HSN Code for Furniture: Chapter 94 Explained

Furniture sits in Chapter 94 of the Customs Tariff, and specifically under heading 9403, "other furniture and parts thereof", for tables, desks, cupboards, wardrobes, beds and similar items. Seats — chairs, sofas, stools and benches — have their own heading, 9401, separate from the rest of the furniture range. Between those two headings, and a handful of neighbouring ones for bedding, lamps and prefabricated buildings, Chapter 94 covers almost everything a furniture retailer, manufacturer or office fit-out contractor invoices.

Chapter 94 and why it classifies by function, not material

Most of the tariff is organised around what a thing is made of: wood in Chapter 44, iron and steel articles in Chapter 73, plastics in Chapter 39. Chapter 94 breaks that pattern. It groups furniture, seating, bedding, lamps and prefabricated buildings by the function the article performs, regardless of the material it is made from. A dining chair made of teak, a stacking chair made of powder-coated steel and a garden chair moulded in polypropylene are all seats, and all three are classified under heading 9401. None of them is an "article of wood", an "article of iron or steel" or an "article of plastic" for tariff purposes, even though each is unmistakably made of one of those materials.

That single fact — function first, material second — is the most useful thing to know about this chapter, and it is where most people coming from a material-first mindset get tripped up. If you are new to how the tariff hierarchy of chapters, headings and sub-headings works in general, our explainer on how HSN codes work is a useful starting point before you go deeper into Chapter 94 specifically.

Material does not disappear from the picture entirely; it simply moves down a level. Within heading 9403, once an article is confirmed to be "other furniture", the tariff then splits it by material at the sub-heading level: furniture of metal, furniture of wood, furniture of plastics, and furniture of other materials such as cane, osier, bamboo or similar material. So a wooden wardrobe and a steel wardrobe are both 9403 at the heading level, but sit in different sub-headings and different eight-digit codes underneath it. This is the level at which most furniture reporting actually happens, because it is the level the rate notifications and the GSTR-1 validation operate at.

Walking the headings: 9401 to 9406

Chapter 94 has six headings that matter in practice. Seats and other furniture carry the bulk of the volume, but the surrounding headings for bedding, lighting and prefabricated structures are worth knowing because they are easy to misplace against 9403 by habit.

Notice that 9401 and 9403 are defined against each other: anything that qualifies as a seat goes to 9401, and "other furniture" in 9403 is, by definition, furniture that is not a seat. Beds are a useful example of how that boundary is drawn — an ordinary bed frame is 9403, but a seat that is also convertible into a bed, such as certain sofa-beds, is classified with the seats under 9401 rather than with the rest of the bed frames, because the heading text for 9401 explicitly extends to seats convertible into beds.

What actually counts as "furniture"

The chapter notes to Chapter 94 define furniture narrowly enough that several everyday items people expect to find here are actually excluded. For tariff purposes, Chapter 94 is limited to movable articles designed for placing on the floor or ground — chairs, tables, cupboards, beds and the like — together with a defined set of items designed to be hung, fixed to the wall or resting on one another, such as cupboards, bookcases and shelf units. That wording matters more than it looks.

Fitted or built-in units that become part of the fabric of a building, rather than movable articles placed in it, fall outside the chapter altogether and are treated as part of the structure. Safes, whether free-standing or built in, are excluded from Chapter 94 and classified separately in Chapter 83. Mirrors designed for placing on the floor or hanging are excluded and fall under Chapter 70 with other glass articles, and articles of ceramic ware — ornamental or functional pieces that look like furnishings but are made of pottery or porcelain — belong in Chapter 69, not Chapter 94. None of these exclusions is obvious from a showroom floor, which is exactly why they cause classification disputes.

Mattresses and bedding: a common item-master error

Mattresses are furniture in every commercial sense, but they are not classified under 9403 with the rest of the furniture range. They sit under heading 9404, "mattress supports; articles of bedding and similar furnishing", together with quilts, duvets, pillows and cushions that are fitted with springs, stuffed or internally fitted. Within 9404 the tariff draws its own material-based split — spring interior mattresses, mattresses of cellular rubber or plastics, and other types of mattress each occupy separate sub-headings — so the eight-digit code still depends on construction, just under a different four-digit heading from the rest of the furniture catalogue.

Parts, fittings and where hardware breaks off

Parts of furniture generally stay within the same heading as the finished article — a table leg, a cupboard door or a chair frame supplied as a spare part is still classified under 9401 or 9403, provided it is identifiable as a part of a specific piece of furniture rather than a generic component. That condition is the important one. Hinges, handles, castors, drawer slides and similar base metal mountings and fittings of a kind used on furniture are not treated as furniture parts for this purpose; they fall under Chapter 83, which covers base metal mountings, fittings and similar articles generally, whether they end up on a door, a cabinet or a piece of furniture. A furniture manufacturer's purchase register will usually carry both Chapter 94 and Chapter 83 codes side by side for this reason. For more on how that hardware chapter is structured, see our guide to the HSN code for hardware items.

Furniture versus works contract

The distinction that carries the most tax consequence in this category is not between one heading and another within Chapter 94 — it is the distinction between a supply of goods and a supply of service. Furniture that is manufactured off-site, delivered as a finished, movable article and simply placed in a room is a straightforward supply of goods, invoiced under the relevant HSN code from Chapter 94. A modular kitchen, a fitted wardrobe or a reception counter that is fabricated to the specific dimensions of a site, assembled in place and permanently fixed to the building is typically a different kind of supply altogether: a works contract, which under GST is a composite supply treated as a supply of service and invoiced under a Service Accounting Code rather than an HSN code.

This distinction matters far more than the four-digit code itself, because it changes the nature of the supply, the place-of-supply rules that apply, and potentially the rate and the credit position. Two businesses selling what looks, to a customer, like the same modular kitchen can have entirely different invoicing obligations depending on whether the unit was delivered as loose, movable furniture or fabricated and fixed on site as part of the building. Our detailed guide to the HSN code for works contract covers how that composite supply is identified and coded.

Where the supply is genuinely loose furniture and the delivery and assembly at the customer's premises is merely ancillary to the goods — for instance, a wardrobe supplied flat-packed with on-site assembly included in the price — the transaction is usually still treated as a composite supply of goods, with the assembly service taking the tax treatment of the principal supply of furniture. The line between that and a works contract is whether the furniture remains a movable article that could, in principle, be dismantled and moved, or whether it has become part of the building's fixed fabric.

A quick-reference map of common furniture items

The table below maps the items a typical furniture retailer or manufacturer carries against the heading they fall under, as a starting point for building or auditing an item master.

Reporting digits, item masters and second-hand furniture

How many digits of the HSN code you must show on an invoice depends on your aggregate annual turnover rather than on the product category, and the requirement has been revised more than once, so it is worth confirming the current threshold rather than relying on whatever your billing software was set up with originally. Our guide to HSN code digits and turnover rules sets out how the tiers work.

Furniture retailers in particular tend to carry unusually long item masters, because a single showroom catalogue can span chairs, sofas, tables, wardrobes, beds and mattresses across several materials and finishes, each needing its own eight-digit code. In practice, most of that reporting volume clusters within the material-based sub-headings under 9403, since that heading covers the widest range of finished products. If you are auditing an existing catalogue rather than building one from scratch, our HSN code list with GST rates and our walkthrough of how to search an HSN code are both useful for checking codes line by line rather than trusting a legacy master.

Second-hand furniture is worth a brief mention because it is common in this trade: a dealer buying and reselling used furniture may be eligible to apply the margin scheme, under which tax is computed only on the margin between the purchase and sale price rather than on the full sale value, subject to the conditions set out for that scheme. The classification of the furniture itself under Chapter 94 does not change because it is second-hand — only the value on which tax is computed does. Furniture that is outsourced for finishing, upholstery or assembly work to a job worker follows its own set of rules for how the movement and the job work service are coded, which our HSN code for job work guide covers separately.

As with any category where rates move with policy changes, this article deliberately describes the structure of Chapter 94 rather than quoting a current GST rate percentage. Confirm the applicable rate line for your specific eight-digit code against the current notification on the CBIC GST portal before configuring it in a rate master.

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