Import Duty From China to the US: 2026 Landed Cost Guide

The freight rate is the smallest question you should be asking

You get a supplier quotation. You get a freight quote. You add them together, apply whatever duty percentage someone mentioned in a forum thread, and that becomes the budget you sign the PO against. Then the entry gets filed, the broker’s invoice arrives, and there are lines on it nobody planned for.

Duty is one of those lines, and it usually isn’t the one that breaks the model. What breaks the model is that duty got calculated on the wrong base, the CBP user fees were never in the sheet at all, and the freight quote that looked cheapest was quoting a narrower job than the one that looked expensive.

What follows is a method, not a rate table. The tariff layers on China-origin goods have moved several times in the last eighteen months. Any page that hands you a single “total China tariff percentage” is handing you something with an expiry date on it. Where a number moves, I’ll tell you where to look it up rather than quote it at you.

What US Customs actually taxes: the FOB vs CIF trap

Duty is assessed on the customs value of the goods. In the US, the primary basis is transaction value — broadly, the price actually paid or payable for the goods themselves.

Here is the part that catches first-time US importers. The US generally assesses duty on an FOB-type value. International freight and insurance are not normally inside the dutiable value. Most of the rest of the world does not work this way. The EU and many other jurisdictions use a CIF basis, where ocean freight and insurance sit inside the number duty is charged on.

Two ways that costs you money:

• You’ve imported into the EU or UK before, so you build the US sheet on a CIF basis and over-state your duty. You price defensively and lose the order, or you eat margin you never needed to give up.
• You use a generic online import tax tool built around a CIF market, get a figure that doesn’t match the entry, and only find out when the broker bills you.

Dutiable value follows the goods, not the transport. But which costs sit inside “the goods price” depends entirely on your Incoterms agreement. An EXW price and a DDP price for the same carton describe two completely different scopes of work. If your supplier invoices DDP as one bundled figure, the freight portion needs to be identifiable in the documentation — if it can’t be separated out, it can end up sitting inside the value you get taxed on. Ask for it broken out before the goods move, not after.

The 2026 duty stack on China-origin goods

Think in layers, all applied to the same customs value.

Layer 1 — the base HTSUS rate. Every product has a classification code, and that code carries an MFN rate running anywhere from zero to north of 32%. Textiles and footwear sit high. Plenty of industrial and electronic goods sit at or near zero. There’s no shortcut: get the code right, then read the General duty rate for that code in the current HTSUS. Your supplier’s suggested code is a starting point, not an authority. They’re guessing at a US tariff schedule from the other side of the ocean, and they don’t carry the liability if it’s wrong.

Layer 2 — Section 301. This stacks on top of the base rate instead of replacing it. Lists 1, 2 and 3 carry 25%. List 4A carries 7.5%. Strategic sectors carry more: electric vehicles at 100%, solar cells at 50%, semiconductors at 50%, non-EV lithium-ion batteries at 25%. A product with a 3.4% base rate sitting on List 3 is a 28.4% product, not a 25% one. That distinction alone has wrecked plenty of margin calculations.

Layer 3 — whatever else is in force on the day of entry. This is the layer that keeps moving. The broader IEEPA “reciprocal” tariffs were struck down by the Supreme Court in February 2026. A temporary Section 122 global tariff replaced them and expired around July 24, 2026. The China truce arrangement currently runs to November 10, 2026.

Now read those dates again with a 30 to 45 day ocean transit in your head. The rate that applies is the one in force when the goods are entered — not when you placed the order, not when you wired the deposit. If your shipment is on the water across a date when a measure expires or renews, your landed cost is a moving target. Price that exposure instead of pretending it isn’t there.

Before you commit, run your code through a customs duty calculator, then have the full stack confirmed against the schedule that will actually be live in your entry window.

The $800 escape hatch is closed

De minimis used to let shipments under $800 in value come in duty-free with minimal paperwork. It was eliminated for China-origin goods on May 2, 2025, and for all countries on August 29, 2025. Low-value shipments now owe duty and require full entry documentation.

That removed a business model, not just a tax break. Sample orders, replacement parts, direct-to-consumer parcels deliberately kept under the threshold — all of it now carries duty and an entry burden. If your cost model was built before mid-2025 and still assumes small parcels slip through, it’s wrong.

Building the number: a landed-cost method you can reuse

Work in placeholders and fill them per shipment. Goods value is V. Base rate is X%. Section 301 rate is Y%.

1. Fix V and the Incoterm. Write down which costs are already inside the supplier’s price. This is the step people skip, and it’s the reason EXW and DDP offers get compared as if they’re the same thing.
2. Classify the goods. Get the HTS code confirmed by someone who is accountable for it. Classification drives every number below it.
3. Look up X and Y for that code, today. Base rate from the current HTSUS, Section 301 rate from the list your code falls on.
4. Duty = V × (X + Y) ÷ 100, plus any Layer 3 measure in force at the time of entry.
5. Add CBP user fees. Formal entries carry the Merchandise Processing Fee, an ad valorem charge with a published minimum and maximum per entry. Ocean shipments also carry the Harbor Maintenance Fee. Both are set by CBP and adjusted periodically — pull the current figures from CBP directly rather than trusting any percentage quoted in an article, including this one. Air freight carries no HMF, which is one of the few places air quietly claws back part of its premium.
6. Add the movement costs. Origin charges, international freight, cargo insurance.
7. Add clearance and delivery. Broker fee, destination terminal and port charges, inland delivery to your door.
8. Price the risk lines. Demurrage and detention aren’t fixed costs, but they aren’t zero either. Take your free days and your realistic unloading capacity, and put a probability-weighted figure in the sheet.
9. Add money costs. Bank transfer fees, letter of credit costs, FX spread.
10. Divide by sellable units. Per-unit landed cost is the only version of this number your pricing can actually use.

Once you have the inputs, a landed cost calculator saves you rebuilding the arithmetic every time. The arithmetic was never the hard part — collecting honest inputs is.

The cost lines importers leave out

Print this and check a real quote against it. Anything with no number next to it is a number you’ll find out about later.

Whoever handles your customs clearance should hand you that fee schedule without being chased for it. If they won’t put brokerage and disbursement charges in writing before the shipment moves, that tells you something.

Why the cheapest freight quote often loses

Two quotes on the same lane, one materially cheaper. Most of the time they aren’t quoting the same job.

The usual gaps: one is port to port and the other is door to door. One includes destination terminal handling and the other leaves it for the invoice. One assumes you’re arranging your own entry. One gives you a few free days at the terminal and the other gives you a week, which changes your demurrage exposure by more than the rate difference between them.

Transit time belongs in this comparison too, and not only for inventory reasons. With measures that expire and truce dates on the calendar, a slower routing can put your entry on the other side of a rate change. That’s not a theoretical risk in 2026 — it’s a scheduling decision with a dollar value.

Normalize before you compare. Same Incoterm. Same pickup and delivery points. Same free time. Same written list of what’s included and what isn’t. Same currency and same validity window. When you line up China to US shipping costs on identical scope, the cheap quote frequently stops being the cheap one.

Do the duty math before you sign the PO

Order of operations matters. Classify and price the duty layer first, because it’s the input you have least control over and the one that most often decides whether the product works at all. Freight is negotiable. A 28.4% stack is not.

Then recompute before the goods ship, not just at PO stage. Between deposit and entry, the code can be corrected, the packing can change the freight basis, and the tariff stack can move.

If you want the stack checked against your actual HTS code and a landed cost built from real charges on your lane, get a freight quote that includes the duty and fee lines — not just the ocean rate.