Your New Hire's Laptop Is A Customs Entry, Not A Courier Job

Shipping laptops to offshore staff is an import transaction in the destination country, and it gets taxed, inspected and cleared like one. The Philippine Bureau of Customs sets the line plainly in its guidance on importation: no duties and taxes are collected on goods with an FOB or FCA value of ten thousand pesos or below. A business-grade machine sits well clear of that. Above fifty thousand pesos it stops being an informal entry and becomes a formal one, with a licensed broker attached.

Most founders learn this in the week their new starter was meant to start.

Device supply is a service you can buy rather than a job you run. Outstaffer sells preconfigured machines delivered before the start date, so read that as a disclosure of interest.

The rules under the parcel changed while nobody was looking

A laptop is a lithium battery in a plastic case, and air freight treats it that way. IATA's Dangerous Goods Regulations are at the 67th edition, in force since 1 January 2026, and the 68th takes effect on 1 January 2027 with revised packing instructions for lithium and sodium batteries. The old lithium battery mark stops being accepted after 31 December 2026. IATA's published battery guidance also recommends offering cells at a state of charge no higher than 30 per cent of rated capacity.

None of it was written with your hiring plan in mind. All of it lands the moment you put two machines in one carton.

Does a laptop clear the de minimis threshold?

No. The ten thousand peso de minimis was built for samples and small personal items, not for an asset your accountant has capitalised. Over that line you are dutiable. Over fifty thousand pesos you are in formal entry, which means a broker and a queue you cannot escalate.

Shipping laptops to offshore staff gets worse at scale, not better

Here is the arithmetic on a January intake of five people in Manila. IATA's guidance keeps a consignment outside the battery marking rules at two batteries installed in equipment per package, so five machines is three packages. Two business laptops in a carton will not be mistaken for a ten thousand peso consignment, so all three are dutiable, and each is its own formal entry with its own broker and its own clock. Three import transactions for one hiring round, before anyone opens a lid.

Set that against the published alternative. Outstaffer's Employer of Record starts at $250 per employee per month for the whole employment arrangement in that market. The founder hours spent clearing three consignments outrun that line well before the quarter closes.

What does the delay actually cost?

The hardware gates the start date, not the contract. Someone employed, paid and waiting on a box is a cost with nothing running against it. There are costs here that never appear on the quote, and this is one of the quieter ones.

A machine posted blind also arrives without the security posture a managed device should turn up with, which is a second bill in the same envelope.

Related reading

• Who provides the laptop when you hire someone overseas
• Recovering company laptops when a remote hire leaves

The honest case for posting the laptop yourself

It works, for one person. Plenty of Australian businesses have couriered a single machine to Manila, paid a modest tax bill, and had it on a desk inside a fortnight. The base rate of disaster is low and the setup cost is nil. If you are hiring one person into a country you already ship to, posting the device is defensible.

The case weakens with every extra head. It collapses on the second replacement cycle, because the machine that dies in year two has to come back out again.

What a ten to fifty person business should do with this

Treat hardware as part of the employment arrangement rather than an errand that trails behind it. When devices are already handled, a start date is a date rather than a hope. If you want the comparison on your own numbers, run one role through it and put clearance, broker and waiting in the same column as the price of the hardware.

So, the question worth arguing about: the last time you sent laptops to a hire offshore, did anyone price any of that, or did the budget stop at the machine?