Household goods and personal effects

Someone moving house across a border produces a shipment that looks like ordinary cargo and is not one. The consignee is a person, not a company; there is no commercial invoice; and the field the message wants is a code that person has never been issued. This is the most-asked question about that shipment, and it has a published answer.

The short answer: the party's PAN, not an IEC

For a shipment of used and old household goods and personal effects:

CBIC answered this directly in its published SCMTR clarifications. Asked "for personal effect cargo which IEC code we have to show in the CSN", the reply is that crew effects belong in the SEI message, and for unaccompanied baggage the filer may give the PAN of the party, or the passport number. Carrier advisories say the same thing in shorter form: the mandatory Indian customer details are name, full address with state and country code and PIN, contact details, and "PAN No. (Passport No. in case of personal effects)".

So the answer to "which IEC" is that there usually isn't one, and none is expected.

Is this also the answer for exhibition cargo, trade samples or company goods?

No — do not carry this page over to them. Everything on it rests on one exemption, for goods imported for personal use, not connected with trade. Goods brought in to be shown or sold at an exhibition, trade samples, and anything a business imports are brought in for that business, so the exemption does not reach them (our reading of the exemption's own wording). Neither the "no IEC needed" answer nor the permanent IECs further down — IIHIE0153E, IABBR0145E — are for that cargo, and UB is not its item type.

For a company consignee the ordinary rule applies, and it is the message's own field note: the consignee's IEC, and its PAN where no IEC is available — a GSTIN already contains the PAN (see Party codes and PANs). How exhibition cargo is filed beyond the party codes — temporary import, re-export, carnets — is not covered in this knowledge base yet; ask the exhibition's official forwarder or your customs broker rather than applying a general rule.

DGFT's same permanent-IEC table does have rows for two cases this page does not cover. ATAEF1096E is for goods imported for display or use at fairs and exhibitions under an ATA carnet, and DGFT says it may also be used for goods imported for exhibitions under para 2.60 of its Handbook. And a government department has its own rows — AMDCG0111E for the central government, ADSGA0129E for a state — with the rest of that case on Party codes and PANs.

Why there is no IEC to go looking for

Because the person is exempt from holding one. The Handbook of Procedures exempts persons importing or exporting goods for personal use not connected with trade or manufacture or agriculture from obtaining an Importer Exporter Code at all. Someone shipping their own furniture is exactly that person. There is nothing to look up, and no registration they have skipped.

This is also why the message accepts a PAN in the first place. The field note on consignee code reads: IEC number of the consignee should be mentioned; if IEC is not available, PAN should be mentioned. A household move is the ordinary case of "not available", not an exception squeezed through a loophole.

If a system insists on an IEC anyway

Occasionally a counterparty's system, or a customs house, will not move without a code typed as IEC. There are official values for this — DGFT publishes permanent IECs for the exempt categories, and two of them cover this shipment:

For a transfer of residence, IABBR0145E is the one that fits.

Two warnings about these. First, they were re-issued in PAN format, and much of the advice circulating in the trade still quotes the retired numeric versions (0100000045, 0100000053). Those older forms are stale; use the alphanumeric ones above. Second, prefer the party's own PAN whenever they have one. A permanent IEC identifies a category, not a person, and it tells customs nothing about who is receiving the container.

Mark it as unaccompanied baggage

Set item type to UB. This is the field that tells customs what body of rules the goods fall under, and household goods and personal effects are unaccompanied baggage.

It is easy to skip. Item type sits next to type of cargo, cargo movement and nature of cargo, all of which are about how and where the box travels, and UB is the only one of the four that is about what the goods legally are. A used-household-goods consignment filed as OT — Other Cargo — has lost the single flag that distinguishes it.

Type of cargo stays IM for a move into India and EX for a move out. UB is not an alternative to those; it is a separate question answered at the same time.

Which way is the shipment moving?

The identity requirement follows the direction, because the message asks for it on whichever party is the Indian one:

Into India — someone moving here. The consignee is the individual: consignee code and consignee code type carry their PAN. This is the IM case, and the case customs' own clarification was answering.Out of India — someone leaving. The consignor is the individual, and consignor code and consignor code type carry the PAN instead. The field note for export cargo asks for the IEC of the consignor, and the same reasoning applies to a personal move: the exemption is written to cover exports as well as imports, and the permanent IEC above names "returning from / going abroad" in one breath.

What customs actually checks

Worth knowing, because it tells you where the risk is.

The code type is validated, and validated against the direction of the cargo:

The guide's types are IEC, PAN, GSN, GSD and GSG — GSTIN for normal taxpayers, diplomats and government entities respectively — and customs has also accepted PPT for a passport number (a consignee's passport on an import, September 2026), though no guide lists it. A passport typed PSP was refused (039). The PAN still comes first: it is the one of CBIC's two answers the guide itself has a type for.

By contrast the error list carries Invalid Consignor Code but no matching "Invalid Consignee Code", which suggests the consignee value itself is not checked against a register the way its type is. Treat that as an observation about the published error list rather than a promise — it is a reason to get the code type right first, not a licence to put anything in the code field.

Everything else on the party block still applies

Nothing about a personal move relaxes the rest. Name, street address, city and country code are mandatory for the consignee exactly as they are for a company, and a residential address abroad is what belongs there. Where the party is Indian, the state or subdivision code and the PIN are what let customs place them.

If you have a GSTIN for anyone on the filing, characters 3 to 12 of it are that party's PAN, and its first two digits are the state code. See Party codes and PANs.

What is not in this message

Some SCMTR guidance lists a passport number and an email and contact number as mandatory for personal-effects shipments. Those belong to the arrival manifest the carrier files, which is a different message with a different field list. The cargo summary notification has no separate passport field — which is why, when a passport number is the only identity available, it goes in the consignee code field itself.

Related

Every code on the form and what it means: Coded valuesWhere a party's PAN comes from, and the codes people confuse it with: Party codes and PANsWhy a filing was rejected, by error code: Why customs rejects a filing