India opens 2027 import quota for 24,500 British cars — JLR, BMW and Skoda stand to gain most

The Directorate General of Foreign Trade (DGFT) has opened applications for a tariff rate quota (TRQ) covering 27,250 British-made vehicles for calendar year 2027, including 24,500 passenger cars, at import duties cut by more than half under the India-UK Comprehensive Economic and Trade Agreement (CETA). Applications are open from 6 to 21 November 2026.

What happened

Public Notice No. 39/2026-27, issued by DGFT under the Ministry of Commerce and Industry on 6 November 2026, invites "fresh applications for allocation of Tariff Rate Quota (TRQ)" for the next calendar year. It is a technical, bureaucratic-sounding notice, but it is the mechanism that decides how many British cars enter India next year at a steep duty discount — and who gets to bring them in.

The quota for completely built unit (CBU) passenger vehicles — cars that arrive fully assembled, not knocked down for local assembly — is split into three bands by engine size:

Band	Engine capacity	Quota
Small	Up to 1,500cc	6,000 units
Mid	Petrol 1,500–3,000cc / diesel 1,500–2,500cc	6,000 units
Large	Petrol over 3,000cc / diesel over 2,500cc	12,500 units

A further 2,750 units are set aside for non-electric, non-hydrogen goods-transport vehicles imported as CBUs. All vehicles must be genuinely unregistered anywhere in the world before import — these are new cars, not used-import arbitrage.

Within this quota, the basic customs duty on cars is reduced from India's standard rates — 66% on smaller engines, 110% on larger ones — down to 50% and 30% respectively. Only companies that manufacturers from the UK have formally authorised — their own Indian subsidiaries, official importers or dealer networks — can apply; this isn't a window any trader can walk through.

This is the second, and much larger, round of the scheme. CETA came into force on 15 July 2026, roughly halfway through the year, so the first allocation (for the remainder of calendar 2026) was prorated to just 4,200 passenger-car units. DGFT approved six of eight applications received, covering 642 vehicles: Jaguar Land Rover India alone took 325 — over half — with BMW India and Skoda Auto Volkswagen India each receiving 75, and the rest split among three dealerships. The 2027 round is the first at full annual scale.

What it means for an Indian buyer

If you're looking at a fully-imported British car in 2027 — a CBU Range Rover variant, a Jaguar, a Bentley, an Aston Martin, or any UK-built model a brand chooses to bring in this way — there's now a real chance it carries a materially lower duty component than an identical car imported outside the quota. On the largest-engine band, the jump from 110% to 30% duty is the difference between a car effectively tripling in price over its UK sticker and one going up by less than half. That's the kind of saving that can shift a car from "aspirational" to "within reach of a serious buyer."

The catch is that the quota is finite and allocated to manufacturers' authorised channels, not auctioned to the open market, so an individual buyer can't apply for a cheaper import directly — you benefit only if the brand you want to buy from secures an allocation and passes the saving through in its price list, which it has every commercial incentive to do. Given the 2026 pattern, Jaguar Land Rover looks the best-placed brand to make full use of its share again, given how much of its India range already arrives as CBU. Buyers eyeing a locally-assembled British-badged car — JLR's India-built Range Rover, Discovery Sport or Defender lines, for instance — see no change at all; this quota only touches fully-imported units.

It's also worth not confusing this with India's broader trade liberalisation story. A separate India-EU free trade agreement, agreed in principle but not yet in force as of this writing, proposes its own, much larger quota (rising toward 1 lakh-plus CBUs a year) for European-made cars on a different duty schedule. The two pacts have different rules of origin, different quota sizes and different timelines — a British car doesn't get EU treatment, and vice versa.

The Auto Grid angle

A CBU import landing in India under this quota has usually spent weeks at sea and on a ship's deck before it ever reaches a dealership forecourt — and that's before the Indian climate, stone-chipped highways and monsoon grime start their own work on the paint. Whether the saving on duty goes toward the car itself or toward protecting it, a fresh import is exactly the kind of car that benefits most from a full-body paint protection film layer applied before first registration, while the factory clear coat is still at its thickest and before the first long-distance delivery drive puts the first chips on the bonnet.

What's next

DGFT's application window closes on 21 November 2026; allocations for the 2027 quota, and which brands and importers actually secure units, typically follow in the weeks after the window shuts. We'll update this piece once that allocation list is public.