The Refund Is Nine Percent, Not Eleven

the refund counter sits past immigration, usually beside the currency exchange, and by the time most travellers reach it they have already made the two mistakes that void the claim: nobody issued the form at the shop, or the goods went into the hold before a customs officer saw them. neither can be fixed airside. that is the whole reason this guide exists, because the rules themselves are simple and the sequence is what people get wrong.

what the scheme does is return the value added tax on goods a visitor buys in China and carries out unused. it runs on a 2015 finance ministry announcement, rewritten on 27 April 2025 by State Taxation Administration announcement 2025 no. 11, which followed a six-ministry notice issued the day before. the 2025 rewrite is the one that matters for anyone travelling now, since it cut the entry threshold by more than half and doubled the cash ceiling.

two adjacent topics get confused with this one and cost people money. the customs allowance for goods you bring home is a separate rule, covered in the shipping and customs guide. and income tax on wages earned here has nothing to do with a shopping refund, which is what the tax guide deals with. this page is only about the counter at the airport.

Who is allowed to claim, and the wall at 183 days

the definition is narrow and it is measured in residency, not in nationality. article 2 of the 2025 rules defines an overseas visitor as a foreign national, or a resident of Hong Kong, Macao or Taiwan, who has lived continuously in mainland China for no more than 183 days. cross that line and the scheme stops applying to you entirely, regardless of what you bought or how much of it.

that single sentence excludes most people who read this site. a two-year work permit, a student residence permit, a spouse visa converted into a residence card: all of them mean you are a resident, and residents pay the tax. the residence permit guide explains why the card is dated from your entry stamp, which is the same clock that decides this question. if you moved here in March and you fly home in December, you are past 183 days and there is nothing to claim.

the short-stay visitor is the person the policy was built for, and the counting has a wrinkle worth knowing. the 183 days run from your last entry, not from the start of the calendar year and not from your first entry on this trip. leave for a week in Laos and come back, and the clock restarts from the new stamp. the shop checks that stamp when it issues the form, and the officer checks it again when you leave.

the identity document has to be one that carries or can be read for the last entry date: a passport, a mainland travel permit for Hong Kong and Macao residents, or a Taiwan residents travel permit. a driving licence or a digital ID will not do, because the system has no way to establish when you arrived.

Eleven percent on paper, nine percent in your hand

the refund rate follows the VAT rate on the goods, and there are two of them. under the 2019 VAT reform, goods taxed at 13% refund at 11%, and goods taxed at 9% refund at 8%. the 2025 rewrite dropped the fixed eleven percent figure out of the rules and replaced it with a reference to the applicable rate, which is why older guides still describe a single number.

then the agency takes its cut. the formula in article 21 of the rules is refundable tax equals invoice value multiplied by the refund rate, and the amount actually paid equals that figure minus the handling fee charged by the refund agent. the fee is not in the national rules; it sits in the service agreement each province signs with its agent, and the provinces that publish the calculation put it at 2% of the invoice value.

here is what that does to a real purchase. a coat priced at RMB¥5,000 including tax carries RMB¥575 of refundable VAT at 11%, the agency keeps RMB¥100, and RMB¥475 reaches you. on a RMB¥2,000 bag the refund is RMB¥220 and you receive RMB¥180. the difference between the headline rate and the payout widens with the size of the purchase, which is why a traveller spending RMB¥40,000 notices it and a traveller spending RMB¥400 does not.

the last row is the customs administration's own worked example, published on its refund guide with the purchase and the tax broken out. it is useful for a second reason: RMB¥26,360 is a large purchase, and the payout still comes in far below the cash ceiling, which almost nothing does. the ceiling question is answered further down.

one honest limit on all of this. the fee is set province by province, so the exact deduction is on the receipt rather than in a national table. treat nine percent as the working estimate and the receipt as the truth.

The RMB¥200 floor has three conditions, not one

before April 2025 the threshold was RMB¥500, and the change to RMB¥200 is the reason souvenir shops, tea counters and museum gift shops started appearing on the scheme at all. the reform was aimed squarely at low-ticket local goods, since the trade ministry said plainly that refund shopping had been dominated by international brands and that Chinese products were under-represented.

the floor is written as one number and functions as three. article 10 of the rules refuses the form unless the same visitor, on the same day, in the same store, has spent at least RMB¥200. that is one person, one date, one address. two shops in the same mall are two stores. a purchase on Tuesday and a purchase on Wednesday are two days. and a group of four friends pooling receipts does not create one qualifying purchase, because the form is issued against one passport.

the practical version is to consolidate deliberately. if you are going to claim, buy the things you want in one shop in one visit rather than spreading them across a street of small shops, and if you are near the line, add a small item rather than making a second trip. the floor applies per store per day, not per item, so a single RMB¥180 scarf does not qualify but the same scarf plus a RMB¥40 notebook does.

there is a reverse side to the same rule worth knowing if you shop in a market. a stall without a refund-store sign cannot issue anything, no matter how much you spend, and the sign is a physical plaque the tax authority issues rather than a sticker the shop prints. the number of registered stores reached about 14,000 by the end of 2025, roughly four times the figure at the end of 2024, but they cluster in shopping streets, department stores and airports rather than in markets.

The form is issued at the shop, and only at the shop

the document that carries the money is the departure tax refund application form, and a shop issues it through the tax refund system at the moment of purchase. it is stamped with the shop's invoice seal, it carries your passport number and your last entry date, and it is matched against the invoice number. article 9 requires the shop to check your identity document before printing it.

this is the step that fails most often, and it fails silently. a shop assistant who does not recognise the scheme will happily sell you a coat, take your money and hand you an ordinary receipt, and no counter at the airport can convert that receipt into a form afterwards. some shops will issue it days later if you return with the goods and the receipt, since the system allows the form to be created before departure, but that is a favour rather than a right.

so ask at the till, before paying, in a way that has a short answer. pointing at the refund-store plaque and saying the words tax refund is usually enough; in a store that already runs the scheme the assistant knows the routine, and in one that does not you have learned something useful before the transaction rather than after it. the goods must also be new and unused at the moment of export, so a coat you wear out of the shop is a coat you cannot claim on, which is worth thinking about for anything you plan to use on the trip.

the rules also block the form in a few situations that catch people out. it cannot be issued where the purchase date is more than 183 days after your last entry, where the invoice date is earlier than your last entry date, where the goods fall outside the eligible categories, or where you cannot produce the invoice. the last one sounds trivial and is not: an electronic invoice is now acceptable, but it has to exist, and a shop that never generated one has nothing to attach the form to.

Customs first, then the bag drop, never the other way round

this is the sequence error that ends more claims than any other, and the customs administration says it in as few words as possible: a traveller who wants a refund must finish the customs verification before checking bags in. the order cannot be reversed. once the suitcase is on the belt, the goods are gone and the officer has nothing to look at.

the physical layout supports this once you know to look for it. the verification point sits in the departure hall before the check-in counters, usually marked as a customs counter or a tax refund desk, and it is staffed by customs rather than by the refund agency. you bring the goods, the passport, the stamped form and the invoice, and the officer compares what is on the form against what is in front of them. article 18 makes the verification a duty rather than an option.

the sampling rule is worth knowing because it decides how much time to leave. applications under RMB¥10,000 in sales value are subject to random spot checks; applications at or above that figure get every slip examined. a traveller with a RMB¥3,000 purchase may walk through in two minutes or may be asked to open the box, and a traveller with a RMB¥30,000 watch should plan on the box being opened.

what the officer checks has three parts. the goods must match the form, and where the quantity differs the officer stamps the actual quantity rather than the declared one, so a missing item reduces the refund instead of voiding it. the goods must be in an unused and unconsumed state. and they must be leaving with you, either carried or checked as accompanied baggage, which is the phrase the rules use and the reason a courier shipment does not qualify.

after the stamp you check in, clear immigration, and find the refund agent inside the restricted area. article 17 requires the agent to keep a counter there with bilingual signage, and in most provinces the agent is a bank, commonly Bank of China, appointed by the provincial tax bureau. hand over the passport, the stamped form and the invoice, and the counter pays out or arranges a transfer.

Money back at the counter, and what it obliges you to do

the 2025 package pushed instant refund, known here as buy-and-refund-on-the-spot, from a set of city pilots to the whole country. state taxation administration announcement 2025 no. 9 set the mechanism in April 2025, and the trade ministry's data explains the enthusiasm: across the ten pilot regions in 2024, instant refund volumes grew 22-fold, eighteen times the national growth rate for the scheme as a whole.

the mechanism is a loan against a card, and understanding that makes the risks obvious. you sign an agreement, the shop or the agent places a pre-authorisation hold on your credit card, prints the form, and pays you the refund in cash on the spot. the hold is released when you leave from the port named in the agreement within the promised window and pass customs verification. if you do not, the agent recovers the money by charging the pre-authorisation, and it does so within three working days of the deadline passing.

the digital version is faster and more fragile at the same time. in Beijing, Shanghai, Shenzhen, Chengdu, Hangzhou, Xi'an and Urumqi, refund points run an Alipay route in which a traveller scans or taps a code, enters passport and card details, signs the agreement electronically and receives the money into an Alipay wallet in about two minutes. the Beijing tax bureau measured the effect on its own counters at a drop from five to ten minutes per transaction to under two. the fragility is the wallet: it needs an Alipay account that is set up and working, which for a first-time visitor is a separate task covered in the Alipay guide. The payment half of that trip is in how to pay in China.

not every refund store offers instant refund. a store becomes an instant refund store by agreeing terms with the local agent, which is a separate arrangement from being a refund store at all, so the plaque tells you the first thing and not the second. ask before you buy if the timing matters, and if you are leaving the country within a day or two, the airport counter is the simpler route anyway.

Downtown refund points and the city-to-city deals

the most useful change for anyone with a full itinerary is that refunding no longer has to happen at the airport with the goods in hand. Beijing built a model it calls refund anywhere in the city, collected at one point: buy at any refund store in the city, then walk into a downtown refund point with the passport, the form, the invoice and a credit card for the pre-authorisation, and collect there. the goods stay in the hotel room. as of mid-2026 the city counted seven downtown points and fifty-one instant refund stores, alongside more than 1,600 refund stores.

the second change is that the port on the form stopped being the port you shopped in. Beijing extended its cross-region arrangement to seventeen provinces and municipalities including Shanghai, Sichuan and Shandong; Zhejiang and Shanghai linked up so that a purchase in a Hangzhou department store can be refunded on the spot and verified at Pudong Terminal 2 on the way out; Chongqing recognises arrangements with Sichuan, Yunnan, Shaanxi, Gansu and Xinjiang. before 2026 the Hangzhou version required leaving through one of five Zhejiang ports, which forced travellers to reshape itineraries around a refund.

these arrangements are provincial agreements rather than national rules, which means the map changes and the coverage is uneven. the safe way to use them is to treat the agreement you sign as the binding document: it names the port and the deadline, and those two fields are the ones a counter will enforce. for a trip that crosses three provinces, the airport counter remains the least surprising option.

What cannot be refunded

the exclusions are short and mostly obvious, with one edge that catches people. article 2 of the rules removes three categories: items on the prohibited and restricted export lists, goods sold under a VAT exemption in the refund store, and anything else the finance ministry, customs and the tax administration add to the list. the store's duty-free counter is the second category, which is why a purchase from an airport duty-free shop cannot also be refunded for VAT.

the edge is the condition rather than the category. goods must be unused and unconsumed when they leave. a jacket worn twice on the trip is a judgement call an officer can make against you, food that has been eaten is not a refundable item, and a phone that has been activated and used is close to the line. the practical reading is that the scheme rewards shopping you do near the end of a trip, and that the last two days are the best two days to buy.

services are outside the scheme by construction, since there is no VAT on a hotel night to hand back in this form. shipping is too: the goods have to leave with you. that is the dividing line between this page and the export shipping routes, where the question is what customs charges on arrival rather than what China returns on departure.

Cash, card or wallet, and the ceiling almost nobody reaches

the refund is paid in renminbi and in nothing else. article 22 sets the method: where the refund is RMB¥20,000 or less, you choose cash or a bank transfer; where it is more than RMB¥20,000, the agent must use a transfer. the 2025 change raised the cash ceiling from RMB¥10,000 to RMB¥20,000, and the transfer route has no ceiling at all.

read the threshold against the refund rather than the purchase, because that is where most summaries go wrong. at an effective 9%, a refund of RMB¥20,000 corresponds to roughly RMB¥222,000 of shopping. almost no leisure traveller gets near it, and the rule that sounds restrictive turns out to apply to watch collectors and jewellers.

for everyone else the choice is about friction. cash arrives immediately in renminbi, which is convenient if you still have airport spending to do and inconvenient if you are about to leave a currency area. a card transfer in a foreign currency lands whenever the international transfer clears, and the amount you see depends on the exchange rate on the day it lands rather than the day you claimed. an Alipay wallet refund lands in minutes but keeps the money inside a Chinese wallet, which is fine if you come back and awkward if you do not.

one more line on the receipt matters. article 22 requires you to sign a receipt confirmation when you collect, and that signature is the record the agent uses if a dispute arises later. keep the stamped form and the confirmation slip until the money has cleared, particularly for a transfer.

When it goes wrong

the four failures below account for most of the complaints, and three of them are decided before you reach the airport.

a lost form is the worst case, because the form is the claim. no airport counter can reconstruct it, and article 11 only allows the shop to void a form in step with a voided invoice, not to reissue one out of nothing. photograph the form when it is printed, and keep it in the same envelope as the invoice.

a changed flight is the second. for a standard claim, the port matters less than the dates: you can verify and collect at whichever port you actually leave from, provided the purchase is within 90 days of departure and your last entry is within 183 days. for an instant refund, the port is written into the agreement and the deadline is too, so a reroute triggers the clawback and the normal route takes over.

a name mismatch is the third failure, and it is caused by shop assistants typing what they see. the form must match the passport exactly, including middle names and the order of given and family names. check the printout at the till while the assistant is still at the keyboard; correcting it later means a second visit to the shop.

the fourth is the 90-day clock. article 20 refuses the refund where more than 90 days separate the purchase date from the departure date, and article 10 refuses the form in mirror image. a long trip that starts with a shopping day and ends three months later loses the whole claim, and there is no appeal, because the deadline is arithmetic rather than discretion. buy late, or plan the shopping around the exit date.

where a transfer has not arrived, or a counter refuses a claim that looks valid, the route is the tax authority's own rather than the airport's. the 12366 hotline runs a multilingual service for refund questions, and the administration publishes a departure refund guide in seventeen languages. the provincial tax bureaus also publish their agent's contact details, and the agent is the party that actually holds the money.

the last thing worth saying is about scale, because it explains why the system feels half-finished in some cities and polished in others. refund sales roughly doubled in 2025, matching in one year the entire volume of the decade since the policy began, and the number of travellers claiming reached about 270,000. a scheme growing that fast has counters that were set up last month next to counters that have run for ten years, and the experience at the desk reflects which one you are standing at.

Common questions about the departure refund

Do I have to show the goods at the airport?

Yes, at the customs verification point, and before you check any bag containing them. Applications below RMB¥10,000 in sales value are subject to random spot checks rather than every item, so you may not be asked to open anything, but the goods must be with you and available. Above that figure, every slip is examined. The officer stamps the form, and that stamp is what the refund counter requires.

Can I claim if I live in China?

No. The scheme covers foreign nationals and Hong Kong, Macao and Taiwan residents who have lived continuously in mainland China for no more than 183 days. A work-type or study-type residence permit puts you past that line, and the shop's system reads your last entry date, so the answer comes from the document rather than from the conversation. Short-stay visitors, including visa-free arrivals, are the intended users.

Is the refund 11% or 9%?

Both, at different points. Goods taxed at 13% refund at 11%, and goods taxed at 9% refund at 8%. The refund agent then deducts a handling fee, which the provinces that publish the calculation set at 2% of the invoice value. So a 13% item pays out about 9% and a 9% item about 6%. The receipt shows the deduction; treat nine percent as the estimate.

Does the RMB¥200 floor apply per item or per receipt?

Per store, per day, per visitor. Article 10 refuses the form unless the same visitor spent at least RMB¥200 in the same store on the same date. One receipt covering several items is the easy way to clear it; two receipts from two shops in the same mall are two separate stores and do not add up. Pooling with a friend does not work either, since the form is issued against one passport.

What if my flight leaves from a different city?

For a standard claim, that is fine: verify and collect at whichever port you actually depart from, as long as the purchase is within 90 days and your last entry within 183 days. For an instant refund, the port is written into the agreement, so a change of plan triggers recovery of the advance within three working days of the deadline, and you claim through the normal route on the day.

Can I get the refund in my own currency?

Not in cash. The refund is paid in renminbi. A bank transfer to a foreign card arrives in the card's currency at whatever rate applies when it clears, and an Alipay refund stays in renminbi inside the wallet. If you want the cash converted, do it at a bank counter rather than at an airport kiosk, where the spread is wider.

What happens if I lose the form?

There is no replacement route. The form is the claim, and the airport counter cannot reconstruct one, because the shop issues it through the tax system against its own invoice. The only recovery is to return to the shop with the passport and the invoice and ask whether the original can be voided and a new one printed, which depends on the invoice still being open. Photograph the form when it is printed.

Is this the same as the Hainan duty-free allowance?

No, and mixing them up is a common error. The Hainan offshore duty-free scheme is a quota on goods bought tax-free inside the province and collected on departure. The departure refund returns VAT on goods bought tax-paid in ordinary shops anywhere in the country. A purchase made duty-free in Hainan cannot also be refunded for VAT, because no VAT was paid on it.

Do I need to buy everything at the end of the trip?

Practically, yes. Goods must be unused and unconsumed when they leave, and the claim has to be made within 90 days of purchase. Anything you plan to wear, open or eat during the trip is a poor candidate, and a purchase made in the first week of a three-month stay is outside the 90-day window by the time you fly. The last two days are the best two days to shop.