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There is a belief inside import operations that a guarantee requirement is an accusation. It is not. Certain categories of merchandise carry a published reference price, and when the value declared on the pedimento falls below that reference, the importer has to guarantee the difference before the cargo moves. Nothing in that sequence asks whether the declared value is correct. An importer buying at a genuinely low price, with a clean invoice, an unrelated supplier and a complete file, is under exactly the same obligation as one who is undervaluing on purpose.
That distinction is the whole subject of this article. Being right is not the same as being exempt. The instrument that sits between the two is the cuenta aduanera de garantía, a customs guarantee account, and for an operation that imports at volume it turns a valuation question into a financing question.
On paper, precios estimados are a control against undervaluation. In practice, for the importer whose prices are legitimately below the reference, they are a decision about capital: how much of it gets committed, in what instrument, for how long, and whether anyone in the finance function was told before the first container left origin.
What precios estimados are, and what they are not
Precios estimados are reference prices that the Secretaría de Hacienda y Crédito Público publishes for specific merchandise, expressed in dollars per commercial unit against a list of fracciones arancelarias. The governing instrument is a resolution originally published in the Diario Oficial de la Federación on February 28, 1994, whose anexos have been added to, modified and removed continuously ever since.
The most important thing to understand about a precio estimado is what it does not do. It is not the base gravable. It does not replace the customs value, it does not change the duty calculation, and it does not override the valuation hierarchy of Articles 64 through 78 of the Ley Aduanera. Duties are still paid on the value you declare and can support. The reference price serves one function: it marks the line below which the operation has to be financed differently.
The obligation itself lives in Article 86-A, fracción I of the Ley Aduanera. Anyone making a definitive import who declares a value on the pedimento lower than the precio estimado published by the Secretaría must guarantee, through a deposit in a cuenta aduanera de garantía, the contributions and cuotas compensatorias corresponding to the difference between the declared value and the reference. Article 84-A defines what those accounts are: deposits held in financial institutions authorized by SAT, held against contributions that may become due on the operation.
Which merchandise is listed changes, and that is the part operations most often get wrong. As of this writing, the anexos in force cover used vehicles, footwear, and a group added during 2025 that includes lighting apparatus, furniture, toys, games and recreational goods, per the Agencia Nacional de Aduanas de México. The 2025 additions were themselves revised by resolution published in the DOF on February 10, 2026.
Textile and apparel merchandise is no longer among them. On September 14, 2026 the SHCP published in the DOF the resolution derogating Anexo 4, the list that had carried the textile and confección sector since 2014. It took effect on September 15, 2026. The reasoning stated in the resolution is a shift toward risk analysis, post-clearance audit and customs valuation powers, rather than a pre-clearance financial barrier. ANAM was explicit on the same point: the authority retains full power to verify the value of textile and apparel merchandise whether or not it appeared on a list.
We will come back to what that shift means, because it is the most misread development of the year in this area. First, the money.
What the guarantee actually costs, and for how long
The amount is not arbitrary and it is not a penalty. It equals the contributions and cuotas compensatorias that would be owed on the gap between the declared value and the reference price. A wide gap on a high-volume fracción produces a large number; a narrow gap on a small shipment produces a trivial one. The math is mechanical.
The duration is where the cost actually lives, and it changed recently. Article 86-A previously cancelled the guarantee six months after the importation. The reform to the Ley Aduanera published in the DOF on November 19, 2025 extended that period to twelve months. The clock still stops for cause: if the authority has begun exercising its verification powers, the term extends until a definitive resolution is issued, and if omitted contributions are determined, they are collected against the guarantee itself.
For a finance function, that single change doubled the working capital committed per operation. An importer running monthly shipments under a reference price now carries twelve months of overlapping guarantees on the balance sheet at steady state instead of six. The capital is not lost. When the guarantee is cancelled, the importer recovers the deposited amounts along with the returns generated from the date of deposit. But recovered in a year is not the same as available this quarter, and an operation that budgeted this as a cost rather than as a locked asset will misread its own liquidity.
There is now a second instrument. Article 86-A allows those obligated to guarantee to opt instead for a carta de crédito issued by an institution authorized by the Comisión Nacional Bancaria y de Valores and registered with SAT, under the same terms and periods. The Reglas Generales de Comercio Exterior para 2026 added a corresponding obligation for the issuing banks to report those letters to the authority. For an importer with available credit lines, the choice between committing cash and committing credit capacity is a real one, and it is a treasury decision rather than a customs decision. It is also a decision nobody makes at the port.
Common mistake
Treating the guarantee as an expense of the month of importation. It is a restricted asset with a twelve month release, and the release is conditional on the authority not having opened verification powers. Operations that model it as a cost understate their committed capital and overstate their available cash, every month, cumulatively.
What happens at the border when the deposit is not there
The enforcement mechanism is not a fine. It is the cargo.
Article 158 of the Ley Aduanera provides for the retention of merchandise when, on customs inspection or verification of goods in transport, the document evidencing the deposit in the cuenta aduanera de garantía is not presented in a case where the declared value is below the precio estimado. The authority issues an acta de retención, and the interested party has fifteen days to present the guarantee. Failure to do so within that period carries the most severe consequence in the entire mechanism: the merchandise passes to the property of the Fisco Federal, with no further resolution required.
The declaration side of this runs through the pedimento itself. Apéndice 8 of Anexo 22 of the RGCE carries two identifiers that operations need to read as a matched pair: GA, for the cuenta aduanera de garantía, and EX, for exemption from it. SAT released an advance version of the corresponding update on its portal on September 14, 2026, aligning those identifiers with the derogation of Anexo 4, with publication in the DOF pending at the time of writing. Any customs software that still carries the previous catalog will produce a pedimento that looks complete and declares a superseded value.
The RGCE for 2026 also added a ground for suspension from the Padrón de Importadores tied to this obligation: omitting the cuenta aduanera de garantía or the carta de crédito when required under Article 86-A, or presenting one for less than the amount that should have been guaranteed. That moves the consequence beyond a single shipment. A suspended padrón stops every operation, in every sector, regardless of which one triggered it.
Q: If our price is genuinely below the reference and we can prove it, is there any way to skip the deposit?
Daniel Sánchez, Customs General Manager, Joffroy
A: No. The obligation is triggered by the declared value sitting below the published reference, not by whether that value is right. Proving it is correct is what gets your capital back cleanly at the end of the period and what protects you if verification powers are opened. It is not what gets you out of constituting the guarantee in the first place. The choice you actually have is the instrument: cash deposit or carta de crédito.
Q: How far ahead does this need to be planned?
Daniel Sánchez, Customs General Manager, Joffroy
A: Before the first pedimento of the program, not at the port. Opening the account with an authorized institution, or arranging the letter of credit, and having the constancia in hand takes longer than the transit does. We see the same failure every season: the commercial team closes a purchase at an aggressive price, nobody checks the reference list, and the guarantee becomes a scramble with the cargo already at the crossing.
How to document a low value so the guarantee stays a formality
The guarantee is temporary by design. What determines whether it releases quietly at twelve months or turns into a determination is the file behind the declared value.
Article 59, fracción III of the Ley Aduanera obliges the importer to deliver a manifestación de valor with the elements that allow the customs value to be determined, and Article 81 of the Reglamento de la Ley Aduanera specifies what supports it: the CFDI or equivalent, purchase orders and contracts, documentation of the incrementables of Article 65, credit notes, and anything else needed to determine the value correctly. Since the MVE became mandatory, that declaration is transmitted electronically, operation by operation, and names the valuation method used. The reference price does not change which method applies, and the method is what the file has to defend.
Article 78-A is worth reading alongside it, because it lists the circumstances in which the authority may reject a declared value outright: an importer who does not keep accounting records or make them available, who opposes verification powers, who omits or alters records of foreign trade operations, or who fails to respond to a requerimiento with the documentation proving the value was determined according to law. Read as a list, those are file failures rather than pricing failures. In most of them the declared value may well have been accurate. It was rejected because it could not be demonstrated.
For an importer whose prices are legitimately below a reference, the documentary burden is specific and worth stating plainly. The purchase has to look like what it is: an arm's length transaction with an unrelated supplier, at a price explained by something real. Volume commitments, end of season inventory, a direct relationship with the producer rather than a trading intermediary, a long term supply agreement, materials the buyer supplied, all of these are legitimate reasons for a price to sit below a market reference, and all of them are documentable before anyone asks. The file assembled in advance costs a few hours. The file reconstructed eighteen months later, across an open period rather than a single shipment, costs considerably more than the guarantee ever did.
If your last twelve months include operations under a reference price, the check is narrow enough to run this week. Take the pedimentos that carried the GA identifier, and for each one name the valuation method and point at the document that supports the price. Where you cannot, you have found the exposure while the guarantee is still the only thing at stake.
What the textile exit actually signals
It would be easy to read the derogation of Anexo 4 as deregulation. It is the opposite, and reading it wrong is expensive.
What was removed is a pre-clearance financial filter. What was not removed is the authority's power to determine customs value, to open verification powers, to reject a declared value under Article 78-A, and to do all of it after the merchandise has cleared, entered inventory and been sold. The stated rationale for the change was a move toward risk analysis and post-clearance audit. In practical terms, textile and apparel importers stopped posting guarantees and started carrying the full exposure on their documentation instead, without the twelve month visibility a guarantee used to give them that the operation was on the authority's radar at all.
The second signal is about the lists themselves. In the space of eighteen months, one anexo grew to cover new consumer categories while another was removed entirely. Whatever your operation imports, the fracciones subject to a reference price are not a fact to be memorized once. They are a published list that moves, and the only defensible practice is to check the current text in the DOF before a purchase is committed, not after the pedimento is transmitted.
The guarantee has always been the cheapest part of this. It is money you get back, with its returns, on a known schedule. What you do not get back is a value determination on an operation you could have documented for the cost of a morning. Whether or not your merchandise is on a list today, the discipline is the same: know the reference, know your method, and hold the file that connects them.
Note: the fracciones subject to precios estimados, the anexos in force, and the applicable identifiers must be verified against the current publication in the DOF before each operation is transmitted.
If you want that reviewed against your current operations before the authority does it for you, talk to a Joffroy expert.
TRADE. UNDER CONTROL.
