Duty deferral
Outside a zone, you pay customs duties when goods arrive. Inside a zone, you pay when goods leave. That timing shift is worth real money to any company that holds imported inventory.
How it works
Goods admitted to a Foreign-Trade Zone haven’t entered U.S. commerce, so no duty is owed on arrival. They can sit in the zone indefinitely — there is no storage time limit. Duty comes due only when goods ship out of the zone to a U.S. customer. If your inventory turns every 60 days, you're paying each duty bill roughly two months later than you would without the zone, forever.
The math
Say you import $20 million a year of goods carrying an average 10% duty — $2 million in annual duties — and your imported inventory sits about 60 days before shipping.
Without a zone: duties are paid on arrival. At any moment, roughly $330,000 of your cash (60 days’ worth of a $2M annual duty bill) has gone to customs for goods you haven’t sold yet.
With a zone: that $330,000 stays in the business permanently. At an 8% cost of capital, the deferral alone is worth about $26,000 a year — before any other zone benefit, and more if rates or volumes rise.
Deferral is rarely the biggest number in an FTZ analysis, but it applies to nearly everyone, requires no manufacturing, and scales directly with duty rates — which is why interest in it climbs every time tariffs do. And if goods are never sold into the U.S. at all, deferral becomes elimination.
Who this fits
Distributors and importers holding meaningful inventory; companies with seasonal stock builds; anyone importing under elevated tariff rates where the duty line has become a real cost of carrying goods.
General education, not customs, legal, or financial advice. Figures are illustrative.