Section 301 tariffs in 2026

Section 301 of the Trade Act of 1974, codified at 19 U.S.C. 2411, lets the United States Trade Representative act against a foreign practice it has found unreasonable or discriminatory. The China action opened in 2017 and the duties began in 2018. It is the one importers meet every week, and almost nobody meets it on its own.

The lists are still the base layer

The duties went on in tranches. List 1 and List 2 took 25 percent on machinery, electronics and industrial inputs. List 3 covered roughly $200 billion of goods, opened at 10 percent and moved to 25 percent in 2019. List 4A began at 15 percent and was cut to 7.5 percent in early 2020. List 4B was announced and never took effect. None of that structure has been withdrawn. Everything built since was stacked on top of it.

The statutory review changed the shape, not the base

19 U.S.C. 2417 requires USTR to review an action four years in. That review kept the existing lists and added increases on strategic sectors, phased across separate effective dates rather than imposed at once: electric vehicles, lithium-ion batteries and battery parts, critical minerals, solar cells, semiconductors, ship-to-shore cranes, and a group of medical goods including syringes, needles and gloves.

The staging is the part that catches people. The rate that governs your shipment is the rate in force on the date of entry, not the date of the purchase order and not the date the vessel sailed. For goods sitting in a bonded warehouse it is the date of withdrawal for consumption, under 19 U.S.C. 1315(a). We check the effective date against the entry date before we file, because a rate that stepped up while the box was on the water is a real event and not a rounding error.

What it looks like on the 7501

A Section 301 duty is not an adjustment to your ordinary rate. It is a separate line. The entry summary, CBP Form 7501, carries a Chapter 99 subheading from the 9903.88 series immediately above the Chapter 1 to 97 line that actually describes the goods, and the additional duty is computed on the same entered value. That is why one commodity can occupy three lines. Get the line structure wrong and the filing will be accepted, the duty will be wrong, and CBP will correct it later with interest.

Origin decides it, and origin is not the port of loading

Section 301 follows country of origin. A container that leaves Ho Chi Minh City can still be Chinese for tariff purposes. The test for non-preferential origin is substantial transformation: whether the processing in the second country produced a new and different article with a distinct name, character and use. Final assembly from a Chinese kit rarely clears that bar, and packaging, labelling and simple finishing never do.

If your supply chain moved and you want certainty rather than an opinion, you can request a binding ruling from CBP under 19 CFR part 177 before you commit to the sourcing. That is a few weeks of waiting against an exposure that runs for the life of the programme.

Exclusions, and getting the money back

USTR grants exclusions by Federal Register notice. Some are written to a specific ten-digit HTSUS number. Others are written to a product description narrower than the tariff line, which means two importers filing the same HTS can get different answers, and the description is what has to match. An exclusion is claimed with its own Chapter 99 number alongside the 301 number.

Two practical points. Exclusions expire and extensions are not automatic, so a claim that was correct last quarter can be wrong this quarter. And when relief lands after you have already paid, the duty does not come back on its own. Before liquidation you recover it with a post summary correction. After liquidation you have 180 days to file a protest under 19 U.S.C. 1514. Miss both windows and the money is gone, whatever the notice said.

Stacking

Section 301 now sits at the bottom of a pile. Above it: Section 232 duties on steel, aluminium and their derivative articles, assessed on the value of the metal content and traced by melt-and-pour origin rather than by where the finished article was made; tariffs imposed under the International Emergency Economic Powers Act, whose scope and legal status have both moved more than once; and, where an order reaches the goods, antidumping and countervailing deposits, which are assessed separately and can be larger than everything else combined.

Some of these programmes were deliberately made mutually exclusive so a single article does not take two of them, and that ordering has itself been amended. We are not going to print a headline percentage on this page, because the honest answer for any shipment is a calculation on that shipment's classification, origin and entry date.

How we handle it

Before the first entry we put the classification, the origin basis and every Chapter 99 line in writing, and we give you a landed duty figure built from those. If origin looks arguable we say so rather than filing and hoping. If a rate steps up between booking and arrival you hear it from us before the entry goes in.

Send a commercial invoice and the factory details and we will work the number through with you: contact. To have us file, start with a power of attorney.