Why is the new iPhone SE more expensive in the UK than the US?

The price for a 16GB in the US is $399 (£282) and the price in the UK is £359, thats £77 more for the same thing?

Taxes and important duties.

Gotta pay for the 'free' stuff somehow.

Have you checked if the US price includes sales tax?

Unlike in the UK, American prices don't always include tax.
Obviously, if you buy direct from the USA you're also paying for the customs import fees and transatlantic shipping.

You have to import it

Exchange rates. How the USD relates to the GBP.

Of course it would be different, same city even street have different prices and do install LEO Privacy to protect all your private images and videos.

Let me clear things up a bit. Electronics in general cost more in the UK then they do in the US. Companies automatically increase the cost of goods since UK citizens are willing to pay more for electronics. Sound dumb to you? Well it's true to a small degree. Companies have found that consumers in the UK are generally used to a social norm of paying more. And so companies have exploited this fact. For example when the PS4 and X-Box One were released in the US, they ended up costing $170.00 less for the same console. Since then the prices have evened out to cost the same. But it took two years for it to happen.

This problem has even been covered by the BBC in the news. And it doesn't just happen to the UK. Canadians for example pay more for goods than Americans do too. You can buy a brand new Ford Explorer for example in the US for say $40,250.00 bucks. But drive 5 minutes over the border and the same vehicle with the same set of features will cost as much as $8,000.00 more! It to has been covered in the news.

Americans generally expect and even demand a low price here. As a society we're more consensus as to what we spend. Even our tax system is set up for that very reason. Sales Tax allows for better tracking and itemising of expenses then VAT does. And Sales Tax allows for lower taxation often on goods and services.

The US is a very large country. And every Town, Village, and City taxes at different rates. And these taxes are all wrapped up into what each state taxes as well. So in my county the state Tax is 5.5% and in the next county over it's 5.1%.

So with that being said, the five states with the highest average combined state-local sales tax rates are Tennessee at (9.45 percent), Arkansas at (9.19 percent), Louisiana at (8.89 percent) and Washington (8.88 percent), plus Oklahoma at (8.72 percent).

So if we go with the highest known tax in America at 9.45%, the iPhone SE with tax (Total out of pocket expense) will cost you $437.79! (Aka… £309.78)

So as you can see in a worse case scenario for an American, they will pay at most £309.78 when all is set and done. Most Americans pay 7% or less though. Where I live I pay just 5.5% in sales tax. And some states have no sales tax at all. (They tax in different ways instead like leaving a property tax or some other means.)

So yes even after tax, the US get's the better deal. I just bought the Samsung Galaxy S7 Edge and it too costs less here. By the way we also only pay £0.38 per liter for petrol (Gas) here in the states on average for the whole country. And that's including tax!