Intrastat Commodity Codes: CN Codes Explained

Intrastat commodity codes, also called Combined Nomenclature or CN codes, are the classification numbers used to describe goods moving between European Union member states. They turn a written product description into a category every statistical office in the EU reads the same way.

Intrastat is the reporting system those codes feed. Goods crossing an internal EU border are not presented and cleared the way a consignment leaving the customs territory is, so the trade figures are collected from the businesses doing the trading. The code is what identifies the goods on each line of that return.

What the code is doing on the return

A goods description written by a warehouse is useless as a statistic. Fittings, parts and machine components mean something in your yard and nothing at all to anyone compiling national trade figures. The code replaces that wording with one agreed category.

The criteria behind the codes are the same across member states, with a few exceptions. That is the whole point of a shared nomenclature: one description of goods, read the same way by every office collecting the figures.

Where the CN code sits in the numbering

An Intrastat line uses the EU level of the code. Underneath it sits the international core, the HS code. Above it, an import entry for goods arriving from outside the EU goes one step finer again. Three depths of the same commodity code, and an Intrastat return reads the middle one.

The job that number does here is narrower than the one it does on a customs entry. Nothing is cleared against it, no duty is read off it, and no officer at a barrier is waiting for it. It is asked for so that a movement can be counted under the same heading as every comparable movement in the EU, which is why an approximate code is worse than it looks. It is not only wrong on your line. It is wrong in the total.

The nomenclature is revised from time to time. A code lifted from an old order file can quietly stop existing, which is a dull way to have a return sent back.

Who files, and what the declaration carries

The obligation sits with the business trading the goods, not with the truck. Movements out of your member state and movements in are reported separately, as dispatches and as arrivals.

Each line typically names the commodity code, the partner member state, the value of the goods and the quantity, usually as net weight. Individual member states ask for further detail, and the reporting period is normally a month.

Whether you file at all depends on how much you trade across EU borders. Each member state sets and publishes its own reporting threshold, so the answer is a national one, and the threshold that binds you is the one of the member state you are registered for VAT in for those movements, not the one where your office happens to sit.

One thing it is not: a tax return. Intrastat is a statistical return that sits alongside the tax paperwork on the same sale, and filing one does nothing about the other.

Where the numbers come from in a transport office

Nobody generates Intrastat data on purpose. It is assembled after the fact from records that already exist: the sales invoice, the packing list, the consignment note, the transport order. If the goods description on those records is vague, the return is being reconstructed from guesswork weeks after the trailer left.

Weights are the usual argument. The return wants the goods themselves, while the figure most easily to hand in dispatch is the loaded weight including pallets and packaging. Recording both against the order saves the back and forth at month end.

The same records also decide which country goes on the line. An export to a buyer outside the EU is declared to customs and does not belong on an Intrastat return at all, while a delivery down the motorway to the next member state does. Sorting cross-border jobs by that distinction as they are entered, rather than at the deadline, is most of the work.

Your return is also only half the record of one movement. What you file as a dispatch, the business at the other end files as an arrival, from its own paperwork and under its own national rules, and both lines are describing the same truckload. Where the two descriptions disagree, the difference does not cancel out. It stays in the trade figures on both sides of the border, one movement counted as two different things.