Rule one: temporary admission is genuinely temporary
A vehicle can enter Morocco under temporary admission for a limited period without duty being paid. Three months is the figure to plan around. It is a useful arrangement for a visit or a transitional period, and it is what most people are unknowingly relying on when they drive in.
What it is not is a way to keep a foreign-plated car indefinitely. At the end of the period the vehicle has to leave the country or be formally imported with the duties that entails. Treating temporary admission as a permanent solution is how people end up with a car they can neither drive nor sell.
Rule two: older vehicles cannot be imported at all
This is the rule that ends most conversations. Vehicles beyond a certain age — five years is the threshold to work with — are prohibited from importation into Morocco.
It is worth reading that carefully, because it is absolute rather than expensive. There is no duty rate that makes an older car importable. If the vehicle you were planning to bring is over the threshold, the question is not how much it will cost; the answer is that it cannot come.
What this means in practice for most people
Combine the two rules and a pattern emerges. A newer car may be worth importing, if its value justifies the shipping and the duty. An older car — which is to say, the car most people actually own by the time they emigrate — cannot come at all.
So the usual outcome is straightforward: sell before you leave, buy locally after you arrive. It feels like a loss until you price the alternative, and there is a functioning second-hand market in Casablanca, Rabat and Marrakech.
If you do decide to import
A vehicle is a separate file from your household goods, with its own documents and its own timetable. It is not a line on your furniture inventory and it should not be planned as one.
Start it early and independently. The single most common failure is treating the car as an afterthought to a household move and discovering, once the container has already sailed, that the vehicle needed a process of its own.
- Registration document and proof of ownership
- Purchase invoice, for the customs valuation
- Your own residence documents for Morocco
- Confirmation the vehicle sits inside the age limit