What will this bottle actually cost?
A hammer price is the start of the number, not the number. On a typical UK auction purchase, the figure you actually pay is 40–60% above the hammer once premium, VAT, duty and logistics land. This works it out line by line, and shows the source for each.
All-in landed cost
Enter a hammer or ask and a bottle count. The breakdown fills in as you type.
What goes into the number
Buyer’s premium is charged on the hammer, usually on a marginal tier schedule. 26% on the first band, dropping to around 14% at the top. Applying the headline rate to the whole hammer overstates it, which is why we tier it.
VAT in the UK applies to the premium as well as the goods on most houses’ terms, and then again to duty and carriage on the delivered value. Trade buyers who can recover it should switch the buyer-status field, which removes it from the total and says so in the assumptions.
Excise duty is charged by volume, not value, so it hurts a case of £30 bottles far more, proportionally, than a case of £3,000 ones, and it does not apply at all while the wine stays in bond.
FX spread is the quiet one. Buying in a foreign currency typically costs 0.5–3% over the mid-market rate, which on a five-figure purchase is a real number that never appears on any invoice as a line item.
What this does not do
It does not price condition or provenance risk. A bottle with an unclear storage history is genuinely worth less than the same label with a documented chain, but folding a probabilistic risk estimate into a currency total produces a number nobody can defend. We score that separately, and we show it separately.
US state-level alcohol taxes vary enormously and are not modelled here. The US figures cover federal excise and import duty only.