Free tool
Ship it, buy it in-country, or reimburse the hire. The planner prices all three routes across 11 markets using the real import charge, shows the lead time for each, and tells you which countries make the employer legally responsible for the machine.
The offer is signed and the start date is in two weeks. This is the question nobody planned for.
Equipment planner
Pick the market, the kit, and the headcount. The planner applies the country's import charge to the customs value, compares it against local retail, and recommends a route with the reasoning shown.
Plan the hardware
The planner prices all three routes against the same machine, applies the country’s import charge to the customs value, and tells you which one to take and why.
A mainstream 14 inch business machine with 16 GB of memory. The default for support, operations, sales, finance, and assistant roles.
Recommended route
$1,320 to $1,560 for 1 person in Colombia, landed and working in 2 to 7 working days.
Source in-country. In Colombia the local retail premium of 1.20x to 1.42x still costs less than shipping, because 19% to 26% on the customs value is charged on the freight as well as the machine, and freight is $110 to $190 for every single parcel. That is $120 to $135 saved against the most expensive route across this hire, and it removes 8 to 18 working days of transit and clearance risk from the start date.
All three routes, same machine
| Route | Total cost | Per person | Working days |
|---|---|---|---|
| Ship from the US | $1,440 to $1,695 | $1,440 to $1,695 | 8 to 18 |
| Buy in-country and deliver (recommended) | $1,320 to $1,560 | $1,320 to $1,560 | 2 to 7 |
| The hire buys and you reimburse | $1,320 to $1,625 | $1,320 to $1,625 | 2 to 9 |
Ship from the US
Buy at US prices, pay 19% to 26% of the customs value on arrival, plus freight of $110 to $190 per parcel.
Ownership: You own the asset from the start and it stays on your books.
Watch out: The consignee clears against their cedula. Colombian customs treats repeated same-consignee electronics as commercial rather than personal, which changes the clearance path.
Buy in-country and deliver
Pay the local retail multiple of 1.20x to 1.42x US pricing, with no border to cross and a local warranty that is actually serviceable.
Ownership: You own the asset, but a company with no local entity usually needs a person or a partner in-country to make the purchase.
Watch out: Good coverage in Bogota and Medellin. Local purchase is the default for most Colombian employers.
The hire buys and you reimburse
The fastest route almost everywhere, because it removes both the border and your own procurement cycle. The cost is the same local retail price plus the transfer.
Ownership: Ownership follows what the agreement says. Write it down, because the default in most of these markets is that the buyer owns the machine.
Watch out: Without a written ownership and return clause you are funding a personal asset. Agree the specification before the purchase, not after it.
The customs position in Colombia
Colombia zero-rates portable computers and applies 19% IVA on the customs value once the parcel exceeds the USD 200 threshold set under the US trade agreement. Clearance is routine but not fast, and the courier's own handling fee is a meaningful share of the total on a single device.
The thing that goes wrong here: Under Ley 2121 the employer provides the equipment as a statutory default, so in Colombia this is not a policy choice you get to make. The only open question is how the device gets there.
What the law requires in Colombia
Employer pays equipment + connectivity compensation. Under Ley 2121 the employer provides the equipment and everything needed for the work. Decreto 555 of 2022 requires a monthly compensation for internet, phone, and energy costs agreed in the contract, which cannot be below the government-set transport allowance. In classic teletrabajo, workers earning up to two minimum wages who no longer commute receive a connectivity allowance in place of the transport subsidy.
Full telework obligations for this market are in the remote work laws tool.
Before you buy anything
Planning bands only, not customs, legal, or tax advice. Effective charges move with the declared value, the carrier, the destination state or province, and whether the parcel clears as a courier shipment or a formal import. Confirm the specific number with your carrier or a licensed customs broker before you commit a budget.
Why it matters
Laptops are zero-rated almost everywhere in the region under the WTO Information Technology Agreement and the US trade agreements. What you actually pay is consumption tax on the customs value, and a US company with no local entity cannot reclaim any of it.
Non-exempt courier parcels into Brazil carry a 60 percent federal import tax plus state ICMS. The Remessa Conforme program that reduces this certifies e-commerce sellers, not employers shipping their own equipment, so the headline rate is your rate.
A parcel delivered to an individual clears against their national tax identifier. Ship a company laptop to a home address and the tax is assessed to the person who started last week, who is then asked for it at the door.
There is a moment in every first nearshore hire that nobody puts on the project plan. The search is done, the offer is signed, the start date is a fortnight out, and someone asks how the person is going to get a computer. The instinct is to do what you would do for a new hire in another state: order a machine from your usual supplier, have it drop-shipped to their address, and move on. Across most of Latin America that instinct is expensive, slow, and in several markets it quietly transfers a tax liability onto the person who has not started yet.
The reason it goes wrong is that the cost is not where a US buyer expects it. Everyone braces for a tariff and there usually is not one. Portable computers under HS heading 8471 are zero-rated across most of the region, whether through the WTO Information Technology Agreement, through USMCA for Mexico, through CAFTA-DR for Central America and the Dominican Republic, or through the bilateral agreements with Chile, Colombia, and Peru. The tariff line reads zero and the finance team relaxes.
Then the consumption tax arrives. IVA, IGV, ITBIS, or ICMS is charged on the customs value, which is the declared value plus freight and insurance, at rates from 12 percent in Guatemala to 22 percent in Uruguay. For a company with a local entity that would be a timing question, recoverable against output tax. For a US company hiring one person remotely with no registration in the country, it is not recoverable at all. You are a final consumer, and the tax is simply cost. That single fact reshapes the whole decision, because the same tax is already embedded in the local retail price, which means the two routes are much closer than the sticker prices suggest.
The routes
You buy at US prices and the border adds tax, freight, and time. It rarely wins on a new machine, because per-parcel freight is both a real cost and part of the taxable base. It is the right call for hardware you already own, and it is closest to competitive in Guatemala, Costa Rica, and Mexico. Requires duty-paid carrier billing so the charge never reaches your hire.
No border, a local warranty that can actually be serviced, and delivery in days rather than weeks. You pay the local retail multiple, which already contains the same tax. The practical constraint is that a company with no local entity needs someone in-country to make the purchase.
The fastest route in almost every market, because it removes both the border and your own procurement cycle. Same money as buying locally. The cost is that ownership follows the agreement, so the agreement has to exist before the receipt does.
When the employment relationship already sits with a managed provider or an EOR partner with a local entity, equipment can travel the same path as payroll: bought locally, held as a company asset, recovered at offboarding. Worth asking about before you build the process yourself.
Almost every equipment decision in the region collapses into these four, and running the arithmetic across all eleven markets produces a blunter answer than most guides give: for a new machine, source it in-country. The reason is not the tax rate, which people expect and plan for. It is the freight. Courier shipping runs 90 to 240 dollars per parcel, it does not fall with volume because every device travels as its own parcel, and it is taxed as part of the customs value rather than sitting outside it. A consumption tax of 12 to 22 percent applied to the machine plus the freight, plus the freight itself, is a bigger number than the local retail premium in every market here. The shipped route earns its place in two situations: hardware you already own, where there is no purchase cost on the other side of the comparison, and the low-tax markets at the favourable end of the band. Brazil sits so far past any of this that it is better treated as a separate category than as an expensive version of the same problem.
The fourth route deserves more attention than it usually gets. If the employment relationship already runs through a managed provider or an EOR partner with a real entity in the country, that entity can buy the machine locally, hold it as a company asset, recover the VAT where the local rules allow, and collect the device at offboarding through a process that already exists. LavaStaff Managed Hire handles payroll and compliance, directly or through a vetted EOR partner, which means the local footprint the equipment question needs is often already there. It is worth asking before you build a shipping process from scratch for two laptops a year.
The comparison
The table below prices the same machine, a mainstream business laptop at $1,100 US retail, into all eleven markets. The import charge column is the effective combined charge on the customs value, covering consumption tax, any tariff, and statutory surcharges. The local premium column is the local retail price as a multiple of the US price for the same class of machine, which already contains that country’s tax. Read the two columns against each other: where the premium is smaller than the charge, buy locally.
| Country | Consumption tax | Charge on arrival | Local retail premium | Shipped lead time | Recommended route |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Guatemala | IVA 12% | 12% to 20% | 1.18x to 1.40x | 6 to 15 days | Buy in-country and deliver |
| Costa Rica | IVA 13% | 14% to 22% | 1.15x to 1.38x | 6 to 15 days | Buy in-country and deliver |
| Mexico | IVA 16% | 16% to 24% | 1.10x to 1.30x | 4 to 12 days | Buy in-country and deliver |
| Dominican Republic | ITBIS 18% | 18% to 26% | 1.20x to 1.42x | 5 to 14 days | Buy in-country and deliver |
| Colombia | IVA 19% | 19% to 26% | 1.20x to 1.42x | 8 to 18 days | Buy in-country and deliver |
| Chile | IVA 19% | 20% to 26% | 1.15x to 1.35x | 7 to 16 days | Buy in-country and deliver |
| Peru | IGV 18% plus IPM 2% | 20% to 28% | 1.20x to 1.42x | 8 to 18 days | Buy in-country and deliver |
| Ecuador | IVA 15% | 16% to 26% | 1.22x to 1.48x | 10 to 22 days | Buy in-country and deliver |
| Uruguay | IVA 22% | 22% to 34% | 1.30x to 1.60x | 10 to 22 days | Buy in-country and deliver |
| Argentina | IVA 21% plus possible perceptions | 15% to 30% | 1.30x to 1.75x | 10 to 25 days | The hire buys and you reimburse |
| Brazil | ICMS 17% to 20% by state | 80% to 95% | 1.50x to 1.90x | 12 to 30 days | Buy in-country and deliver |
Planning bands, not customs rulings. Ordered from the lightest import burden to the heaviest, which is roughly the order in which shipping stops being defensible.
Brazil
Every regional guide notes that Brazil is costly to ship into. What that undersells is that Brazil is running a structurally different regime, and the number most people quote does not apply to employers at all.
Brazil taxes non-exempt international parcels at a 60 percent federal import tax plus state ICMS of roughly 17 to 20 percent. The widely reported exemption below USD 50 comes from the Programa Remessa Conforme, which is a voluntary compliance program that certifies e-commerce companies. Certified sellers collect the tax at checkout and their qualifying low-value shipments clear faster and cheaper. A US employer couriering its own laptop to its own hire in Sao Paulo is not a certified e-commerce seller, so none of that applies. Receita Federal states the position plainly: outside the program the import tax rate remains 60 percent, in addition to the applicable ICMS.
Compounded, on a customs value that includes freight, that lands the total charge close to the value of the machine. A $1,100 laptop with $140 of freight arrives owing something near four figures in tax, assessed against the CPF of the person who signed for it. That is not a line item to absorb. It is a reason to never take this route.
The awkward part is that Brazil also carries the region’s widest gap between local retail and US pricing, so the correct answer is still the more expensive one in absolute terms. Budget a Brazilian hire’s machine at roughly one and a half to two times what the same machine costs in the US, buy it in-country, and treat that as the price of the market rather than a problem to engineer around. The employer cost calculator is the right place to check whether the total cost of a Brazilian hire still works once that is in the model. The full Receita Federal manual on postal and express shipments has the current rules if you need to check a specific case.
The legal side
US employers approach equipment as a policy question. Some companies issue machines, some run bring-your-own-device with a stipend, and the choice is a matter of security posture and budget. Across a good part of Latin America the choice has already been made for you by statute, and the contract clause that says otherwise is void rather than merely unusual.
Chile is the clearest case. Under Ley 21.220 the equipment, tools, and materials are the employer’s obligation, and so are the costs of operation, maintenance, and repair, with the law stating that these costs cannot be transferred to the worker. A Chilean telework contract that makes the employee supply their own laptop does not create a valid arrangement, it creates an unenforceable clause and a compliance finding. Colombia’s Ley 2121 similarly makes the employer provide the equipment and adds a monthly connectivity compensation set by Decreto 555 of 2022. Mexico’s telework chapter, with NOM-037 behind it, requires the employer to provide, install, and maintain the equipment, including an ergonomic chair, and to pay a proportional share of internet and electricity. Peru sets the same default and publishes annually updated compensation tables for the utilities.
At the other end, Brazil, Uruguay, Guatemala, and the Dominican Republic leave equipment and cost allocation to the written agreement. That is genuine freedom, and it is also where the most avoidable disputes happen, because freedom to allocate means nothing if the allocation was never written down. The practical rule is the same in both groups: the agreement should name the equipment, say who owns it, say who pays for what, and say what happens to the machine when the engagement ends. In the statutory markets that document proves compliance. In the contractual markets it is the only rule there is.
The planner shows the position for the market you select, read directly from the same data behind the remote work and telework laws tool, which carries the full obligations including registration deadlines, right-to-disconnect floors, and the utility compensation rules.
By the numbers
0%
Tariff on laptops in most of the region under the WTO ITA and the US trade agreements
12% to 22%
Consumption tax on the customs value, Guatemala at the low end and Uruguay at the high end
60% + ICMS
Brazil's federal import tax on parcels outside Remessa Conforme, plus state ICMS
Sources: WTO Information Technology Agreement and Receita Federal, Programa Remessa Conforme. National consumption tax rates are the published standard rates in each market.
Method
Nothing here is a quoted rate from a carrier, and it would be dishonest to present it as one. The effective charge on a single device moves with the declared value, the carrier, the destination state or province, the courier’s own handling fee, and whether the parcel clears as a courier shipment or a formal import entry. What can be stated with confidence is the range, and the range is built the same way in every market so the comparison is like for like.
The charge on arrival starts from the published standard consumption tax rate, adds any statutory surcharge that applies to imports specifically, such as Peru’s municipal promotion tax, Costa Rica’s Ley 6946 levy, or Ecuador’s FODINFA, and adds the tariff position for HS 8471, which is zero in every market here except Brazil. The upper end of each band carries the courier’s advancement and handling fees, which on a single device are a larger share of the total than most people expect. Brazil is calculated from its 60 percent federal import tax compounded with ICMS in the 17 to 20 percent range. Argentina reflects the courier franquicia, which exempts the first USD 400 of each shipment from duty and the statistical fee and charges IVA on the excess, so the effective rate on a laptop is lower than the headline 21 percent.
The customs value is the declared value plus freight and insurance, which is the standard basis across the region. This is why the planner adds freight before applying the charge rather than after: shipping cost is taxed as part of the base, so a heavier or more expensive shipping option costs more than its own price.
The local retail premium is the price of the same class of machine in country as a multiple of US retail. It is not a tax calculation. It contains the local consumption tax, the importer and distributor margin that a consumer price carries, and the exchange and pricing behaviour of each market. It is the widest band in the model and the one most worth checking against a live local quote before you commit, particularly in Argentina and Brazil where it moves fastest.
The lead times are door to door working days when nothing goes wrong, including customs clearance. They are not carrier transit estimates, which describe the flying part rather than the waiting part. Markets where a device of this value cannot clear as a simple courier parcel, which is Ecuador above its 4x4 ceiling, Uruguay above its franchise, and any Brazilian shipment of consequence, carry both a longer window and a clearance cost band, because a customs agent has to be involved.
Getting it back
Provisioning gets planned because it blocks a start date. Recovery gets planned by nobody, because it does not block anything until the day it does. The result is a predictable pattern: a company hires steadily in the region for two years, has a normal amount of turnover, and discovers it has no idea how many company machines are in how many homes in how many countries, or how to get any of them back.
The reverse trip is harder than the outbound one. Exporting a used laptop from most of these markets means a person who no longer works for you standing in a courier office with a machine that is worth more than the shipping and possibly worth more than the goodwill remaining in the relationship. Re-importing it into the US is straightforward, but getting it out of the country is not always. In practice, most companies that face this honestly conclude that the residual value of a two-year-old laptop does not justify the retrieval, and the real cost was never the hardware. It was the data on it.
Which points at the actual control. Device management enrolment is what turns an unrecoverable asset into a recoverable one, because a machine you can remotely wipe is a machine whose loss is an accounting entry rather than an incident. Make enrolment a condition of issuing or reimbursing any device, in every market, including the ones where you are reimbursing a purchase the hire made in their own name. Then write the return terms at hire: who pays return shipping, what the deadline is, and what happens to the residual value if the device stays where it is. Deciding to let a machine go is a perfectly good policy. Discovering that you have to is not.
Questions
For a single machine, buy locally almost everywhere. That surprises people, and the reason is not the tax rate, it is the freight. Courier freight runs 90 to 240 dollars per parcel, it does not scale down with volume because each device travels separately, and it is taxed as part of the customs value rather than sitting outside it. Add that to a consumption tax of 12 to 22 percent and the shipped route loses to local retail in every market the planner covers, narrowly in Guatemala and Costa Rica and heavily in Brazil. Shipping becomes competitive only at the favourable end of the band, on higher-value machines where the fixed freight is a smaller share, or where you already own the hardware. The planner prices all three routes against the same machine so you can see how close your case actually is.
Usually no. Portable computers under HS heading 8471 are zero-rated in most of the region, through the WTO Information Technology Agreement, through USMCA for Mexico, CAFTA-DR for Central America and the Dominican Republic, or through the bilateral US trade agreements with Chile, Colombia, and Peru. What you do pay is consumption tax on the customs value, which ranges from 12 percent in Guatemala to 22 percent in Uruguay, plus whatever the carrier charges to handle the clearance. Brazil is the exception in both directions: its courier regime applies a 60 percent federal import tax that functions as a tariff regardless of what the product is.
Not if you have no registered entity in the country, which is the normal situation for a US company hiring one or two people remotely. VAT recovery runs through a local tax registration, and a foreign company without one is a final consumer in the eyes of the tax authority. This is the single most misunderstood part of the arithmetic, because a US finance team is used to thinking of VAT as a wash. Here it is not. Treat the full consumption tax as real cost in the budget, whichever route the device takes, because the same tax is embedded in the local retail price too.
The consignee, which is your hire. That is the part US employers tend to discover after the fact. When a courier delivers a parcel to an individual in Bogota, Santiago, or Sao Paulo, it clears against that person's national tax identifier, the charges are assessed to them, and in most markets the carrier will present the bill at the door. If the clearance goes wrong, it is your new hire arguing with customs about a machine they do not own. Two things fix this: open a duty-and-tax-paid billing account with the carrier before the shipment moves, and tell the hire in advance exactly what will arrive and what it is worth.
In several countries, yes, and it is not waivable. Chile's Ley 21.220 makes equipment, tools, operating costs, maintenance, and repair the employer's obligation and says the cost cannot be passed to the worker, so a bring-your-own-device clause in a Chilean telework contract is void. Colombia's Ley 2121 makes the employer provide the equipment and adds a monthly connectivity payment. Mexico's telework chapter and NOM-037 require the employer to provide, install, and maintain the equipment and to pay a proportional share of internet and electricity. Elsewhere, including Brazil, Uruguay, Guatemala, and the Dominican Republic, the written agreement decides. The planner shows the position for the market you select, and the remote work laws tool carries the full rules.
From the US, plan on four to twelve working days to Mexico, six to eighteen for most of Central America and the Andean markets, and ten to thirty for Brazil, Argentina, Ecuador, and Uruguay where the shipment may need a formal import entry rather than a simple courier clearance. Buying in-country is faster almost everywhere, usually one to ten working days depending on the market and how specific the configuration is. If the start date is inside two weeks, the shipped route is a risk in most of the region and a near certainty of being late in Brazil.
Buying in-country, or reimbursing the hire for buying it, in almost every case. The exception worth knowing is a machine you already own: a laptop coming off a departing US employee has no purchase cost attached, so the comparison becomes freight plus tax against a full local retail price, and that flips the answer in the lower-tax markets. Brazil stays the exception to the exception, because the charge on arrival is large enough to exceed the residual value of most used hardware. The other saving people miss is peripherals. A monitor, keyboard, and headset are cheap relative to a laptop and are the worst things to ship, because they are bulky, low value, and taxed on exactly the same basis.
Whoever your written agreement says, and if it says nothing, the person who bought it. This is the trade you make for the speed of the reimbursement route, and it is a perfectly acceptable trade as long as you make it deliberately. Write the ownership position, the return terms, and the residual treatment into the contract or the telework annex at hire, not at exit. Also require device management enrolment as a condition of the reimbursement, because a machine you cannot remotely wipe is a machine you cannot offboard, and that is a security question rather than an accounting one.
No, and you should distrust any tool that claims to. The effective charge on a device moves with the declared value, the carrier, the destination state or province, the courier's own handling fee, and whether the parcel clears as a courier shipment or a formal import. The bands here are planning ranges built from published tax rates and tariff positions, and the method is set out in the section below so the arithmetic can be checked line by line. Use them to choose the route and size the budget, then confirm the specific number with your carrier or a licensed customs broker before you commit.
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