepts.
Section. It now consists of 21 categories. This is the most general of the levels and is not usually considered tacitly in the subject keys. It serves to bring together in the same group goods with the most general common characteristics possible. Here we find clusters such as Live animals and animal products, Vegetables and their derivatives, and Base metals and their derivatives.
Chapter. This level is represented by the first two digits. In the current version it is composed of 96 categories. The description of the chapters is usually still very generic, but allows a more precise grouping of products. Among the sections with the most chapters are Chemical and Allied Products with 11, Textiles and Textile Products with 14, and Base Metals and their derivatives with 12.
Line item. Two digits are added to the right of the chapter to make up the line item. At this level there is greater complexity in the classification, since there are 1228 headings in the current system. An example is heading 2208 “Undenatured ethyl alcohol of an alcoholic strength by volume of less than 80% vol.; spirits, liqueurs and other spirituous beverages” which includes wines, whiskeys, rums, gin, vodka, liqueurs and others.
Sub-item. It is the last level and is described with six digits; two more to the right based on the heading. Today there are 5612 subheadings. Here we can already distinguish products very close to those that we can find individually in the market. Based on the example above, heading 2208 consists of 7 subheadings. However, it is still possible to create further sub-levels which are already the responsibility of the national level.
The Harmonized System Nomenclature has among other purposes to allow countries to standardize the generation and availability of international trade information, to be the basis for more detailed national classifications, to serve as a rule for assigning tariffs and to set import and export rules. It is crucial to accurately classify a good within this system since exchange requirements, costs and handling conditions depend on it.
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Source: Harmonized System Nomenclature Edition 2022 (2025) World Customs Organization.
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