Bringing Your Belongings: an Exemption in the Act, an Allowance Somewhere Else
Part IX of the Customs Management Act is headed Goods for Personal Use and is two sections long. Section 140(1) exempts goods from duties and taxes where they are in the personal baggage of a passenger or crew member arriving from outside the customs territory, are of a non-commercial nature within the limits of the duty-free allowance, and show no material indication of being part of commercial traffic. Section 140(2) goes further and exempts goods that are the bona fide belongings of such a passenger, without reference to the allowance. Both are subject to any regulations, and neither states a figure: the duty-free allowance is referred to and not defined in the Act. The Act's own definition of personal effects is narrow - all new or used articles which a traveller may reasonably require for personal use during the journey, excluding anything imported for commercial purposes - which is a definition about travelling rather than about moving house. The Tariff Act, 2023, where the allowance and the rates of duty live, has now been downloaded and still cannot be read: its font drops whole letters, taking the tariff codes and the rates with them, so no figure is published here.
At a glance
- Exemption for accompanied baggage (Customs Management Act s. 140(1))
- Yes
- Duty-free allowance figure
- Not stated in the Customs Management Act
Section 140(1)(b) refers to the limits of the duty-free allowance without defining them. The Tariff Act, 2023 sets them in Chapter 98 of its Schedule and extracts unreadably.
- Definition of personal effects
- Articles a traveller may reasonably require for personal use during the journey
- Household removals
- Not addressed in Part IX of the Act
Requirements
- Goods in your personal baggage, of a non-commercial nature
- Nothing suggesting the goods are part of commercial traffic
- Compliance with any regulations, and with the duty-free allowance the Act refers to but does not state
- Nothing whose importation is prohibited by any other law
In detail
Two exemptions, and the second is wider than the first
Section 140(1) exempts goods in personal baggage where they are of a non-commercial nature within the limits of the duty-free allowance and there is nothing to suggest commercial traffic. Section 140(2) says, separately, that goods which are the bona fide belongings of a passenger or crew member arriving from outside the customs territory may, subject to any regulations, be imported exempt of duties and taxes. The second subsection names no allowance and no non-commercial condition. Both are expressly subject to regulations, which is where the limits are set, and section 140(3) removes anything whose importation is otherwise prohibited.
The figure is not in the Act, and we have not read it
Nothing in the Customs Management Act states what the duty-free allowance is. The allowance and the rates of duty are matters for the Tariff Act, 2023 and for regulations made under the Customs Management Act. The Tariff Act has been fetched since this record was first written and it still cannot be read: the publisher's file is 83 MB and its font maps no glyph for several common letters, so the Act's words lose letters and its tariff schedule loses the codes and the rates entirely. It is recorded as unread, because a document that extracts into 658,900 characters we cannot trust is not a document we have read. A reader planning a move should take the allowance from the Bahamas Customs and Excise Department, and should expect household goods for a permanent move to be treated differently from the contents of a suitcase - the Act's definition of personal effects is about the journey, not about relocating.
Country-level policy
Every citation on these pages goes to laws.bahamas.gov.bs, and the question of what that site is has a statutory answer. The Law Reform and Revision Act, 2023, in force since 1 May 2023, repealed and replaced the 1975 Act of the same name. Under it the Law Reform and Revision Commissioner maintains an electronic database of the existing revised edition with amendments incorporated, and that database, made available electronically through the medium of a national information structure, shall be deemed to be an official version of the law. The Attorney-General, not the Minister, now authorises pages into the edition by Law Revision Order and appoints the day a revised edition comes into operation; and under section 28 the Government Printer may, at the Commissioner's request and with the Attorney-General's approval, print a reprint of any Act with its amendments incorporated, which is deemed an authentic copy as at the date of printing. The practical consequences are three. The chapters are the 2000 Revised Edition as the publisher says it stood at 31 December 2016, so every amendment since sits in a separate Act. Pages inside one chapter can carry different Law Revision Orders, and some are still at the original service of 2001. And the site itself says the authoritative texts are in the Official Gazettes, which can be bought on Bay Street - a disclaimer flatly narrower than the statute that deems the database official.
Exceptions by origin
No exceptions recorded
Nothing we have read treats any nationality differently for this topic. The rule above applies to everyone.
What the law says
«they are contained in the personal baggage of the
passengers, or members of the crew, of any
aircraft or vessel arriving from a point outside of
the Customs territory;»Known to be out of date. The chapters on this site are the 2000 Revised Edition as the publisher states it stood at 31 December 2016; Acts amending them since are published separately and are not folded in. The page the quotation sits on carries its own Law Revision Order, printed in the Act's own list of authorised pages.
The opening words are: Goods may, subject to any regulations, be imported in the Customs territory exempt of duties and taxes where. Paragraphs (b) and (c) add the non-commercial and duty-free allowance conditions and the absence of material indications of commercial traffic.
Read it at the sourceAbout this source
The statute book of The Bahamas, managed by the Law Reform and Revision Commission and official by statute rather than by courtesy: section 12(2) of the Law Reform and Revision Act, 2023 provides that a database the Commissioner maintains and makes available electronically through the medium of a national information structure shall be deemed to be an official version of the law, and section 18(2)(c) says the same of an electronic revised edition. It carries the 2000 Revised Edition of the Statute Law and Subsidiary Legislation as in force at 31 December 2016, every principal and amending Act and statutory instrument made since, Acts not yet in force, Bills tabled since October 2023, and the Official Gazettes since January 2021. The Supplementary Volume holds the Table of Principal Legislation by Title and the Alphabetical List of Principal Legislation, which are the only published closed lists of what the statute book contains. It supports a point-in-time query, so what was in force on a given date can be asked rather than guessed. Pages authorised by the 2017 Law Revision Order, 2023 were prepared by The Regional Law Revision Center, Inc., in Anguilla.
Standing: Maintains the text in force
Cannot be cited for: It consolidates and does not issue, and its chapters stop at 31 December 2016: every amendment since sits in a separate Act and is not folded in. The Immigration Act Chapter 191 has been amended six times since the cut-off, including the Act that created the economic permanent residence certificate and the Act that put a figure of one million dollars in it, and none of that is visible in the Chapter. The cut-off is also per page rather than per Act - every page bears the Law Revision Order that authorised it, and one chapter routinely mixes LRO 1/2017, LRO 1/2010 and pages still at the original service of 2001. The Immigration Act has six such bands; the section setting the eight-month visitor ceiling is on an Original Service page. The Bahamas Nationality Act and the Caribbean Community Act are at the original service throughout, which is why the oath of allegiance there still names Queen Elizabeth the Second. It must not be cited for whether an Act is in force: it serves Chapter 3, the Law Reform and Revision Act 1975, with nothing on its face to say that section 33 of the 2023 Act repealed it, though its own in-force index no longer lists it. Its own About page says the authoritative texts are in the Official Gazettes, which can be bought on Bay Street, which is a narrower claim than the statute makes for the site. And it must never be relied on for reachability: a content delivery network in front of it answers part of its traffic with a 192-character bot-challenge page headed "Checking the site connection security", which no failure marker catches and which is stored carrying the real document's HTTP validators, so the pipeline then reports the source unmoved and never re-reads it. On 6 October 2026 that happened to the consolidated Immigration (Fees) Regulations, the Exchange Control Regulations Act and the Domestic Minimum Top-Up Tax Act, 2024. A direct or PDF fetch answers 403 to the user agent the fetcher sends and 200 to any other, so a re-read needs a different user agent as well as a flag that bypasses the validator check. And one of its files cannot be read at all: the Tariff Act, 2023 is an 83 MB PDF whose font maps no glyph for w, h, g, j, k, q, z or most capitals, so it extracts into 658,900 characters of text with the letters missing and a tariff schedule with no codes and no rates in it. That is the Act carrying every rate of customs duty and the baggage exemption the Customs Management Act refers to and does not define.
We re-read it every 90 days. More about this source
«they are of a non-commercial nature within the
limits of the duty-free allowance»Known to be out of date. The chapters on this site are the 2000 Revised Edition as the publisher states it stood at 31 December 2016; Acts amending them since are published separately and are not folded in. The page the quotation sits on carries its own Law Revision Order, printed in the Act's own list of authorised pages.
The allowance is referred to and not defined anywhere in the Act. Section 140(3) excludes goods whose importation is prohibited by any law in force.
Read it at the sourceAbout this source
The statute book of The Bahamas, managed by the Law Reform and Revision Commission and official by statute rather than by courtesy: section 12(2) of the Law Reform and Revision Act, 2023 provides that a database the Commissioner maintains and makes available electronically through the medium of a national information structure shall be deemed to be an official version of the law, and section 18(2)(c) says the same of an electronic revised edition. It carries the 2000 Revised Edition of the Statute Law and Subsidiary Legislation as in force at 31 December 2016, every principal and amending Act and statutory instrument made since, Acts not yet in force, Bills tabled since October 2023, and the Official Gazettes since January 2021. The Supplementary Volume holds the Table of Principal Legislation by Title and the Alphabetical List of Principal Legislation, which are the only published closed lists of what the statute book contains. It supports a point-in-time query, so what was in force on a given date can be asked rather than guessed. Pages authorised by the 2017 Law Revision Order, 2023 were prepared by The Regional Law Revision Center, Inc., in Anguilla.
Standing: Maintains the text in force
Cannot be cited for: It consolidates and does not issue, and its chapters stop at 31 December 2016: every amendment since sits in a separate Act and is not folded in. The Immigration Act Chapter 191 has been amended six times since the cut-off, including the Act that created the economic permanent residence certificate and the Act that put a figure of one million dollars in it, and none of that is visible in the Chapter. The cut-off is also per page rather than per Act - every page bears the Law Revision Order that authorised it, and one chapter routinely mixes LRO 1/2017, LRO 1/2010 and pages still at the original service of 2001. The Immigration Act has six such bands; the section setting the eight-month visitor ceiling is on an Original Service page. The Bahamas Nationality Act and the Caribbean Community Act are at the original service throughout, which is why the oath of allegiance there still names Queen Elizabeth the Second. It must not be cited for whether an Act is in force: it serves Chapter 3, the Law Reform and Revision Act 1975, with nothing on its face to say that section 33 of the 2023 Act repealed it, though its own in-force index no longer lists it. Its own About page says the authoritative texts are in the Official Gazettes, which can be bought on Bay Street, which is a narrower claim than the statute makes for the site. And it must never be relied on for reachability: a content delivery network in front of it answers part of its traffic with a 192-character bot-challenge page headed "Checking the site connection security", which no failure marker catches and which is stored carrying the real document's HTTP validators, so the pipeline then reports the source unmoved and never re-reads it. On 6 October 2026 that happened to the consolidated Immigration (Fees) Regulations, the Exchange Control Regulations Act and the Domestic Minimum Top-Up Tax Act, 2024. A direct or PDF fetch answers 403 to the user agent the fetcher sends and 200 to any other, so a re-read needs a different user agent as well as a flag that bypasses the validator check. And one of its files cannot be read at all: the Tariff Act, 2023 is an 83 MB PDF whose font maps no glyph for w, h, g, j, k, q, z or most capitals, so it extracts into 658,900 characters of text with the letters missing and a tariff schedule with no codes and no rates in it. That is the Act carrying every rate of customs duty and the baggage exemption the Customs Management Act refers to and does not define.
We re-read it every 90 days. More about this source
«means all new or used articles
which a traveler may reasonably require for his
personal use during the journey»Known to be out of date. The chapters on this site are the 2000 Revised Edition as the publisher states it stood at 31 December 2016; Acts amending them since are published separately and are not folded in. The page the quotation sits on carries its own Law Revision Order, printed in the Act's own list of authorised pages.
The definition continues: taking into account all the circumstances of the journey but excluding any goods imported or exported for commercial purposes. The spelling of traveler is the publisher's.
Read it at the sourceAbout this source
The statute book of The Bahamas, managed by the Law Reform and Revision Commission and official by statute rather than by courtesy: section 12(2) of the Law Reform and Revision Act, 2023 provides that a database the Commissioner maintains and makes available electronically through the medium of a national information structure shall be deemed to be an official version of the law, and section 18(2)(c) says the same of an electronic revised edition. It carries the 2000 Revised Edition of the Statute Law and Subsidiary Legislation as in force at 31 December 2016, every principal and amending Act and statutory instrument made since, Acts not yet in force, Bills tabled since October 2023, and the Official Gazettes since January 2021. The Supplementary Volume holds the Table of Principal Legislation by Title and the Alphabetical List of Principal Legislation, which are the only published closed lists of what the statute book contains. It supports a point-in-time query, so what was in force on a given date can be asked rather than guessed. Pages authorised by the 2017 Law Revision Order, 2023 were prepared by The Regional Law Revision Center, Inc., in Anguilla.
Standing: Maintains the text in force
Cannot be cited for: It consolidates and does not issue, and its chapters stop at 31 December 2016: every amendment since sits in a separate Act and is not folded in. The Immigration Act Chapter 191 has been amended six times since the cut-off, including the Act that created the economic permanent residence certificate and the Act that put a figure of one million dollars in it, and none of that is visible in the Chapter. The cut-off is also per page rather than per Act - every page bears the Law Revision Order that authorised it, and one chapter routinely mixes LRO 1/2017, LRO 1/2010 and pages still at the original service of 2001. The Immigration Act has six such bands; the section setting the eight-month visitor ceiling is on an Original Service page. The Bahamas Nationality Act and the Caribbean Community Act are at the original service throughout, which is why the oath of allegiance there still names Queen Elizabeth the Second. It must not be cited for whether an Act is in force: it serves Chapter 3, the Law Reform and Revision Act 1975, with nothing on its face to say that section 33 of the 2023 Act repealed it, though its own in-force index no longer lists it. Its own About page says the authoritative texts are in the Official Gazettes, which can be bought on Bay Street, which is a narrower claim than the statute makes for the site. And it must never be relied on for reachability: a content delivery network in front of it answers part of its traffic with a 192-character bot-challenge page headed "Checking the site connection security", which no failure marker catches and which is stored carrying the real document's HTTP validators, so the pipeline then reports the source unmoved and never re-reads it. On 6 October 2026 that happened to the consolidated Immigration (Fees) Regulations, the Exchange Control Regulations Act and the Domestic Minimum Top-Up Tax Act, 2024. A direct or PDF fetch answers 403 to the user agent the fetcher sends and 200 to any other, so a re-read needs a different user agent as well as a flag that bypasses the validator check. And one of its files cannot be read at all: the Tariff Act, 2023 is an 83 MB PDF whose font maps no glyph for w, h, g, j, k, q, z or most capitals, so it extracts into 658,900 characters of text with the letters missing and a tariff schedule with no codes and no rates in it. That is the Act carrying every rate of customs duty and the baggage exemption the Customs Management Act refers to and does not define.
We re-read it every 90 days. More about this source
Practical notes
The Act distinguishes a traveller - a non-resident entering, a departing resident, a returning resident - but Part IX does not attach different allowances to those categories, so any difference between them comes from instruments we did not read.
This record rests on section 2 and sections 140 and 141 of the Customs Management Act Chapter 293. The Tariff Act, 2023 is recorded in the unread sources catalogue, now for a reason the catalogue did not have before: it downloads in full and extracts into text whose letters are missing.
- consolidatesCustoms Management Act, Chapter 293 of the Statute Law of The Bahamas
Laws of The Bahamas On-line (Law Reform and Revision Commission) · consolidated to 2016-12-31
Known to be out of date. The Chapter's own list of authorised pages shows pages 1 to 448 at LRO 1/2017, so the whole Chapter is at the publisher's 2016 state. Amending Acts since then are published separately and were not read.
About this source
The statute book of The Bahamas, managed by the Law Reform and Revision Commission and official by statute rather than by courtesy: section 12(2) of the Law Reform and Revision Act, 2023 provides that a database the Commissioner maintains and makes available electronically through the medium of a national information structure shall be deemed to be an official version of the law, and section 18(2)(c) says the same of an electronic revised edition. It carries the 2000 Revised Edition of the Statute Law and Subsidiary Legislation as in force at 31 December 2016, every principal and amending Act and statutory instrument made since, Acts not yet in force, Bills tabled since October 2023, and the Official Gazettes since January 2021. The Supplementary Volume holds the Table of Principal Legislation by Title and the Alphabetical List of Principal Legislation, which are the only published closed lists of what the statute book contains. It supports a point-in-time query, so what was in force on a given date can be asked rather than guessed. Pages authorised by the 2017 Law Revision Order, 2023 were prepared by The Regional Law Revision Center, Inc., in Anguilla.
Standing: Maintains the text in force
Cannot be cited for: It consolidates and does not issue, and its chapters stop at 31 December 2016: every amendment since sits in a separate Act and is not folded in. The Immigration Act Chapter 191 has been amended six times since the cut-off, including the Act that created the economic permanent residence certificate and the Act that put a figure of one million dollars in it, and none of that is visible in the Chapter. The cut-off is also per page rather than per Act - every page bears the Law Revision Order that authorised it, and one chapter routinely mixes LRO 1/2017, LRO 1/2010 and pages still at the original service of 2001. The Immigration Act has six such bands; the section setting the eight-month visitor ceiling is on an Original Service page. The Bahamas Nationality Act and the Caribbean Community Act are at the original service throughout, which is why the oath of allegiance there still names Queen Elizabeth the Second. It must not be cited for whether an Act is in force: it serves Chapter 3, the Law Reform and Revision Act 1975, with nothing on its face to say that section 33 of the 2023 Act repealed it, though its own in-force index no longer lists it. Its own About page says the authoritative texts are in the Official Gazettes, which can be bought on Bay Street, which is a narrower claim than the statute makes for the site. And it must never be relied on for reachability: a content delivery network in front of it answers part of its traffic with a 192-character bot-challenge page headed "Checking the site connection security", which no failure marker catches and which is stored carrying the real document's HTTP validators, so the pipeline then reports the source unmoved and never re-reads it. On 6 October 2026 that happened to the consolidated Immigration (Fees) Regulations, the Exchange Control Regulations Act and the Domestic Minimum Top-Up Tax Act, 2024. A direct or PDF fetch answers 403 to the user agent the fetcher sends and 200 to any other, so a re-read needs a different user agent as well as a flag that bypasses the validator check. And one of its files cannot be read at all: the Tariff Act, 2023 is an 83 MB PDF whose font maps no glyph for w, h, g, j, k, q, z or most capitals, so it extracts into 658,900 characters of text with the letters missing and a tariff schedule with no codes and no rates in it. That is the Act carrying every rate of customs duty and the baggage exemption the Customs Management Act refers to and does not define.
We re-read it every 90 days. More about this source
- consolidatesTable of Principal Legislation by Title, Title XXXV Customs and Excise
Laws of The Bahamas On-line (Law Reform and Revision Commission) · consolidated to 2016-12-31
About this source
The statute book of The Bahamas, managed by the Law Reform and Revision Commission and official by statute rather than by courtesy: section 12(2) of the Law Reform and Revision Act, 2023 provides that a database the Commissioner maintains and makes available electronically through the medium of a national information structure shall be deemed to be an official version of the law, and section 18(2)(c) says the same of an electronic revised edition. It carries the 2000 Revised Edition of the Statute Law and Subsidiary Legislation as in force at 31 December 2016, every principal and amending Act and statutory instrument made since, Acts not yet in force, Bills tabled since October 2023, and the Official Gazettes since January 2021. The Supplementary Volume holds the Table of Principal Legislation by Title and the Alphabetical List of Principal Legislation, which are the only published closed lists of what the statute book contains. It supports a point-in-time query, so what was in force on a given date can be asked rather than guessed. Pages authorised by the 2017 Law Revision Order, 2023 were prepared by The Regional Law Revision Center, Inc., in Anguilla.
Standing: Maintains the text in force
Cannot be cited for: It consolidates and does not issue, and its chapters stop at 31 December 2016: every amendment since sits in a separate Act and is not folded in. The Immigration Act Chapter 191 has been amended six times since the cut-off, including the Act that created the economic permanent residence certificate and the Act that put a figure of one million dollars in it, and none of that is visible in the Chapter. The cut-off is also per page rather than per Act - every page bears the Law Revision Order that authorised it, and one chapter routinely mixes LRO 1/2017, LRO 1/2010 and pages still at the original service of 2001. The Immigration Act has six such bands; the section setting the eight-month visitor ceiling is on an Original Service page. The Bahamas Nationality Act and the Caribbean Community Act are at the original service throughout, which is why the oath of allegiance there still names Queen Elizabeth the Second. It must not be cited for whether an Act is in force: it serves Chapter 3, the Law Reform and Revision Act 1975, with nothing on its face to say that section 33 of the 2023 Act repealed it, though its own in-force index no longer lists it. Its own About page says the authoritative texts are in the Official Gazettes, which can be bought on Bay Street, which is a narrower claim than the statute makes for the site. And it must never be relied on for reachability: a content delivery network in front of it answers part of its traffic with a 192-character bot-challenge page headed "Checking the site connection security", which no failure marker catches and which is stored carrying the real document's HTTP validators, so the pipeline then reports the source unmoved and never re-reads it. On 6 October 2026 that happened to the consolidated Immigration (Fees) Regulations, the Exchange Control Regulations Act and the Domestic Minimum Top-Up Tax Act, 2024. A direct or PDF fetch answers 403 to the user agent the fetcher sends and 200 to any other, so a re-read needs a different user agent as well as a flag that bypasses the validator check. And one of its files cannot be read at all: the Tariff Act, 2023 is an 83 MB PDF whose font maps no glyph for w, h, g, j, k, q, z or most capitals, so it extracts into 658,900 characters of text with the letters missing and a tariff schedule with no codes and no rates in it. That is the Act carrying every rate of customs duty and the baggage exemption the Customs Management Act refers to and does not define.
We re-read it every 90 days. More about this source