How Much Import Duty From China? 2026 Rates and How to Calculate Them

Rates verified against primary sources on 26 August 2026. Duty rates change without much warning — three separate US tariff programmes changed status in the seven months before this article was written. Every rate below carries the schedule or notice it came from so you can re-check it before you quote.

You have a supplier quote in front of you, a margin to protect, and a spreadsheet cell that needs a number. So you search for the duty rate on Chinese goods, and you get told it is about a third. You budget on that, the entry clears, and the bill is half as much again as you planned. The order that looked like it had room in it does not.

That happens because “about a third” is an average across an entire trade flow, and nobody imports the average. What you actually pay is a stack: for Chinese-origin goods entering the United States today, four separate charges land on the same customs value, each authorised by a different instrument, each with its own rate and its own tariff heading. Two of them changed this year. Two others that were on quotes as recently as July are not collected at all any more — and pages still listing them are why some importers are now over-accruing instead of under.

So this page does something different from the six results above it. You get the live stack with the tariff heading behind every layer, two worked calculations you can copy straight into that spreadsheet, and a five-minute routine for checking any of it — including checking us — against the official schedule. What you will not get is a single percentage, because the single percentage is precisely what goes stale and costs you the margin.

The Honest Answer: There Is No Single Rate, There Are Four Layers

The reason nobody can give you a percentage is that duty is not assessed on shipments. It is assessed on tariff lines. Two cartons on the same pallet, from the same supplier, on the same invoice, can carry rates that differ by twenty points, because they classify to different subheadings of the tariff schedule.

So the question “how much import duty from China” only becomes answerable once you have two things in front of you: a defensible HS classification for each product, and a customs value. Without those you are not computing duty, you are guessing at an average.

What actually appears on a US entry summary

For Chinese-origin goods entering the United States, four charges stack onto the same customs value:

• The base MFN rate — from the General column of your product’s own subheading in the Harmonized Tariff Schedule of the United States. China holds normal trade relations status, so it takes this column rather than the punitive Column 2.
• Section 301 technology-transfer duties — the 2018 trade-war lists, still in force, reported under Chapter 99 headings.
• Section 301 forced-labour duties — a separate and much newer action, effective 24 July 2026.
• Processing fees — the Merchandise Processing Fee, and on ocean freight the Harbor Maintenance Fee.

These are cumulative, not alternatives. A product on List 3 pays its MFN rate y 25% y 12.5%. That is how a good with a modest 7% base rate ends up costing forty-something percent of its invoice value at the border, which is the number that surprises people who budgeted from a blog post.

Worth being precise about the vocabulary, because the two words get used interchangeably and they are not the same instrument: we covered the distinction and where each term legitimately belongs in import duty vs tariff. This article assumes you already know which is which and want the arithmetic.

The Live Duty Stack on Chinese Goods, With Every Heading Number

Below is what is actually being charged, layer by layer, with the tariff heading that carries it. The heading numbers matter more than the percentages: percentages get quoted second-hand and go stale, but a heading number is something you can paste into the official schedule and confirm in twenty seconds.

Consolidating several Yiwu suppliers into a single entry changes what you pay in fees, not in duty: one entry means one $33.58 MPF floor instead of one per supplier shipment. That is the fee mechanics behind our free consolidation service — multiple suppliers into one warehouse, bulky packaging stripped to cut CBM, one bill of lading — and you can ask how your own consolidation would be entered if you are running several suppliers onto one shipment.

Layer one: your base rate is probably not what you assumed

The spread here is wider than most importers expect, and it is the layer you have the most legitimate influence over, because it follows from classification. Verified against the live USITC schedule on 26 August 2026:

A toy is duty-free at the base layer and a textile backpack is not. That is a seventeen-point swing on the same invoice, decided entirely by classification — which is why getting the code right before you get a quote matters more than negotiating the freight. Our guide to HS codes for Yiwu goods covers how the classification is built.

Layer two: the trade-war lists are still running

The Section 301 technology-transfer duties from 2018 were never removed. Lists 1, 2 and 3 carry an additional 25%, reported under headings 9903.88.01, 9903.88.02 and 9903.88.03; List 4A carries 7.5% under 9903.88.15. Each heading’s duty column on the live schedule reads, literally, “the duty provided in the applicable subheading plus 25%” — which is the schedule telling you in its own words that this is additive.

There is a live set of product exclusions. Goods covered by headings 9903.88.69 and 9903.88.70 take the applicable subheading’s duty only, with no Section 301 add-on, and the current extension runs through 9 November 2026. That date is worth diarising: if your product sits on an exclusion and the extension lapses, your landed cost moves 25 points overnight with no change to anything you control.

Layer three: the newest duty, and the heading almost nobody quotes correctly

On 24 July 2026 a second and entirely separate Section 301 action took effect, arising from investigations into 60 economies over forced-labour import prohibitions. Products of China carry an additional 12.5% under heading 9903.05.31.

The rate is not arbitrary and it is worth understanding why China landed at the higher tier. The action sets 10% for economies that have a prohibition but do not yet enforce it, or that made commitments in a reciprocal-trade agreement — a named list including Canada, Mexico, India, Indonesia, Malaysia, Vietnam’s neighbours in the region, and the United Kingdom. The 12.5% rate is the residual for everyone else. China is not on the 10% list, so it takes the residual rate.

There is also an in-transit rule that mattered a great deal in late July and still matters for anything that shipped around then: goods loaded onto a vessel and in transit before 12:01 a.m. eastern time on 24 July 2026, and entered before 12:01 a.m. on 28 July 2026, escape the new duty. If you have an entry from that window being reconciled, it is worth checking which side of the line it fell.

Layer four: the fees that are not duty

The Merchandise Processing Fee runs at 0.3464% of value, but the floor and ceiling are what actually bite. For fiscal year 2026 the minimum is $33.58 and the maximum $651.50 per formal entry. Because of that floor, every consignment below roughly $9,694 in value pays the same $33.58 — so on a small shipment the MPF is effectively a flat charge, and splitting one order into three entries triples it. The Harbor Maintenance Fee adds 0.125% on ocean freight and does not apply to air.

Two further charges exist that the four-layer stack above deliberately does not cover, because neither applies to most Yiwu consumer goods and both need product-specific checking rather than a headline rate.

Section 232 duties attach to steel, aluminium and an expanding list of derivative articles. If your product has significant metal content, ask your broker whether a derivative listing catches it — the answer changes by component and the lists are amended frequently. Anti-dumping and countervailing duties are narrower still: they attach to specific products from specific producers, are set case by case, and can run to several hundred percent.

Neither has a general China rate that anyone can quote you, which is precisely why a page offering one blended percentage cannot be right.

Broker charges sit on top of all of this and are not government fees at all — they are commercial pricing, typically somewhere around $100–200 for a single formal entry, though that is an estimate rather than a published rate and varies widely by broker and complexity. The government side is fixed and identical everywhere; the broker side is not. We broke the whole invoice down line by line in customs clearance fees, including which lines are negotiable.

What You Are No Longer Paying, and the Exact Date Each One Died

This is the section most likely to save you money today, because several pages ranking on page one for this exact question still list charges that are no longer collected. If you built a landed-cost model earlier this year, it is probably over-accruing.

IEEPA tariffs: collection ended 24 February 2026

On 20 February 2026 the Supreme Court held that the International Emergency Economic Powers Act does not authorise the President to impose tariffs. Collection of IEEPA-based tariffs — the “reciprocal” baseline and the fentanyl-related country measures — ended on 24 February 2026. A refund process exists for entries already liquidated, but it is neither automatic nor fast, and it is a separate exercise from pricing your next order.

The Section 122 surcharge: expired 24 July 2026

A 10% global surcharge was imposed under Section 122 of the Trade Act of 1974 with effect from 24 February 2026. Section 122 is a balance-of-payments provision and it is self-limiting: the statute caps such a surcharge at 15% ad valorem and, critically, at 150 days. Those 150 days ran out on 24 July 2026 and the surcharge lapsed by operation of law.

The timing is what catches people. The forced-labour Section 301 duty took effect the same day the Section 122 surcharge expired. A quote prepared in early July that carried a 10% Section 122 line, updated in August by adding 12.5% for the new action without removing the expired one, is now 10 points too high — and it will look plausible to everyone who reviews it.

What did not go away

Section 301 and Section 232 rest on entirely different statutes and were not at issue in the IEEPA litigation. Both remain in force. Anyone telling you the Supreme Court “struck down the China tariffs” has conflated two separate things: the trade-war Section 301 duties on Chinese goods are alive, collected, and account for the largest single layer in the stack above.

Neutral background on reading HTS codes and duty columns (Shipping Solutions). The layer structure it describes is the same one tabulated above; the specific China rates in this article are current as of 26 August 2026.

The $800 Rule Is Gone, and the $2,500 Line Is Not the Same Line

Two dollar thresholds get conflated constantly, and they do completely different jobs. One decides whether you pay duty at all. The other decides what kind of entry you file and whether you need a bond.

The $800 de minimis exemption is suspended indefinitely

Under a CBP interim final rule effective 24 June 2026, the de minimis administrative exemption for merchandise valued at $800 or less is indefinitely suspended for shipments arriving by every mode other than the international postal network. A companion rule covers postal shipments.

In practice this ends the small-parcel workaround entirely. Consignments that used to clear duty-free and with minimal formality now require formal or informal entry procedures and pay the full stack described above. If your model was built on splitting orders into sub-$800 parcels, that model no longer exists, and it has not existed since June.

Two narrow carve-outs survive and are worth knowing: bona fide gifts, and personal or household articles accompanying a traveller. Neither is a commercial import channel, and treating them as one is the kind of thing that turns a duty question into an enforcement question.

The $2,500 line is about entry type, not duty

Formal entry procedures generally apply to shipments valued above $2,500. Informal entry is authorised at $2,500 or less, and is less burdensome — though CBP can require formal entry for any merchandise where it considers it necessary.

The practical consequence is about bonds and brokers, not about rates. A first-time importer bringing in a $2,000 test order files an informal entry and pays a lower MPF; the same importer scaling to $18,000 crosses into formal entry, needs a customs bond, and in practice needs a broker. The duty rate does not change across that line. What changes is the machinery, the paperwork, and the fixed cost of clearing.

Duty Is Charged on a Different Number Depending on Where It Lands

Here is the thing that causes two importers of an identical carton to compute different duty and each conclude the other has made an error. They are both right. The rate is applied to a different base.

The United States values on the goods alone

US customs value is, for most transactions, the transaction value — the price actually paid or payable for the goods when sold for export to the United States, as defined at 19 U.S.C. 1401a. International freight and insurance sit outside that figure. In practice this means US duty behaves as though it were assessed on an FOB basis: your ocean freight does not attract duty.

The UK and EU value on the landed cost

The UK assesses customs duty on a value that includes transport and insurance to the border — a CIF-style base. Then import VAT is charged on top, and its base includes the duty you just calculated. VAT is charged on duty, not alongside it.

That ordering matters more than the duty rate itself. A UK importer with a modest 6% duty rate and 20% VAT will hand over far more cash at the border than a US importer facing 44% in duty on a smaller base — the difference being that the UK importer’s VAT is generally recoverable and the US importer’s duty never is. The cash requirement and the eventual cost are two different questions, and conflating them is how businesses run out of working capital while remaining profitable on paper.

Because the base differs, the Incoterm you agree with your supplier changes your duty bill in the UK and does not change it in the US. If you are buying EXW and adding your own freight, that freight enters the UK duty base. We covered how each term shifts the cost boundary in our guide to EXW, FOB and DDP for Yiwu sourcing.

Worked Example: One Yiwu Carton, Landed in the US

Numbers you can reproduce. The consignment: made-up textile articles — the catch-all classification a great deal of Yiwu soft goods lands in — under HTSUS 6307.90.98, invoice value $18,400, shipped ocean LCL, product on Section 301 List 3.

Forty-five percent of the invoice, on a product whose “duty rate” — if you looked up only the base rate, as most people do — is 7%. The base rate contributes less than a sixth of what you actually pay. This is why the layer structure is not pedantry: get it wrong and you have mispriced by a factor of six.

How the answer moves on a smaller consignment

Drop the same goods to a $3,200 order and the duty falls proportionally to $1,424, but the MPF does not fall to $11.08 — it hits the $33.58 floor. That floor applies to every entry below roughly $9,694 in value. Split a $9,000 order across three entries to smooth cash flow and you pay $100.74 in MPF instead of $33.58, for no benefit whatsoever. At the other end, the $651.50 ceiling means MPF stops growing above about $188,077 in value, so on a full container the fee is a rounding error and the duty is everything.

One line above is an estimate rather than a rate, and it is deliberately not in the table: the broker’s own entry fee. Government charges are fixed and identical at every broker; the commercial ones are not, which is exactly why they belong in a separate conversation from this arithmetic.

The Same Carton, Landed in the UK

Same goods, same supplier, same $18,400 invoice — landed in Britain instead. Add $1,150 of ocean freight and $95 of insurance, because unlike the US, the UK counts them.

The equivalent UK commodity code is 6307909899, which carries a third-country duty of 6.00% and standard-rate import VAT of 20.0%, both read from HMRC’s own UK Integrated Online Tariff on 26 August 2026.

Two observations an importer can use. First, the duty itself is $1,178.70 against $8,188.00 in the US — the punitive layers are a US-specific phenomenon and do not follow the goods to Britain. Second, the cash demand at the UK border is dominated by VAT, which a VAT-registered importer generally recovers, so the $5,343.44 is a financing question rather than a cost. The US importer’s $8,274.74 is a cost, full stop.

If you are landing in a third market, the structural lesson transfers even though the numbers do not: find out whether your destination values on goods alone or on the landed figure, and whether its consumption tax sits on top of duty. Those two facts determine more of your final number than the headline rate does. The landed cost calculator handles the assembly once you have the rates.

Find Your Own Rate in Five Minutes, and Check Ours

Every rate in this article carries a date because every rate in this article will eventually be wrong. The procedure below will not.

1. Get a defensible classification first. Not a plausible one — a defensible one, meaning you can explain from the product’s construction and function why it sits where you put it. Duty follows classification, and no rate lookup means anything until this is settled.
2. Read the General column on your own subheading at the official USITC schedule. Read the schedule itself, not a summary site’s rendering of it. That is your base layer.
3. Check the Chapter 99 headings that attach to Chinese origin. For the trade-war lists that means 9903.88.01, .02, .03 and .15, and the exclusion headings .69 and .70. For the forced-labour action it means 9903.05.31. Each heading’s duty column states its own arithmetic in words.
4. Add the fees. MPF at 0.3464% bounded by $33.58 and $651.50; HMF at 0.125% if it comes by sea.
5. Send the broker something usable. Give them the proposed HTS code and your reasoning, the customs value with the Incoterm it is based on, the country of origin, the mode, and ask specifically which Chapter 99 headings they will report. A broker answering that question is doing classification work; a broker answering “about 35%” is not.

What none of this can do is classify your product for you. Anyone who tells you your goods are “on List 3” without seeing the product, its construction and its intended use is guessing on your behalf and leaving you with the liability. Classification is the importer’s responsibility in law, and it is the one part of this you should be slowest to outsource to a webpage — including this one.

What We Check on a Duty Line, and Where We Stop

These are the five checks to run against any duty quote you are handed — ours or anyone else’s. All of them are mechanical, and all of them you can run yourself from the procedure above.

• The General column on your stated subheading — read off the official schedule, not a summary. Across ordinary Yiwu goods that value lands anywhere between Free and 17.6%, and a quote that has guessed it is already wrong before any add-on.
• The six Chapter 99 trade-war headings — 9903.88.01, .02 and .03 at +25%, 9903.88.15 at +7.5%, and the two exclusion headings .69 and .70 that zero the add-on entirely until 9 November 2026.
• Heading 9903.05.31 at +12.5% for the forced-labour action — the line most quotes still carry wrongly, either omitted or entered under an Indonesian heading.
• MPF against its $33.58 floor and $651.50 ceiling, and HMF at 0.125% if it is arriving by sea. On anything under roughly $9,694 the MPF is a flat charge, which changes whether splitting entries makes sense.
• Dead lines still on the sheet — a Section 122 or IEEPA charge on a 2026 quote means the template has not been updated since February or July respectively, and the rest of the quote deserves the same scepticism.

Where we stop is equally specific. We do not classify your goods. We can tell you that a stated code carries a stated rate; we cannot tell you the code is right for your product, because that requires the physical item and it is your legal liability, not ours. We do not issue binding rulings — only CBP does, and anyone implying otherwise is selling you false comfort.

Four things about your own order decide the number, and none of them is negotiable with the person quoting you. The material breakdown and construction of each SKU drive the classification, and that is where the spread lives — a textile bag and a plastic one sit seventeen duty points apart on the same schedule. Whether you hold a sample of the actual production item decides whether a classification is defensible: argued from the item in hand it survives a query, argued from a listing photograph it does not.

Lead time changes which duty applies at all, not just when the goods arrive — ocean transit from Ningbo runs weeks, which is precisely why the 24 July in-transit rule and the 28 July entry deadline decided which side of a rate change a shipment landed on. And certification requirements such as CE or UKCA marking do not move the duty rate by a single point, but a consignment held for a missing test report accrues storage while it waits, which lands in the same budget line. Consignment value and therefore your MOQ matter only for one thing here: whether you fall under or over the $2,500 informal entry line. There is no generic MOQ figure we can publish — on a consolidated Yiwu load it is set per project against your supplier mix.

Conclusión

The question has a real answer, but it is a procedure rather than a percentage. Here is what to do with this page, in order, on the order you are pricing right now.

1. Today: pull the classification for each SKU on the invoice in front of you, then read the General column on that subheading at the official schedule. That is your base layer and it takes minutes.
2. Same sitting: add the Chapter 99 headings for Chinese origin — 9903.88.01/.02/.03 or .15 for the trade-war lists, and 9903.05.31 for the forced-labour duty. Add MPF and, if it is coming by sea, HMF.
3. Before you accept any quote: check it for a Section 122 line or an IEEPA line. Both are dead. If either is on there, the quote was built from a stale template and everything else in it deserves a second look.
4. Put 9 November 2026 in the calendar if any of your products rely on a Section 301 exclusion. That is the day a 25-point increase becomes possible with nothing on your side changing.
5. Re-run step one before the next order, not before the next quarter. Three programmes changed status in the seven months before this was written.

The importers who get hurt on duty are rarely the ones who did not know the rate. They are the ones who knew last quarter’s, and never went back to look.

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