China vs India: The Real Cost of Furniture for Your Project

Chinese furniture looks cheaper on the sticker, but once you add 47.5% import duty, ocean freight and clearing, the landed cost climbs 40–70% — and it still won't fit your room or survive Indian weather. Here is the honest China vs India comparison, with a free calculator to run your own numbers.

Let us be fair from the first line. On the sticker, China is cheaper. Many projects import furniture from China for exactly that reason, and it feels like quick, easy work. We are not going to pretend otherwise. But a sticker price and a landed price are two different numbers. This guide shows you the gap between them — plainly, with real figures — so you can decide with your eyes open.

We proudly build make in India. Every piece we make is cut to your exact room and made for the weather it will live in. So we have a side. But this page is not a sales pitch dressed as advice. It is the honest maths that we wish every buyer saw before a container was booked.

Why the China sticker price is not the real price

The price a Chinese factory quotes is the ex-works price — the goods, at their gate, and nothing else. To land those goods in your project in India, you pay for a long chain of things the sticker never showed you. Here is the chain, in order.

• Ocean freight and surcharges — the container, plus terminal handling, fuel, papers and port fees at both ends.
• Marine insurance — because things break, sink and get wet at sea.
• Basic Customs Duty — 20% of the shipped value, the moment it reaches an Indian port.
• Agri-Infra Cess — 5% more on the same value.
• IGST — 18% on the value plus the duty above.
• Customs clearing and the CHA agent — a flat fee per shipment to get it released.
• Inland transport — from the port to your city, which for North India can be a large number on its own.

Add it up and the duty alone is about 47.5% of the shipped value in cash at the border. If you are GST-registered you can reclaim the 18% IGST later, which brings the non-recoverable duty down to about 25% — but you still pay the full amount upfront and wait months for the refund. Either way, the cheap sticker is now a very different number.

China vs India furniture cost: a worked example

Numbers make it real. Take a mid-size home project — sofas, chairs, tables, beds and wardrobes — that a Chinese factory quotes at about ₹15 lakh ex-works, filling roughly one container. Here is what actually lands in India.

A ₹15 lakh sticker lands near ₹25.6 lakh in cash, or about ₹21.8 lakh once IGST is reclaimed. That is a 40–70% jump — and you have not yet checked whether any of it fits your room. A made-to-fit quote in India for the same project sits in the same range or below, with none of the import stack, and it is designed around your walls, not a factory mould. Run your own figures in the landed-cost calculator to see where your project lands.

A ₹15 lakh sticker lands near ₹25.6 lakh. The duty is the real price tag.

The myth that China is quick

People choose China because it feels fast. For project furniture, that is the biggest myth of all. A container does not move at the speed of a decision. Here is the honest timeline for made-to-order furniture, from the day you place the order to the day it is installed.

Three to four months is normal, and Chinese New Year can shut factories for weeks and push it further. If a piece arrives damaged or wrong, you are months from a fix, with a container between you and the factory. We build the same project in India in a fraction of that time, and we cover the real numbers in How Long Does Custom Furniture Take?.

A container ships furniture. It can't ship a climate.

This is the quiet reason imports fail, and the one buyers find out too late. Furniture built for a stable Chinese warehouse arrives into India's monsoon humidity and dry-summer heat, and the material starts to move. Cheap board and unseasoned wood swell and shrink. Joints open. Veneers lift and tops crack. It looks fine on the day it lands and tired within a year.

Everything we make is built from timber seasoned for the climate it will actually live in, and joined by hand to allow that natural movement. That is why made-for-India furniture lasts exactly where imports fail. If you want to understand the material side deeply, read Best Wood for Furniture in India's Climate and Solid Wood vs Veneer.

What you give up when you import

The landed price is only half the story. The other half is everything the container cannot carry. When you import mass furniture, you also import a set of quiet compromises.

• Fit. Mass sizes rarely match your room. You end up with gaps, filler panels and a layout built around the furniture instead of your space. We explain this fully in Why Standard Furniture Fails in Luxury Homes.
• Revisions. Once it is made and shipped, wrong is wrong. There is no changing a colour, a size or a detail.
• Support. After the container is unloaded, there is usually no one to call. No repair, no touch-up, no spare part.
• Collaboration. You take what the mould makes. There is no designing the piece around how you actually live.

Made-to-space furniture is the opposite on every point. You approve the design before we build. It is cut to your exact millimetres. And we are here after delivery, because our name is on it. That is the real difference between buying a product and commissioning a piece — see Bespoke vs Ready-Made Furniture.

So when does China make sense?

Honesty cuts both ways. China can be the right call for high-volume, low-stakes furniture where fit and lifespan do not matter much — think basic fit-out for a large, budget project where every piece is identical and no one will keep it for decades. If that is your brief, import away.

But if the furniture has to fit a real room, survive Indian weather, match a design vision and last for decades — a home, a boardroom, a hotel, a flagship space — then custom furniture built in India wins on the things that actually matter, and often on landed cost too. That is the whole case for is bespoke furniture worth the money.

Ready to compare a real quote? Send us your space and the pieces you need, and we will build the price around your room — made in India, delivered by hand, with no duty and no container wait. Start at customization, or see finished work in our collections.