What It Really Costs to Import a Horse from England to the United States

Prefer to listen? Harriet reads this out, with the story of the Belgian foal a driver refused to load, in the first episode of Yard Notes: The Foal That Did Not Travel — ten minutes.

The two questions

Every American buyer asks me the same two things, usually in this order. How much does it cost to get him over here, and how long will it take?

I have stopped giving the short answer, because the short answer is wrong often enough to cause trouble. The honest version takes a few minutes to explain, and it is worth your time, because almost everything written about importing horses from Britain online is either out of date or written by somebody who has never done it.

So here is the whole of it: what it costs, what changes the cost, what you have to do yourself, and the one genuine risk in the process. The figures below come from a written quotation from our shipper, dated September 2026, not from the internet.

The thing that decides everything

The largest variable in what it costs to bring a horse to America is not the price of the horse. It is not the airline, the season, or how far you live from an airport.

It is whether your horse is a gelding, a mare, or a stallion.

Britain is classified by the United States as affected by contagious equine metritis, a reproductive infection usually shortened to CEM. That classification describes the country, not your horse. Nobody is suggesting your horse is carrying anything.

But the consequences are real, and they run like this.

A gelding of any age is exempt. He lands, completes three days of federal quarantine, and he is yours.

A mare over two years old lands, does the same three days, and then goes into a further fourteen to eighteen days of CEM quarantine: a blood test, three sets of cultures, and five days of treatment.

A stallion over two years old lands, does his three days, and then faces thirty to forty-five days. He must be cultured from four sites and then live-covered to two qualified test mares, who are themselves swabbed repeatedly and blood tested afterwards. You pay for the test mares throughout.

Between a gelding and a stallion bought on the same day, that is several thousand pounds and about a month of difference. It says nothing at all about the quality of either horse.

There is good news in this if you are buying young. A horse under two that has never been bred is exempt from CEM altogether, which makes youngstock among the simplest and cheapest horses to bring over.

What it actually costs

Take a gelding landing in New York. From our yard in Kent to the door of American quarantine is just under £10,000.

That is the figure I would want if I were buying, so that is the figure I give.

A mare adds about £100 to the pre-export testing and roughly £2,400 for her CEM quarantine. A stallion adds £150 and something closer to £6,800.

Three things sit on top

The arrival airport. New York is the cheapest way in. Miami, Chicago and Los Angeles all cost more in the air, and Los Angeles costs more on the ground too, billing its permit, power of attorney and customs clearance separately. The gap between New York and Los Angeles is over £4,000 on an identical horse. If your yard is a long haul from the east coast, flying closer to home can still be the right answer, but get both numbers before you decide.

Onward delivery. No shipping quote includes the haul from the quarantine facility to your barn. It is purely a question of distance.

The tariff, and this one is new.

The 10% nobody has updated their website for

Since 24 July 2026, British goods entering the United States carry an additional 10% duty. Live horses are not excluded from it.

It is charged on the price on the sales invoice, so it scales with the horse. On a £25,000 horse that is £2,500. On a £100,000 horse it is £10,000, which is more than the entire cost of shipping him. There is also a customs processing fee of roughly a third of one percent, which is small by comparison.

I want to be straight about two things here. The first is that a great deal of the guidance you will find online still says horses enter America free of duty. That was true until July. It is not true now, and most of it has not been updated.

The second is that these duties are being challenged in the American courts by twenty-five state attorneys general, and they may not survive. So confirm the position with your customs broker on the day you buy, rather than taking my word or anybody else's for it.

One distinction worth knowing: a horse coming temporarily to compete and return is not subject to the additional duty. It applies to horses being sold. If you are importing to compete, say so to your broker before entry rather than after.

Foals and broodmares

There is a rule here that catches people out, and it is not negotiable.

A foal must be fully weaned and halter broken before the transport can even be booked. Our shipper will not wean a foal on a lorry and will refuse to collect one weaned too recently. A broodmare must have her foal taken off her before she is collected. So a foal is not a horse you decide to send next week: the weaning has to be planned properly, done at home, and the foal needs to lead well in a foal slip by the time it travels.

I have watched this rule enforced, and I was glad of it. I had a foal being collected from Belgium and the seller, who was inexperienced, had not weaned it. I had communicated every detail beforehand. The driver was crystal clear with him: the foal would not be shipped. And the lorry left without it.

That cost me time and it cost me money, and it is exactly what I want to hear. We only work with companies who put animal welfare first, and John Parker International, who move our horses, are one of those long-established firms who do. We have never had a shipment go wrong with them, which is the whole of why we use them. They communicate properly, which in this industry is rarer than it ought to be, and their drivers are talented professionals — friendly, can-do, and every one of them a good horseperson. That last part matters more than people realise, because the driver is the one with your horse at two in the morning at a border, not me.

If a shipper is willing to load a foal that should not travel, ask yourself what else they are willing to wave through.

A mare in foal can travel, but the window closes earlier than most people expect: roughly two months before she is due, and some carriers are stricter still. The reason is not only the obvious one. She needs time to settle in her new surroundings and build the antibodies that pass to her foal through her colostrum, so the last thirty to forty-five days before foaling are the wrong time to move her anywhere. We move a mare in mid-pregnancy, or we wait until after she has foaled and the foal is weaned.

What we do, and what is genuinely yours

Almost all of the paperwork is ours. We handle the passport and microchip records, the veterinary work and the blood tests, both export health certificates, the customs declarations, the border inspection, and we book the flight and the quarantine through our shipping agent. That is not an add-on service; it is part of selling you a horse.

That includes the EORI number. An EORI is the customs identifier every British importer and exporter has needed since April 2023, and because the export declaration is ours to make, the number is ours to hold. You may see other guidance telling overseas buyers to register for one. You do not need a British customs number to buy a British horse.

Two practical things while we are here. Our shipper needs a full copy of the horse's passport before anything is booked — front page, the details page showing colour and date of birth, the sketch page, the breeding pages, and the country and date of issue. And their booking is only confirmed once the form is in and payment has been received, which is before collection rather than on delivery. Neither is onerous. Both are easier known early than discovered late.

Two jobs are genuinely yours.

A customs broker in the States, to file the entry and handle the duty, with you as importer of record. A shipping agent and a customs broker do different jobs even when one firm coordinates both. Ask which you are getting.

Your own pre-purchase examination, commissioned by you, from a vet of your choosing, with the report and the full radiographs going directly to your own veterinarian at home. I encourage this even with buyers who tell me they trust us completely. Especially those buyers. Treat the purchase examination and the import health testing as entirely separate decisions: the first tells you whether the horse suits you, the second only satisfies a border.

Why I will not recommend you a vet

This is the question underneath every other question, and it has nothing to do with freight rates. The real fear is being ripped off — sending money across an ocean for a horse that never arrives, or one that should never have been sold.

American buyers spend more on vettings than any other buyers I deal with, precisely to avoid that. And they are right to. But a vetting is only as good as its independence. A friendly vet, or simply a miss on the day, and a horse that should not have gone anywhere is on a plane.

So we do not recommend vets. We give you the options and then we stay out of it. We use Bell Equine locally ourselves and we say so publicly — but we will not steer you, because the moment we choose your vet, your vetting is worth less.

We can afford to stay out of it because we do not sell a horse that isn''t ready, or a horse in any condition other than the one we described.

The part of that worth reading twice: a seller who recommends your vet has quietly taken something from you. The vetting is the one step in this whole process that exists to protect the buyer from the seller, and its entire value comes from the vet owing the seller nothing. So choose your own. And if any seller — me included — pushes you towards a particular practice, treat that as information about the seller.

The one real risk

During American quarantine every horse is tested for equine piroplasmosis. If that result comes back anything other than negative, the horse is refused entry. There is no retest and no appeal, and horses travelling in the same shipment can be caught up in it.

It is uncommon. It is also the reason we test here, at home, weeks before a horse goes anywhere near a lorry. Those British results are not formally recognised by the American authorities and guarantee nothing on the other side, but they are what stops a horse reaching New York and being turned round.

There is a wrinkle worth knowing: one of the required piroplasmosis tests uses a reagent supplied from the United States, and a shortage means British laboratories can no longer run that particular version as a courtesy test. The alternatives are still run, and this is exactly the sort of detail that changes without notice, which is why we work with a shipper who tracks it.

How long, honestly

The shared transport runs to a weekly rhythm. Horses are collected in the UK between Tuesday and Thursday, come to the shipper's yard in Kent for their paperwork, and the European transport leaves on the Sunday or Monday. They rest a night or two near the airport before flying.

After that it depends entirely on the horse. A gelding is through quarantine in three days. A mare adds a fortnight or so. A stallion adds a month or more.

Do not build a competition plan around the earliest possible release date. Leave the horse room to arrive properly.

Where to start

Ask for a written estimate to your final destination, not an airfreight price. It should separate the veterinary work, the certificates, the road legs, the flight, the arrival charges, the quarantine, the customs and the delivery, and it should tell you which lines are fixed and which depend on how long the horse stays.

We have put a planner on the website that will cost any horse in our collection against your own figure and your own arrival airport, showing every line with the source it came from, and it will email you the whole thing if you would like a copy.

Or ring me, which is honestly easier. I have sent horses to buyers across the United States and I would rather talk it through than have you piece it together from a website.

If you are still choosing the horse rather than the route, our showjumping horses for sale are all ones we own and have produced ourselves, each with a published price.

Figures from a written quotation dated 9 September 2026 for a shared load, and from published United States and British government schedules. Estimates for planning, not a quote. Confirm the requirements for your horse, route and arrival date with your appointed professionals before shipping.