Section 301 forced labour tariffs: 10% or 12.5% across 60 economies

What changed

The Section 122 surcharge was always temporary. Section 122 of the Trade Act of 1974 caps a balance of payments surcharge at 15% and at 150 days, so the 10% global rate imposed on 24 February 2026 carried a fixed expiry of 24 July 2026. It reached it.

It did not leave a gap. Within about an hour of the surcharge lapsing, a new Section 301 action took effect. In June 2026 USTR had made findings across 60 separate investigations, concluding that 60 trading partners either had no import prohibition on goods made with forced labour, or had one and were not meaningfully enforcing it. The final action turned those findings into duties.

There are two tiers. A 10% additional ad valorem duty applies to economies USTR credited with a prohibition, a partial enforcement regime, or a commitment under a reciprocal trade agreement: Argentina, Bangladesh, Cambodia, Canada, Ecuador, El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras, India, Indonesia, Jordan, Malaysia, Mexico, Pakistan, Sri Lanka, Trinidad and Tobago, and the United Kingdom. Everything else in the investigated set, China, Vietnam and Brazil among them, sits at 12.5%.

Coverage is deliberately broad, running across chapters 1 to 97 of the tariff schedule rather than a targeted product list. USTR did soften it after the comment period, adding 471 further HTSUS subheadings to the exclusion list, mostly raw materials and supply chain critical inputs that cannot be sourced domestically in volume.

Trade advisories have also reported capped treatment for several partners, with the European Union and Taiwan at 10% net of the MFN rate and Japan, Korea and Switzerland at 12.5% net of MFN. Treat that as reported rather than settled, and confirm the exact stacking rule against current CBP guidance before quoting a landed cost on those origins.

The structural difference from Section 122 is the part worth internalising. Section 122 came with a statutory expiry printed on it. This layer has none. It ends when litigation removes it or when a trading partner negotiates its way out, and neither of those has a calendar date attached.

Who it affects

• Apparel, footwear and home textile importers, whose sourcing map is concentrated in exactly the economies USTR named.
• Electronics and consumer goods sellers sourcing from China or Vietnam, who moved from a flat 10% surcharge to 12.5% overnight.
• Importers who shifted production out of China during the 2018 to 2025 tariff cycle and landed in Cambodia, Indonesia or Malaysia, several of which are also on the list.
• Anyone relying on USMCA origin from Mexico or Canada. Both sit in the 10% tier, and preferential origin does not remove this duty.

A worked cost example

A homeware seller imports 500 cotton bath towels at $7.20 each. The same order costs different money depending on nothing but where it was woven. The MFN rate below is illustrative, so confirm your own classification.

$90 looks trivial until you annualise it. Across 40 orders a year that is $3,600, roughly a full replenishment order, decided entirely by which tier the sourcing country landed in rather than by anything about the towel.

What importers should do

1. 1 Check every sourcing country against the two tier lists before your next purchase order rather than after the goods ship.
2. 2 Search the expanded exclusion list for your HTSUS subheadings. USTR added 471 of them after comment, and the additions skew heavily towards inputs rather than finished goods.
3. 3 Re-run supplier comparisons with the tier applied. A 2.5 point difference is enough to flip which quote is genuinely cheapest.
4. 4 Stop treating this as temporary in your forecasts. Unlike the surcharge it replaced, nothing in it expires on its own.
5. 5 Document your own forced labour due diligence. An action built on enforcement findings tends to be followed by enforcement attention.

Questions importers keep asking

Primary sources

• USTR action in the forced labour Section 301 investigations →
• USTR findings across 60 investigations, June 2026 →

Related changes

What to re-check, and when

This page is about the Section 301 forced labour duties, and no published instrument names a closing date for the measure itself, so this site records no scheduled end for it: it runs until the authority behind it revokes or amends it, which is a finding about the measure rather than a gap in the record, while any temporary provision sitting alongside it carries its own date in the passage above that describes it, and what is dated below is the reading rather than the measure.

The claims on this page about the Section 301 forced labour duties were last read on 28 August 2026, against the sources it names, and what to check first is the sentence under this one.

Re-check the two tier lists and the exclusion list before each purchase order. USTR has already moved economies between tiers once, and the net of MFN caps for a handful of partners remain reported rather than confirmed.