.svg)
.svg){kind=icon}
Your commercial invoice is where customs value starts. It is not where customs value ends.
Most import operations never think about valuation, because most import operations declare transaction value and clear. The invoice arrives, the price becomes the base, the duties calculate, the cargo moves. It works until the day it does not, and on that day the question stops being what you paid and becomes which method the law says applies.
Customs value is the base for the Impuesto General de Importación (IGI), and the IGI in turn feeds the base for the IVA, the DTA, and any ad valorem cuota compensatoria (countervailing or antidumping duty) on the merchandise. Change the method and you change every number below it. The Ley Aduanera does not leave that choice open: it sets one primary method and five secondary ones, in a fixed order, applied successively and by exclusion. Knowing which one your operation is actually on, and being able to prove it, is the difference between a file that answers an information request in a day and a value determination you find out about eighteen months later.
What customs value is, and what it is not
Article 64 of the Ley Aduanera states it plainly: the taxable base of the IGI is the customs value of the merchandise, and the customs value is the transaction value, except in the cases covered by Article 71. Transaction value is the price paid for the goods, adjusted in the terms of Article 65, provided all the circumstances of Article 67 concur, and provided the goods were sold for export to Mexican territory through a purchase made by the importer.
Read that sequence again, because it contains three separate tests that operations routinely collapse into one. There has to be a sale. There has to be a price paid. The circumstances of Article 67 have to hold. Take away any of the three and the invoice, however accurate, stops being the legal answer. Goods sent on consignment, samples shipped free of charge, machinery transferred between plants of the same corporate group without a sale, leased equipment: none of those have a transaction value, no matter what number appears on the paperwork accompanying them.
This is not a Mexican peculiarity. Articles 64 through 78 of the Ley Aduanera implement the WTO Customs Valuation Agreement, the agreement on the application of Article VII of the GATT 1994. The hierarchy is the same in every member country. What differs is the enforcement posture, and Mexico's has tightened.
Method one: transaction value, and the four conditions it has to survive
Article 67 lists what must be true for the price you paid to be the value you declare.
First, there can be no restrictions on the importer's disposal or use of the goods, other than restrictions imposed by law, restrictions limiting the geographic territory where the goods may be resold, or restrictions that do not substantially affect the value.
Second, the sale or the price cannot depend on a condition or consideration whose value cannot be determined. A price that is only that price because the buyer also agreed to purchase something else, or to provide a service back, fails this test.
Third, no part of the proceeds of a later resale, disposal, or use of the goods can revert to the seller, unless the corresponding adjustment can be made under Article 65.
Fourth, there can be no vinculación (relationship) between importer and seller, or, if there is one, it must not have influenced the price.
Any operation that fails one of these four is not on transaction value, whatever the pedimento says. That is the quiet exposure: the declaration is procedurally complete and substantively wrong, and nothing at the border flags it.
The additions you owe, and the deductions you can take
Even when transaction value holds, the invoice price is rarely the final figure. Article 65 lists the incrementables, the additions that must be made to the price paid when they are borne by the importer and are not already included.
Commissions and brokerage, except buying commissions. The cost of containers treated as one with the goods, and the cost of packing, both labor and materials. The apportioned value of goods and services the importer supplied free of charge or at reduced cost for use in producing the imported merchandise: materials, parts and components incorporated into the goods; tools, dies and molds used in their production; materials consumed in production; and engineering, development, artwork, design work, plans and sketches carried out outside Mexico and necessary for production. Royalties and license fees related to the goods that the importer must pay as a condition of the sale. Any part of the proceeds of subsequent resale that reverts to the seller. And the transport, insurance, and related handling costs incurred up to the point where the goods enter national territory.
Article 66 works in the other direction, listing what is not part of customs value provided it is separately stated and distinguished from the price: transport, insurance and related expenses after the goods arrive; construction, erection, assembly, maintenance or technical assistance carried out after importation; and the duties and taxes payable in Mexico.
Two of these carry most of the risk in practice. Royalties, because the question is not whether royalties exist but whether they are a condition of the sale, and that determination lives in the license agreement rather than in the commercial documents. And free-of-charge supplied materials, the classic assist, because they generate no invoice at all and therefore leave no trace in the systems that build the pedimento. Nothing prompts anyone to add a number that no document contains.
When transaction value fails, the order is not a menu
Article 71 sets the sequence. When the customs value cannot be determined under Article 64, it is determined by applying, in successive order and by exclusion, the following: the transaction value of identical merchandise, the transaction value of similar merchandise, the deductive value, the computed value, and finally the value determined under Article 78.
Successive and by exclusion means exactly what it says. You do not select the method that produces the most convenient result. You move down one step at a time and only when the step above genuinely cannot be applied. The single flexibility the law grants is that the importer may request that the order of the third and fourth methods be inverted.
Identical merchandise (Article 72). The transaction value of goods produced in the same country that are the same in all respects, including physical characteristics, quality and commercial prestige, sold for export to Mexico at the same time or a proximate time, at the same commercial level and in similar quantities.
Similar merchandise (Article 73). Goods that are not alike in all respects but have like characteristics and component materials that let them perform the same functions and be commercially interchangeable, under the same conditions of time, commercial level and quantity.
For both, Article 76 defines the proximate time as a period of no more than ninety days before or ninety days after the importation of the goods being valued. That ninety-day window is one of the most litigated details in the whole section, because it bounds the universe of comparable operations the authority may draw on.
Deductive value (Article 74). The unit price at which the greatest aggregate quantity of the imported goods, or of identical or similar goods, is sold in Mexico to persons not related to the seller, reduced by commissions or the usual additions for profit and general expenses, by transport and insurance costs incurred within Mexico, and by the duties and taxes payable in Mexico.
Computed value (Article 77). Built from the production side: the cost of materials and fabrication, plus an amount for profit and general expenses equal to that usually reflected in sales of goods of the same class or kind made by producers in the country of export, plus transport and insurance to the point of entry.
Article 78, the method of last resort. The value is determined by applying the preceding methods with greater flexibility, or by reasonable criteria consistent with the principles and legal provisions, on the basis of data available in national territory. Article 78 also contains a separate power worth knowing: when the supporting documentation of value is false or altered, or in the case of used merchandise, the authority may reject the declared value and determine the commercial value through its own quotation and appraisal.
Related parties: the relationship is not the problem, the silence is
This is where most valuation exposure in cross-border corporate groups actually sits, and it is widely misread in both directions.
Vinculación between buyer and seller does not by itself disqualify transaction value. Articles 68 and 69 of the Ley Aduanera define when a relationship exists (officers or directors of each other's businesses, legally recognized partners, employer and employee, ownership or control of a defined share of voting stock, one party controlling the other directly or indirectly, both controlled by a third party, jointly controlling a third party, or family relationship) and then set out how the price survives. The importer demonstrates that the relationship did not influence the price, or shows that the declared value closely approximates a test value: the transaction value of identical or similar merchandise in sales to unrelated buyers in Mexico, a deductive value, or a computed value, at the same time or a proximate time.
The operative word is demonstrates. The burden sits with the importer, and it is documentary.
A manufacturer importing subassemblies from its own parent company had run the same intercompany price for years, supported by a transfer pricing study prepared for income tax purposes. The study was rigorous. It was also built to a different standard, on a different set of comparables, for a different authority, and it said nothing about whether the price approximated a customs test value at the moment of each importation. When the value was questioned, the file that existed answered a question nobody had asked. Rebuilding the customs-side support took months, and the exposure ran across every operation in the open period, not just the one that triggered the review. The relationship was never the problem. The absence of a customs-specific demonstration was.
What the authority asks for, and what a file has to contain
Article 59, fracción III of the Ley Aduanera obliges the importer to deliver a manifestación de valor with the elements that allow the customs value to be determined. Article 81 of the Reglamento de la Ley Aduanera specifies the supporting documentation: the CFDI or equivalent document, purchase orders and contracts related to the operation, documentation supporting the incrementables of Article 65 (royalties, technical assistance, commissions, transport, insurance, packing), credit notes, and any other information necessary to correctly determine the customs value.
As of August 1, 2026, that manifestación is transmitted electronically through the Ventanilla Única for each import operation, under regla 1.5.1 of the Reglas Generales de Comercio Exterior para 2026 and the Décimo Primero transitorio, the eleventh transitional provision, as modified in the Segunda Resolución de Modificaciones published in the DOF on June 2, 2026. The operational consequence is the one that matters for this article: the electronic format requires the importer to state which valuation method was used, operation by operation, and to point at the documents that support it. The method stops being an implicit assumption inside the pedimento and becomes an explicit, transmitted, timestamped declaration.
That change does not alter a single article of the valuation section. It changes who has to have thought about it, and when.
When the authority rejects the value, and the right most importers never use
Article 78-A sets out when the authority, in the exercise of its verification powers and in the definitive resolution issued under the procedures of Articles 150 to 153, may reject the declared value and determine the customs value using the methods of this section. The listed cases include an importer who does not keep accounting records or does not make them available, who opposes the exercise of the authority's verification powers, who omits or alters the records of foreign trade operations, or who fails to comply with a formal requerimiento for the documentation and information proving that the declared value was determined in accordance with the law.
Read that list as what it is: a description of file failures, not pricing failures. In most of those scenarios the declared value may well have been correct. It was rejected because it could not be demonstrated.
Two provisions on the importer's side of the ledger get far less attention than they deserve. Article 78-B, together with Article 49 Bis, allows an importer to request an advance ruling on valuation methodology, which converts an open question into a written position before the cargo ever moves. And Article 78-C gives the importer the right to designate up to two representatives to access the confidential third-party information the authority obtained and used to determine the value, in the terms of Articles 46 and 48 of the Código Fiscal de la Federación. When a determination rests on comparable operations of other importers, that access is the only way to test whether the comparables were genuinely identical or similar. It has to be offered, and it has to be exercised.
Across more than 190,000 customs operations a year at 39+ ports, the pattern is consistent. The operations that never face a value determination are not the ones with the lowest prices or the simplest supply chains. They are the ones that can name their method, article by article, and produce the file that supports it, before anyone asks them to.
The invoice is where customs value starts. What decides whether it is also where customs value ends is not the number on it. It is the file behind it.
If you want that file reviewed before it is tested, talk to a Joffroy expert about a customs valuation methodology review of your current operations.
TRADE. UNDER CONTROL.
