A duty-free allowance is the threshold above which you owe duty. Below it, you bring goods in without paying. Above it, you declare and pay.
The phrase does a lot of quiet damage, because “duty-free allowance” sounds like permission to spend, and people plan around it as though exceeding it is an offence. It is not. Carrying more than your allowance is entirely legal. Carrying more than your allowance and walking through the green channel is not, and that is the distinction the phrase obscures.
Two consequences follow, and they are the whole of the practical advice.
The allowance is per person, not per family. Four adults arriving together each carry their own, which is why the arithmetic is worth doing before someone buys one large bottle instead of several small ones.
Alcohol and tobacco usually sit outside the general goods allowance. A country that lets you bring in a thousand dollars of shopping duty-free will still cap cigarettes separately, and often at a number far lower than a single carton.
Usually it is two reliefs, not one, and they are measured in different units
This is the distinction that makes the question answerable, and almost nothing written for travellers draws it.
Singapore Customs sets both out on one page, which is why we cite it here even though this page covers fourteen countries. It grants a duty-free concession, measured in litres and applying only to liquor, and separately a GST import relief, measured in money. (Singapore Customs, Duty-Free Concession and GST Import Relief, updated 25 March 2026)
The concession is a choice between five combinations rather than a single figure: 1 litre of spirits with 1 litre of wine, or 1 litre of spirits with 1 litre of beer, or 2 litres of wine, or 2 litres of beer, and so on. The relief is a value: up to S$500 of new goods if you were away 48 hours or more, and S$100 if you were away less.
So a traveller landing in Singapore has one allowance denominated in litres and another denominated in dollars, and exceeding either one has nothing to do with the other.
And the conditions attach to you, not to the goods. Singapore’s liquor concession requires all five of: you are 18 or over, you spent at least 48 hours outside Singapore, you are not arriving from Malaysia, the liquor is for your own consumption, and it is not otherwise prohibited. The GST relief is refused outright to holders of a work permit, employment pass, student pass, dependent pass or long-term pass, and to crew.
Four of those five conditions are facts about your trip and your status rather than about what you bought. That is why no page, including this one, can tell you your allowance from the country alone.
What fourteen customs services publish
These are the figures each country’s own customs authority states, taken from the page we cite on that country’s guide. Each links to the full rules, because a table is a summary and the exceptions are where people get caught.
| Tobacco | Alcohol | |
|---|---|---|
| Hong Kong | 19 cigarettes, or 1 cigar or 25g of cigars, or 25g of other tobacco | 1 litre above 30% ABV |
| Singapore | None at all, including packs bought in Singapore | 2 litres total, in one of five spirits, wine and beer combinations |
| Korea | One carton | 1 litre, plus 60ml of perfume |
| Vietnam | 200 cigarettes | 1.5 litres above 20 degrees, plus goods to VND 10,000,000 |
| Malaysia | Excluded from the general allowance, and no separate figure published | 1 litre total of wine, spirits, beer or malt liquor |
| Brunei | None. Duty is B$0.50 per stick | 2 bottles of 1 litre, OR 12 cans of 330ml beer, non-Muslim passengers aged 17 and over |
| China | Declare at 400 cigarettes, 100 cigars or 500g of tobacco | Declare at 1,500ml at 12% or above |
| Japan | 200 cigarettes, or 50 cigars, or 250g of other tobacco, or 250g in total when mixing kinds | 3 bottles, a bottle being about 760cc |
| Thailand | 200 cigarettes, or 250g of tobacco, or 250g of all types combined | 1 litre |
| Nepal | 200 cigarettes, or 50 cigars | One 1.15 litre bottle of distilled liquor |
| Laos | 1 carton of 200 cigarettes, or 50 cigars, or 250g of tobacco leaves | 2 litres of spirits, 3 litres of wine and 5 litres of beer, listed as three separate lines |
| Myanmar | 400 cigarettes | 2 litres of beverage alcohol |
| Philippines | 2 reams of cigarettes, or 50 cigars, or 250g of pipe tobacco | 2 bottles of liquor, the tobacco and liquor together worth under PHP 10,000 |
| Maldives | 200 cigarettes, or 25 cigars, or 250g of tobacco, aged 18 and over | None stated |
Hong Kong’s number is the one people disbelieve. Nineteen cigarettes is not a typo and it is not a carton. It is less than a single pack of twenty, and Hong Kong applies it to arriving travellers aged 18 and over.
China’s row is a different kind of number. Those are declaration thresholds rather than duty-free allowances: they tell you the point at which you must declare, which is not the same statement as what enters free.
Malaysia is worth reading in full before you buy anything. Its general allowance is a value ceiling that changes with how you arrive, and it explicitly excludes tobacco, e-cigarettes, vaping devices and their liquids from that ceiling. Those are handled separately and more strictly.
Japan and Thailand also cap ordinary shopping, and the table has no column for it. Japan’s other articles must come to under 200,000 yen in total overseas market value, with anything worth under 10,000 yen free of duty and left out of that sum entirely, and with no allowance at all for a single item or set worth more than 200,000 yen. (Japan Customs, Guide for Passengers) Thailand’s equivalent is personal belongings in reasonable quantity worth no more than 20,000 baht in total. (Thai Customs Department, Passengers)
The Philippines publishes a unit it does not define. Its arriving-traveller ration is “two (2) reams of cigarettes”, under CAO 01-2017, and the Bureau of Customs page nowhere says how many sticks a ream contains. Local usage puts it at ten packs, so 400, but that is not on the page and this site will not convert a figure the authority left undefined.
Two rows rest on sources that would not answer an automated check on 18 September 2026, and they are flagged rather than quietly trusted: Maldives Customs returned 403 to a script and the Lao trade portal timed out. Both figures are quoted on the country guides linked above from readings taken when those pages did answer. Everything else in the table was re-read from the authority’s own page this week.
Maldives states no alcohol allowance at all, which is the one “publishes nothing” on this page that survives scrutiny, and it is scoped to the travellers page of Maldives Customs rather than to the country. Given how tightly alcohol is controlled outside resort properties, an absence there reads as deliberate rather than as an oversight.
Thailand is the one that does not let you simply pay. Its passenger page states that excess quantities of cigarettes, tobacco or alcoholic beverages must be dropped in the box provided by Customs, and that prosecution follows otherwise. Everywhere else in this table the excess is a duty bill you can choose to pay. In Thailand the goods do not come with you.
The trap is which official page you land on
Every country in the table publishes its figures. What varies is how findable they are, and both of the countries this page used to list as publishing nothing turned out to publish plenty.
Thailand is the honest mistake. Thai Customs runs a page on personal and household effects, which is the exemption for people changing residence: a timing window, a used-goods condition, a cap of one appliance per type, and nothing whatever about a tourist’s bottle of whisky. Read only that page and the reasonable conclusion is that Thailand states no ordinary traveller’s allowance. The figures live on the department’s Passengers page instead.
Japan was simply wrong. Its Guide for Passengers is mostly about declaration forms and the channel system, and the allowance table sits partway down it, headed “for an adult”. It was there the whole time, on the page this site already cited.
A claim that a country publishes nothing deserves far more scepticism than a claim about a number. A number can be checked against one page. An absence can only be checked against every page, and nobody does that.
The category where several countries answer zero
Singapore states that there is no duty-free concession and no GST import relief for cigarettes and tobacco products at all, and that this holds even for packs bought in Singapore carrying the local duty-paid mark. Brunei publishes no allowance either and charges B$0.50 on every cigarette, which is B$100 on a carton of 200. Malaysia excludes tobacco from its general ceiling and then publishes no separate figure for it. A published zero is a real answer, and it is the one most likely to cost a traveller money.
The one thing worth doing before you fly
Look up the country you are actually entering, not the region. The figures above vary by a factor of more than twenty on tobacco alone, and neighbouring countries do not converge: Hong Kong allows 19 cigarettes and Myanmar allows 400.
If you are over, declare. The penalty structure in most of Asia is unforgiving in a way the allowance itself does not suggest, and the duty you would have paid is almost always smaller than the fine for not paying it.
Corrections
18 September 2026. This page previously carried a section headed “Two big destinations that do not answer this question”, naming Japan and Thailand. Both halves were wrong, and the section has been removed rather than softened.
Japan Customs publishes a duty-free allowance table on its Guide for Passengers: 200 cigarettes or 50 cigars or 250g of other tobacco, 3 bottles of alcoholic beverages, 2 ounces of perfume, and other articles to under 200,000 yen. That is the same page this site already cited on its Japan guide, so the claim contradicted our own reporting.
Thailand’s passenger page states 200 cigarettes or 250g of tobacco and 1 litre of alcohol, with personal belongings to 20,000 baht. The page we had been reading was the department’s separate personal and household effects exemption, which is written for people changing residence and genuinely says nothing about tourist shopping. That is the same error as the Singapore one below, made on a second country: reading one official page and concluding the country publishes nothing.
Both countries are now in the table, the excess-surrender rule for Thailand is recorded above, and the section that made the claim is gone.
10 September 2026. An earlier version said that “Japan, Singapore and Thailand publish process rather than a simple numeric allowance”, and described Singapore’s official page as being about declaring through Customs@SG and the channel system. That was wrong, and it was wrong about the country whose page is the clearest of the seven.
Singapore Customs publishes a dedicated page, updated 25 March 2026, that sets out a five-option liquor concession in litres, GST import relief of S$500 or S$100 by time spent abroad, and an explicit statement that neither relief applies to tobacco. We had been reading a different Singapore page. Singapore is now in the table, its definition of the two reliefs anchors the new section above, and the claim about it has been withdrawn rather than softened.
Brunei was also added, because a published allowance of nothing plus a per-cigarette duty is the most consequential row on the table for anyone who smokes.