Section 301 Exclusions Expire November 9: The Duty Cliff, Dated and Priced

AI Summary

USTR’s remaining 178 Section 301 exclusions expire for goods entered on or after 10 November 2026. The date that governs is the customs entry date, not the shipping date, and the extension carries no in-transit relief. Duty returns at 25% on Lists 1 to 3 and 7.5% on List 4A.

Most importers treat a Section 301 exclusion as a property of their product. It is not. An exclusion is a property of one customs entry, and the only question that decides whether it applies is the date that entry is filed. Two containers of identical goods, unloaded the same afternoon, carry different duty treatment if one clears on 9 November and the other on 10 November.

That single distinction is worth real money to anyone with a catalog clearing under the two exclusion headings still in force.

What happened

USTR extended the last remaining Section 301 product exclusions in a notice published on 1 December 2025 at 90 FR 55232, following the trade agreement announced between the two governments on 1 November 2025. The extension covers goods entered for consumption, or withdrawn from warehouse for consumption, on or after 30 November 2025 and before 11:59 p.m. Eastern on 9 November 2026.

The universe is smaller than most sellers assume. It is 178 exclusions, and that is all of them:

Both sets lapse together. An entry filed on or after 10 November 2026 pays the full underlying list rate instead.

Entry date — the date merchandise is entered for consumption, or withdrawn from warehouse for consumption, as recorded on the entry summary. It is the only date a Section 301 exclusion tests, and it cannot be re-timed after the fact.

Why now

Three clocks are running at once, and only one of them is the November deadline.

The exclusion clock. 178 exclusions end on 9 November 2026. When one lapses, the underlying rate returns automatically. There is no transition rate and no phase-in: 25% for Lists 1, 2 and 3, and 7.5% for List 4A, on top of the most-favoured-nation rate your goods already pay.

The correction clock. Entries filed in the past ten months are still inside the Post Summary Correction window, which runs 300 days from the entry date and closes 15 days before scheduled liquidation. If an exclusion was available and not claimed, that window is open now and shuts on its own schedule.

The extension clock. This set of exclusions has been renewed in short increments: through 31 May 2025, then 31 August 2025, then a 90-day extension to 29 November 2025, then to 9 November 2026. Before the November 2025 deadline, USTR published a request for comments on 16 September 2025, roughly ten weeks ahead of the cutoff. As of 18 August 2026, no equivalent comment notice for the current deadline has appeared. That absence is not evidence either way.

The 2024 four-year review raised rates sharply on strategic categories, including electric vehicles at 100%, solar cells at 50% and lithium-ion batteries at 25%. In July 2026 a separate Section 301 action on forced labour added duty on products of 54 economies, China included. Section 301 survived the February 2026 Supreme Court ruling that struck down the IEEPA tariffs, because it rests on different statutory authority. The direction of travel for the past three years has been more duty, not less.

So what

Here is what the snapback costs, computed per unit and per container. FOB prices and container quantities are model inputs — substitute your own. The rate is the sourced figure.

The pattern to notice: a low unit price does not mean a low exposure. The wire example adds 22.5 cents to a 90-cent part, which is a 25% increase in landed cost on that line. A seller importing twelve such containers a year is looking at $162,000 of new duty from one date change.

The counterintuitive part is what the exclusion does not cover. The 9903.88.69 and 9903.88.70 headings exclude you from the technology-transfer action that produced Lists 1 to 4A. They do nothing about the forced-labour action that took effect for entries on or after 24 July 2026, which applies an additional 12.5% to products of 54 economies including China. A product sitting comfortably inside an exclusion today still pays that layer. Importers who assume “I am excluded” means “I am clear” are reading half the entry summary.

So do not plan around a renewal you have not seen. If USTR publishes a comment notice, it will arrive in the Federal Register with a short window. Until then, the correct planning assumption is that the rate returns on 10 November 2026, and any renewal is upside. Two moves follow from that: model the snapback against your actual entry volume by SKU, and review entry timing for anything landing in the first half of November. Entry planning is ordinary practice, not a loophole — and it only works if the merchandise genuinely qualifies, with correct classification, valuation and origin.

For you

• Importers filing under their own Importer of Record number: pull your entry summaries from the past twelve months and search for headings 9903.88.69 and 9903.88.70. Plenty of importers discover they were relying on an exclusion their broker applied quietly and never mentioned. Get it in writing rather than from memory.
• Sellers buying on delivered-duty terms: the duty is inside your supplier’s price, and the snapback arrives as a quotation change rather than a customs bill. Ask your supplier directly whether the current quote assumes an exclusion. A quote that silently assumed one reprices in November, and you will hear about it after the order is placed.
• Brands whose Chinese supplier buys excluded components: your finished product carries its own classification, but your supplier’s cost base does not. Motors, PCBs, connectors and LCD modules sit inside these headings. Expect the component-level duty to surface in the next round of price negotiations, whether or not your own HTS code was ever excluded.

The data point

FAQ

What exactly changes on 10 November 2026?

Entries filed on or after that date lose the Section 301 product exclusion and pay the underlying list rate: 25% for goods on Lists 1, 2 and 3, and 7.5% for goods on List 4A, in addition to the most-favoured-nation duty already owed. There is no phase-in, no transition rate and nothing to apply for. The change is automatic, and it turns on the entry date rather than the date goods were ordered, shipped or unloaded. A container that sails in October and clears on 12 November pays the full rate.

My goods arrive before the deadline but clear after it. Does the exclusion still apply?

No. Eligibility follows the date merchandise is entered for consumption, or withdrawn from warehouse for consumption, and the extension notice contains no in-transit savings clause. Goods on the water on 9 November receive no protection from having shipped while the exclusion was alive. If you have bonded stock of excluded goods, the withdrawal date is the entry date for this purpose, so inventory that qualifies today loses the exclusion on withdrawals made 10 November or later, even if it has been sitting in the warehouse for months.

Does my Section 301 exclusion protect me from the 2026 forced-labour tariffs?

No, and this is the most common misreading of the two headings. The 9903.88.69 and 9903.88.70 exclusions apply only to the technology-transfer investigation that produced Lists 1 to 4A. The forced-labour action that took effect for entries on or after 24 July 2026 is a separate determination with its own exemption annexes, and it applies an additional duty to products of 54 economies including China regardless of exclusion status. Check that annex against your headings before assuming the exclusion clears the whole entry.

Can my broker fix an entry that missed the exclusion?

Only while the correction window is open, and never by changing the entry date. A Post Summary Correction can be filed within 300 days of the entry date and up to 15 days before scheduled liquidation, provided the entry is paid and not under review. That is the mechanism for an entry filed before the cutoff where the exclusion was available and not claimed. Once an entry liquidates, the route is a protest within 180 days of liquidation. No correction retroactively makes a 15 November entry eligible for an exclusion that ended on 9 November.

The point

The exclusions were never a permanent feature of these products. They were a temporary carve-out with a date attached, and the date is now close enough to plan against rather than argue about. Confirm which headings you actually clear under, price the snapback at your own volume, and treat a further extension as upside rather than a baseline.