Gifts you carry to Bangladesh — do the allowances change?
No. An item you are giving away is assessed exactly like an item you are keeping, and quantity is what usually moves gifts out of the personal-effects category.
Almost everyone travelling home carries gifts, and almost everyone assumes gifts are treated more gently. They are not.
The short answer
- Gifts get no separate allowance. An item you will give away is assessed the same as an item you will keep.
- Quantity is what catches people. The baggage rules cover personal effects; enough identical units stops looking like personal effects.
- Gifts you carry and gifts you post or courier are governed differently — see gifts sent by courier.
The allowance follows the item, not the intention
Three phones are three phones whether two are for your brothers or all three are yours. The 100 g jewellery limit is 100 g whether you will wear it or hand it over at a wedding.
This trips up the single most common diaspora shopping pattern: buying one thing for each of several relatives. Individually every item is unremarkable. Collectively they are over allowance, or they read as commercial.
What “commercial quantity” means in practice
There is no published magic number, and anyone who quotes you one is guessing. What actually happens is a judgement at the desk about whether the quantity is consistent with personal use.
Signals that push toward “commercial”:
- Many identical units of the same item.
- Items still in retail packaging with price labels.
- Quantities that would be odd for one household.
Signals that push the other way: variety, used or unpackaged condition, and a quantity that matches the size of your family.
Practical advice
- Unbox and distribute where reasonable. Twelve identical boxed items in one bag is the worst presentation; the same twelve items unboxed and spread across the family’s luggage is the ordinary one.
- Do not split to evade. Distributing across travellers so each stays under an allowance is fine when the goods genuinely belong to each of them, and is structuring when they do not. The difference is whose they are.
- Keep receipts for anything valuable. If an item is assessed, a receipt is the fastest way to establish value.
Related
What we could not verify
Any numeric threshold for “commercial quantity”. We have not found one in the sources we have, and we do not publish one. Treat it as a judgement, not a line.
Sources
- Baggage (Import) Rules, NBR — personal effects
- Import Policy Order, Ministry of Commerce — commercial quantity
Re-checked every June budget cycle.