NCTS Final State Rules – 21 January 2025 – Regulatory Advisory

Final State Rules for NCTS will be introduced on 21 January 2025.

The Northern Ireland NCTS service (Departures and Arrivals) will be unavailable from 22:00 on 20 January to 00:15 on 21 January GMT (Greenwich Mean Time).

The GB (Great Britain Mainland) service will be unavailable from 23:00 on 20 January to 00:15 on 21 January GMT (Greenwich Mean Time).

Cargoes will be offline to deploy changes 21/01/2025 between 04:30 and 05:30 and users are advised not to process departures and arrivals during downtimes.

On 21 January 2025, all member countries of the Common Transit Convention (CTC) will introduce the final new features of NCTS5 (Transit Movements). These are known as Final State Rules.

What’s changing – times and dates of Final State rules

HMRC will deploy Final State Rules in two phases:

The Northern Ireland service (Departures and Arrivals) will be unavailable from 22:00 on 20 January to 00:15 on 21st  January GMT (Greenwich Mean Time).

The GB (Great Britain Mainland) service will be unavailable from 23:00 on 20 January to 00:15 on 21st  January GMT (Greenwich Mean Time)

Cargoes will be deploy changes on 21st January 2025 between 04:30-05:30 GMT. Cargoes will not be available between 04:30-05:30 GMT.

It is advised not to process departures and arrivals during each downtime

What you need to do

Familiarise yourself with the new requirements introduced in Final State rules

Multiple House Consignments 

Historically, a transit movement only allows the declaration of a single consignor/consignee pair (Exporter / Importer, Buyer / Seller etc.). With final state rules, the ability to declare up to 99 house consignments (each containing up to 999 items) has been introduced. This enables you group consignments on one declaration more accurately. This should be especially useful for example groupage loads or road consignments delivering to multiple destinations.

Mandatory Commodity Codes for all goods in transit

Commodity (a.k.a HS) codes will be required on all declared items across all house consignments

Pre-lodged declarations and amendments to pre-lodged declarations

Departure declarations will be able to be ‘pre-lodged’, essentially tentatively confirmed prior to a departure. The pre-lodged declaration can then be edited as per requirements prior to confirmation via a ‘presentation notification’ declaration. This should be especially useful when awaiting confirmation of details (e.g. trailer numbers) or testing of customs data prior to departure

Office of Incident

Border Force (UK) and Customs officers (Europe) now have an additional role to report incidents via NCTS, which will update your departure declarations with details of said incident. There will NOT a requirement to report this digitally and no functionality will be available via Cargoes

Electronic TAD

Transit accompanying documents (TAD’s) will be able to be presented to customs official (customs offices etc) via electronic means. For example, movements under Simplified Procedures may be moved with a digital copy of the TAD on the driver of the consignments smartphone

Prepare for the Cargoes Update

Cargoes will be updated to reflect new functionality on 21st January.