Section 301 Exclusions End November 10, 2026: What Importers Should Do
The 178 remaining Section 301 exclusions on Chinese goods expire at 11:59 p.m. Eastern on November 9, 2026. Entries filed on or after November 10 lose the exclusion and pay the full List 1, 2, 3, or 4A duty rate — 25% on Lists 1 through 3, 7.5% on List 4A — on top of the normal tariff. If any part of your catalog clears under HTSUS heading 9903.88.69 or 9903.88.70 today, you have about twelve weeks to confirm coverage, model the new landed cost, and make sure your entries are filed cleanly through the change.
What Actually Expires on November 10
The exclusions at issue come from the Section 301 investigation into China's practices around technology transfer and intellectual property — the tariff program that produced Lists 1 through 4A between 2018 and 2019. Over the years, the Office of the U.S. Trade Representative (USTR) carved out specific products from those duties. What's left is a much smaller set than importers often assume: 178 exclusions, and that's the whole universe.
They split into two groups. 164 product exclusions are claimed under Harmonized Tariff Schedule of the United States (HTSUS) heading 9903.88.69, and 14 solar manufacturing equipment exclusions are claimed under heading 9903.88.70. USTR extended both sets in a notice published December 1, 2025 (90 FR 55232), following the trade agreement announced between the two governments on November 1, 2025. The extension covers goods entered for consumption, or withdrawn from warehouse for consumption, on or after November 30, 2025 and before 11:59 p.m. Eastern on November 9, 2026.
One detail governs everything else in this article: the date that matters is the entry date, not the date the goods were ordered, shipped, or arrived. An exclusion applies based on when merchandise is entered for consumption or withdrawn from a warehouse for consumption. A container that sails in October but is entered on November 12 pays the full rate. This is not a rule you can negotiate at the port, and it isn't something a broker can fix after the fact.
How to Tell Whether You're Actually Using an Exclusion
A surprising number of importers don't know. Exclusions are claimed by the filer as a secondary HTSUS line on the entry summary, and if a broker has been handling it quietly for two years, it may never have come up in a conversation about duty rates.
The fastest check is to look at your own entry summaries in the Automated Commercial Environment (ACE) — the CBP system that processes essentially all U.S. customs entries — and search for the headings 9903.88.69 and 9903.88.70. If either appears on your entries, you are relying on an exclusion that ends in November. If you don't have direct ACE visibility, ask your broker for a duty report by HTS code covering the last twelve months and look for the same two headings. Either way, get this in writing rather than relying on memory.
Then confirm you actually qualify, because exclusion scope is narrower than it looks. Each exclusion is defined by both a ten-digit HTSUS statistical reporting number and a written product description set out in the HTSUS chapter 99 notes. An exclusion for a particular type of pump described in the annex does not cover everything classified under that pump's ten-digit code. If your product drifted — a design change, a new supplier, a different specification — it's worth re-reading the description against what you're importing now. The current exclusions are available to any importer whose product meets the description, so this is a question about your goods, not about who filed the original request.
What Your Duty Bill Looks Like After the Cliff
When an exclusion lapses, the underlying Section 301 rate returns automatically. There's no notice, no transition rate, and no phase-in. The rates snap back to where the lists sat before the exclusion: 25% for Lists 1, 2, and 3, and 7.5% for List 4A, which was reduced from 15% under the Phase One agreement in February 2020.
That's on top of the most-favored-nation (MFN) rate your goods already pay — the standard duty rate in the tariff schedule — and on top of anything else layered onto the entry. In 2026 that stack has gotten crowded. The separate Section 301 forced-labor action, which took effect for entries on or after July 24, 2026, applies an additional duty to products of 54 economies including China, and it is a distinct action: your 9903.88.69 exclusion does not exclude you from it. Section 232 duties and any antidumping or countervailing duty orders sit on top of that as well. Our guide to tariff stacking in 2026 walks through how these layers interact on a single entry, and our forced-labor tariff page covers that action's exemption structure.
Run the number before you're surprised by it. An importer bringing in $2 million a year of List 3 goods currently covered by an exclusion is paying no Section 301 duty on that value today. On November 10, that becomes 25% — roughly $500,000 a year in new duty, front-loaded onto whatever entries clear first. For a business running on 15% gross margin, that isn't a line-item adjustment; it's a pricing decision, a sourcing decision, or both. Model it against your actual entry volume, not a rough average, because the cost lands unevenly depending on how your shipments cluster.
Will USTR Extend Again? What the Record Shows
Nobody outside USTR knows, and anyone telling you otherwise is guessing. But the procedural history is public and it's worth reading, because it tells you roughly when you'll find out.
These 178 exclusions have been extended repeatedly and in short increments: through May 31, 2025, then August 31, 2025, then a 90-day extension to November 29, 2025, and finally to November 9, 2026. That last one was the longest in the sequence and came directly out of a bilateral agreement rather than the ordinary review process. USTR also stated in the December 2025 notice that it may continue to consider further extensions and additional modifications as appropriate — language that preserves the option without committing to it.
The tell to watch for is a comment notice. Before the November 2025 deadline, USTR published a request for comments on September 16, 2025 — about ten weeks out — asking whether the exclusions warranted further extension, with the evaluation focused on whether covered products are available outside China and what sourcing shifts importers had attempted. As of August 18, 2026, no comparable comment notice or extension has been published for the November 9, 2026 deadline. If USTR follows its prior pattern, a notice would surface in the Federal Register sometime in the next several weeks. Its absence today is not evidence that an extension won't happen, and its appearance wouldn't guarantee one — in the last round, 147 exclusions drew comments supporting extension, and USTR still acted only under presidential direction tied to a trade deal.
Plan for the tariff to return and treat an extension as upside. Building your Q4 pricing around a renewal that hasn't been announced is a bet with a $500,000 downside in the example above.
Entries That Straddle the Cliff
The first two weeks of November are where mistakes happen. Because eligibility turns on entry date, goods sitting in the same warehouse can carry different duty treatment depending on when they're entered.
Note what the December 2025 notice does not contain: an in-transit savings clause. Some tariff actions include one — the forced-labor Section 301 notice, for instance, spared goods already loaded and in transit before its effective date if they were entered within a few days. The exclusion extension has no equivalent provision. Goods on the water on November 9 get no protection from the fact that they shipped while the exclusion was alive.
Two practical consequences follow. First, if you have flexibility on entry timing and the goods are available, entering before the cutoff preserves the exclusion for that merchandise. This is ordinary entry planning, not a loophole, but it has to be real: the merchandise must genuinely be entered for consumption, with everything that entails — correct classification, correct valuation, correct country of origin. Filing a sloppy entry to beat a deadline trades a known duty increase for an unknown penalty exposure, which is a bad trade.
Second, if you're withdrawing goods from a bonded warehouse, the withdrawal date is your entry date for this purpose. Warehouse inventory that would qualify today loses the exclusion on withdrawals made November 10 or later. If you hold bonded stock of excluded goods, that timing is worth a conversation with your broker this month rather than in November. Getting classification right across the catalog underpins all of it — our HTS classification guide covers how to build and maintain that.
Fixing Entries After the Fact: PSC and Protest
Two correction paths exist, and it's worth being clear about what each can and can't do.
A Post Summary Correction (PSC) is the electronic method for correcting an entry summary before it liquidates — liquidation being CBP's final calculation of the duties owed. Per CBP, a PSC can be filed within 300 days of the entry date and up to 15 days before the scheduled liquidation date, whichever comes first, and the entry must be paid and not under CBP review. If you were eligible for an exclusion on an entry filed before the cutoff but the claim wasn't made, a PSC is the mechanism for correcting that filing. Our PSC filing guide covers the process in detail, and our post-summary corrections service runs $150 per entry for up to 10 lines.
What a PSC cannot do is change your entry date. There is no correction that retroactively makes a November 15 entry eligible for an exclusion that ended November 9. Be skeptical of anyone who suggests otherwise — a PSC is for fixing what was filed, not for re-timing when it was filed.
Once an entry liquidates, the PSC window closes and the remaining route is a protest, filed within 180 days of liquidation. That's a slower and more formal process. Neither path guarantees an outcome; CBP decides these on the merits of the filing and the documentation behind it. But both are real options that expire on their own schedules, which is why building a simple inventory of your affected entries and their liquidation dates is worth doing before year-end.
A Twelve-Week Checklist
Between now and early November, four things deserve calendar time. Confirm coverage: pull your 9903.88.69 and 9903.88.70 usage from ACE or from your broker, and verify each product still matches its exclusion description. Model the cost: apply the correct list rate to your actual volume by SKU and get a real annual number in front of whoever owns pricing. Review entry timing: identify shipments and bonded withdrawals landing near the cutoff, and decide deliberately rather than by default.
Audit your recent filings: check whether exclusions were claimed correctly on entries from the past ten months, since those are the ones still inside the PSC window. Importers who take on more of this work in-house tend to spot these issues earlier, simply because they're closer to the entry data — our self-filing software page covers what that involves, at $30 per entry with licensed broker support available when something gets complicated. Importers who'd rather hand the whole problem to a licensed broker can do that instead, at $100–$250 per entry depending on complexity.
Finally, watch the Federal Register. If a comment notice appears, the window to submit a case for your product will be short, and a well-documented submission about sourcing constraints is more useful than a general objection to tariffs.
Frequently Asked Questions
What exactly happens to my duty rate on November 10, 2026?
The Section 301 exclusion stops applying to entries made on or after that date, and the underlying list rate returns — 25% for Lists 1, 2, and 3, or 7.5% for List 4A — in addition to the MFN rate and any other duties on the entry. There's no phase-in or transition rate. The change is automatic, so nothing is required from you for it to take effect.
Can I still claim an exclusion on goods that arrived before the deadline but were entered after it?
No. Eligibility turns on the date the goods are entered for consumption or withdrawn from warehouse for consumption, not the shipping or arrival date, and the extension notice includes no in-transit savings clause. Goods arriving in early November should be evaluated on entry timing specifically.
Does my Section 301 exclusion also cover the 2026 forced-labor tariffs?
No. The 9903.88.69 and 9903.88.70 exclusions apply only to the technology-transfer Section 301 action that produced Lists 1 through 4A. The forced-labor Section 301 action that took effect July 24, 2026 is a separate determination with its own exemption annexes, and it applies to products of China regardless of your exclusion status.
If USTR extends the exclusions again, will I need to do anything?
Typically no re-application is required. Recent extensions have applied automatically to any product meeting the exclusion description, and CBP issues entry guidance after USTR publishes. The practical step is making sure your filer knows to keep claiming the heading rather than dropping it in anticipation of the deadline. Watch for the Federal Register notice rather than relying on secondhand reports.
Get Ahead of the November Deadline
The importers who handle this well won't be the ones who find a clever workaround — there isn't one. They'll be the ones who knew by September exactly which SKUs were covered, what the duty increase costs them, and which recent entries still had a correction window open. That's a few hours of work now instead of a scramble in November.
If you want a second set of eyes on which of your entries rely on these exclusions, what the snapback costs at your volume, or whether entries from the past ten months were filed correctly, talk to our team. We file entries at all U.S. ports, and we'd rather help you plan for this in August than untangle it in December.
Sources: Federal Register, Notice of Product Exclusion Extensions: China's Acts, Policies, and Practices Related to Technology Transfer, Intellectual Property, and Innovation (90 FR 55232, December 1, 2025), USTR, USTR Extends Exclusions from China Section 301 Tariffs Related to Forced Technology Transfer Investigation, USTR, China Section 301-Tariff Actions and Exclusion Process, Federal Register, Notice of Modification of Section 301 Action (List 4A rate reduction, January 22, 2020), Federal Register, Notice of Actions in Section 301 Investigations Related to the Failure to Impose and Effectively Enforce a Prohibition on the Importation of Goods Produced With Forced Labor (July 28, 2026), CBP, Post Summary Corrections.