Method & sources

classifyanything helps importers, brokers, sellers and researchers find the right code for a product or a business. The tariff side is the Harmonized Tariff Schedule of the United States, published by the US International Trade Commission; the industry side is the 2022 North American Industry Classification System from the US Census Bureau.

The classifier is retrieval, not a language model. Your description is matched against the full text path of every tariff line (heading, subheading and line wording together) and against the roughly 20,000 example activities in the Census NAICS index, using BM25 ranking with light stemming. Matches are rolled up to tariff lines, headings and industries, and each suggestion shows the catalogue text that supports it, so you can see why it was suggested. Everyday words are mapped to the schedule's own vocabulary (a laptop is a portable automatic data processing machine), and an industry match also votes for the tariff headings of the goods that industry makes, using the Census import concordance.

How well it works, measured: on 48 everyday product descriptions held out from tuning, the correct four-digit heading was the first suggestion 83% of the time and in the top three 96% of the time. For industries, holding out 535 of Census's own index entries and asking for them back, the exact six-digit NAICS code was in the top three 83% of the time. These are short, plain descriptions; unusual goods, mixtures and sets are harder, and the heading text and chapter notes still decide.

Rate history compares the general rate of each eight-digit line across the January 2023, 2024, 2025 and 2026 basic editions and the current revision. Percentiles compare a line with the other lines in its chapter that carry a simple percentage rate. Business counts are national totals from County Business Patterns 2023 and 2018. The link between tariff lines and industries is the Census import concordance.

Chapter 99 additional duties (Section 301, Section 232, IEEPA and others) change often and depend on the country of origin; we show the provisions a line's footnotes point to but do not compute them. Nothing here is legal advice: a binding classification comes from a CBP ruling. The site runs on a prototype embedded database on a single small server. Corrections are welcome by email to the address in the WHOIS record.