HSN Code for Mobile Phones, Chargers and Accessories

The phone itself: heading 8517

Heading 8517 sits in Chapter 85, the chapter for electrical machinery and equipment, and its wording covers telephone sets, including telephones for cellular networks or for other wireless networks, along with other apparatus for the transmission or reception of voice, images or other data. A smartphone is a telephone set for cellular networks, so it falls squarely within 8517, and so does a basic feature phone with no data capability beyond calls and text. The eight-digit sub-classification narrows this by device type, but the four-digit heading is settled and rarely disputed. If you have not read how the chapter, heading and sub-heading structure works more generally, our explainer on how HSN codes work is a useful place to start before the rest of this article.

What trips people up is not the phone. It is everything that arrives in the same box, or is offered alongside it on the same product page, or is bundled into the same invoice line. Each of those items is a separate good with its own heading, and the tariff does not care that a customer perceives them as one purchase.

The accessory map: what goes where, and why

The reasoning behind each accessory's classification follows the same underlying logic every time: the Harmonised System classifies goods by what they are and what they are made of, not by what device they are sold next to. A charger is a power-conversion device whether or not a phone is nearby, so it sits with other power-conversion devices. A glass screen protector is a worked glass article whether or not it is cut to fit a particular phone model, so it sits with other worked glass. Once you apply that test item by item, the table below follows almost automatically.

The charger deserves a longer note because it has genuinely been contested. For years, sellers argued that a charger sold with a phone should be treated as part of the phone under 8517, since a phone is not much use without one. That argument does not survive contact with the tariff's own structure: 8504 exists precisely to capture static converters as goods in their own right, and a charger meets that description regardless of what it charges. A charger sold separately — on its own shelf, on its own product listing, to a customer who already owns a phone — is unambiguously 8504. The only place the phone's classification can pull a charger along with it is inside a genuine retail set, which is a narrower rule than most sellers assume, and is the subject of the next section.

Retail sets and the essential-character rule

The relevant principle here is General Rule of Interpretation 3(b): goods put up in a set for retail sale, consisting of products classifiable under different headings, are classified as if they consisted of the component that gives the set its essential character. A boxed phone that ships with an in-box charger and a data cable is a retail set in exactly this sense — a customer buys it as one item, in one box, priced as one unit, and no reasonable person would say they bought a charger that happened to include a phone. The phone is what gives the set its essential character, so the whole set is classified under 8517.

That is a narrow, specific rule, and it does not generalise the way sellers often want it to. The same charger sold as a standalone SKU, even by the same seller, even in the same product category, reverts to 8504 the instant it is not part of a retail set with the phone. The rule attaches to the set, not to the item.

Parts versus accessories

A related but distinct question is how to classify components of the phone itself — a replacement display assembly, a motherboard, a camera module — as opposed to accessories that merely attach to it. Section XVI of the tariff, which covers Chapters 84 and 85, carries a note dealing with exactly this: a part which is itself a good described by a heading in Chapter 84 or 85 is classified in that heading, in its own right, rather than as a part of whatever machine it is destined for. Parts that are specific to a particular type of machine and are not separately described elsewhere generally follow that machine's heading instead, which for phones means a sub-heading under 8517 covering parts of telephone sets — display assemblies, camera modules, motherboards and similar components built specifically for a handset.

This is also the underlying reason a charger is never treated as "part of a phone" for classification purposes: a charger is a static converter described by its own heading (8504), so Note 2 routes it there regardless of the fact that a phone cannot be charged without one. Being functionally necessary to a device is not the same as being a part of it, in tariff terms.

Composite supply, mixed supply and bundled offers

Tariff classification decides which HSN code a good carries. It does not, by itself, decide how a bundled offer is taxed under GST — that is a separate question governed by the composite and mixed supply rules, and it can produce a different practical outcome even when the underlying classification of each item is settled. A composite supply is a bundle of goods or services that are naturally supplied together in the ordinary course of business, with one principal supply, and it is taxed at the rate applicable to that principal supply. A mixed supply is a bundle of otherwise independent items sold together for a single price where no single item is the natural principal, and it is taxed at the highest rate among the items in the bundle.

A phone sold in its retail box with an in-box charger and cable is ordinarily a straightforward composite supply with the phone as the principal item. A promotional bundle — say, a phone plus a pair of earphones offered as a limited-time combo, priced and marketed as a package but not naturally sold together as a matter of trade practice — is a harder call, and depending on the facts can be treated as a mixed supply instead, with different rate consequences. Exchange offers and phone-plus-plan bundles raise the same kind of question. None of this changes what heading each physical item sits under; it changes how the combined offer is taxed, and it is worth getting a firm view on before you design a promotional SKU rather than after a return has already been filed.

What this means for e-commerce listings

Marketplace and own-storefront listings generally require an HSN code per SKU, not per order, which means a single "smartphone" product page can sit behind several distinct codes once you count the charger, the cable, the optional earphones and the case as separate line items in your catalogue — even where they are all delivered in one shipment. Getting this right matters most in three places: the item master, where each accessory needs its own correctly assigned code rather than inheriting the phone's; the invoice, where a bundled retail set can legitimately show one code while an accessory add-on at checkout should show its own; and the return filing, where the number of digits you must report depends on your aggregate turnover — see our guide on HSN digit requirements by turnover for how that threshold works. If you are still building out a catalogue and are not confident which code applies to a given accessory, our guide on how to search for an HSN code and our broader HSN code list are both useful starting points, and the general obligations that apply to online sellers are covered in our guide to GST for e-commerce sellers. If your catalogue also spans other electronics categories, our posts on the HSN code for computers and laptops and the HSN code for electrical items follow the same material-first logic, as does our note on the HSN code for hardware items for tools and fittings sold through the same channels.

Exchange offers and refurbished phones

Two situations specific to phones are worth flagging separately because they affect valuation rather than classification. The first is the exchange offer, where a customer trades in an old phone against the price of a new one. The classification of the new phone does not change, but the value of supply for GST purposes is the full price of the new phone before the trade-in adjustment, not the net amount the customer actually pays. Structuring the transaction as a discount against the trade-in value, rather than correctly valuing the two legs, is a recurring error in exchange-offer retailing.

The second is the refurbished phone, sold by a dealer who buys used handsets and resells them after reconditioning. Refurbished phones still fall under 8517 like any other phone; what can differ is the valuation mechanism available to the seller, since a margin scheme — taxing only the dealer's margin rather than the full sale value — is available in some circumstances for dealers in second-hand goods. Whether that scheme applies to a given refurbishment business, and on what conditions, is a specific enough question that it is worth confirming against the current notification rather than assuming it from general practice.

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