Importing to the USA in 2026: Duty Rates, MPF Fees and the Closed $800 Door

The $800 Door Closed: Three Dates That Reset Every Parcel

On 29 August 2025 the most useful number in American importing stopped being useful. Executive Order 14324 closed the $800 de minimis exemption for goods from every country, not just China, and US Customs and Border Protection spent the next ten months making that closure permanent. The cap itself has a long history. Section 321 of the Tariff Act of 1930 started the exemption at $1, Congress lifted it to $5 in 1978, $200 in 1993 and $800 in 2016, and the volume followed. Low-value shipments went from roughly 140 million a year to more than one billion a year over the following decade, and once the bulk of that flood was direct-to-consumer e-commerce from Chinese platforms, the political arithmetic changed. What replaced the exemption is not a rule you can read once. On 20 February 2026 the Supreme Court invalidated the IEEPA tariffs in Learning Resources v. Trump, and the administration immediately issued Executive Order 14388, arguing the de minimis suspension rested on different authority and would stay in place. On 24 June 2026 CBP filed two final rules that wrote the suspension into the regulations indefinitely: one covering merchandise arriving through the international postal network, with a new postal informal entry process, and one covering every other mode of transport. From that date, a $40 phone case and a $40,000 machine tool both need an entry.

I learned this the hard way in October 2025, when two pallets of sample hardware I had air-freighted out of Shenzhen landed at Los Angeles. Under the old rules the consignment would have cleared duty-free. Instead the invoice from my broker came to $412 in duty, fees and clearance on $3,150 of goods, a 13% surcharge I had not built into the quote I had already sent my customer. I now treat $800 as a museum piece. It still shows up in older blog posts and in supplier conversations, and it is not a number you can plan on.

A 12.1% Average Hiding a Grid That Moves Every Few Months

The headline average tells you less than you think. The overall effective US tariff rate sat at 2.5% in January 2025, peaked near 27% by April 2025, and was estimated at 12.1% on 21 July 2026, the highest sustained level in roughly a century. The path between those numbers was not a straight line. In February 2026 the Supreme Court ruled the IEEPA tariffs illegal, a decision that covered about $166 billion collected from more than 330,000 businesses and set off a refund process. Within days the administration pivoted to Section 122 of the Trade Act of 1974 for a 10% global surcharge, framed as a 150-day bridge. The Court of International Trade then held that surcharge illegal as well, and the appeal is still running. On 24 July 2026, the day the Section 122 window ran out, a fresh set of Section 301 duties took effect: 10% on goods from one group of trading partners and 12.5% on goods from 45 others, aimed at economies the US Trade Representative says tolerate forced labour. Sixty partners are in scope, including China, Mexico, Canada, the EU and the UK. Two small importers have already sued over how broadly that authority was used.

My honest read is that you should not price a 2027 catalogue against any of these rates. I have re-quoted three jobs this year inside six weeks because the number underneath them moved, and the only thing that saved the margin was an 8% contingency line I now write into every landed-cost sheet. The refunds are a second trap. If you paid IEEPA duties during 2025, that money is claimable, but the claim is paperwork and most brokers charge for it. Chase it, but do not book it as cash until it clears.

Section 232 Sits Outside the Grid: 50%, 25% or 15%

Metal tariffs are structural rather than political, and they behave differently from everything else on this page. Under Section 232 the US put 25% on all steel and aluminium imports in March 2025, raised both to 50% in June 2025, added a copper duty in August 2025, and expanded the covered list by 407 products. In April 2026 the treatment was clarified, and the clarification is the part importers get wrong. Articles made entirely or almost entirely of steel, aluminium or copper, such as steel coils and aluminium sheet, pay a flat 50% on their full value rather than on the metal content. Derivative articles substantially made of those metals pay a flat 25% on full value. Metal-intensive industrial and electrical grid equipment pays 15% through 2027. Articles made abroad but entirely from American steel, aluminium and copper drop to 10%. And if metal content is 15% or less, the product falls outside the Section 232 metals duties altogether. Cars carry a separate 25% tariff imposed in April 2025 and extended to auto parts in May 2025, with USMCA-compliant parts exempted.

A client of mine imports steel-framed outdoor furniture. Her line sits in heading 9403, which the USITC database shows at Free, so she had budgeted no duty at all. Then the Section 232 derivative list caught the product and 25% of full value landed on a $46,000 consignment, which is $11,500 she had not quoted for. The sequence I run now is mechanical: read the HTSUS rate, check whether the product appears on a Section 232 annex, then check the Section 301 rate for the origin. Three lookups, three separate pockets of money, and skipping the second one is the most expensive mistake in this whole process.

Your Real Rate Comes From the HTSUS, Not the Headlines

Strip out the 232 and 301 layers and you get the ordinary most-favoured-nation rate, which is what the tariff schedule actually assigns to your product. I pulled the rates below from the USITC Harmonized Tariff Schedule database on 14 September 2026, and the spread is far wider than most first-time importers expect. Toys are free. So are smartphones, laptops and wooden furniture. Cotton T-shirts carry 16.5% and synthetic dresses 16.6%. Leather footwear lands at 8.5%. Household ceramic tableware is 4.5%, but the same chapter jumps to 28% for hotel and restaurant ware. Leather handbags over $20 each are 9%, passenger cars between 1,500cc and 3,000cc are 2.5%, and coffee makers are 3.7%. A duty-efficient product mix and a duty-heavy one can differ by more than a full margin point, which is why the classification decision matters more than the freight negotiation. These figures are the general column only. Add Section 232 or the current Section 301 rate on top where they apply, because those layers stack rather than replace the MFN rate.

Two habits I keep. First, I look up all ten digits rather than the first six, because 6912.00 splits into a 4.5% household line and a 28% commercial line and customs reads the statistical suffix. Second, I screenshot the tariff page with the date visible and file it with the entry paperwork. When a rate gets challenged in court, the version you relied on is the only thing that supports a refund claim.

The Fee Stack: 0.3464% MPF, 0.125% HMF and the 1 October Step-Up

Duty is not the only line on a US entry, and the two statutory fees are where small importers get squeezed. The merchandise processing fee is 0.3464% of entered value, with a floor and a ceiling that CBP restates every year for inflation. In fiscal year 2026 the limits are a minimum of $33.58 and a maximum of $651.50 per entry. On 1 October 2026, when fiscal year 2027 begins, those become $34.58 and $670.86. The floor is the part that bites. On a $1,000 shipment the fee works out at 3.36% of value, ten times the headline rate. On a $200,000 shipment it is capped at $651.50, or 0.33%. The fee is regressive by design, and it lands hardest on the importer testing whether a product sells. The harbour maintenance fee behaves the opposite way: 0.125% of value, no floor and no ceiling, on cargo arriving by ocean. A $200,000 sea freight entry pays $250, and the identical goods arriving by air pay nothing at all.

There is a second reason to care about the entry type. Lower-value shipments filed as informal entries pay a reduced flat processing fee instead of the ad valorem formula, which means the broker's filing decision is worth as much to your margin as the duty rate itself. I ask for the entry summary and check which class was used. On a run of eleven small consignments last year that single question moved about $290 in fees, which is not life-changing until you multiply it by a hundred shipments.

FOB, Not CIF: Why the US Dutiable Value Is Lower

Here is a rule most of the world does not share, and it is worth real money. The United States appraises imports on the transaction value of the goods, in practice the FOB price, and international freight and insurance are not part of that value. 19 CFR 152.103 makes the point in its own worked example: a shipment of toys priced at $10,000 with $150 of ocean freight and insurance has a customs value of $10,000, because the regulation excludes C.I.F. charges. Compare that with the European Union and most other markets, where duty is assessed on the CIF value and the freight is taxed along with the goods. On a $10,000 consignment with $1,200 of freight, the US base is $10,000 while a CIF base would be $11,200, a 12% difference that compounds once duty sits on top of it. What you do have to add are the statutory additions: the cost of packing, selling commissions, assists such as tooling or design work you supplied free of charge, and royalties you must pay as a condition of sale.

I once recovered $657 for a client by rebuilding a valuation. Her broker had dutifully declared the CIF invoice total, which on $190,000 of goods carried $14,600 of freight and insurance. At her 4.5% rate that error handed the government an extra $657 on a single entry, and the same habit repeated across a year is a five-figure number. Freight and insurance belong on your landed-cost spreadsheet, not on the entry summary. Keep the invoices in the file though, because CBP can ask you to prove what you excluded.

One Container of Handbags, Line by Line

Here is a full ledger from a shipment I repriced in August 2026. Five hundred leather handbags under HTS 4202.21.90 at a 9% general rate, FOB Ningbo at $18 each, so $9,000 of goods. Ocean freight to Los Angeles came to $2,400 and marine insurance to $95. The duty base is the FOB value, so $9,000, and duty at 9% is $810. The July 2026 Section 301 layer applies to Chinese origin, and at the 12.5% tier it adds $1,125. If your line falls in the 10% tier it adds $900 instead, which is why you confirm the current rate for your ten-digit code before you sign the purchase order rather than after the container sails. The merchandise processing fee at 0.3464% of $9,000 would be $31.18, below the fiscal year 2026 floor, so you pay $33.58. The harbour maintenance fee at 0.125% of $9,000 is $11.25. The broker charges $125 for the entry itself. Total landed before a single bag is sold: $13,599.83 on $9,000 of goods, which is 51% on top of the FOB price, or $27.20 per bag.

The number that surprises people is not the duty, it is how small a share of the total the MFN duty turns out to be. The $810 of ordinary duty is under a fifth of the added cost. Freight, the tariff layer and the fixed fees make up the rest. If I were sourcing this product fresh, I would settle the origin and tariff-rate question before I ever negotiated the factory price, because a 2.5 point swing between two Section 301 tiers is worth more than most rounds of haggling will ever return, and it is decided by paperwork rather than by charm.

What Nobody Quotes: Bond, Broker, ISF and State Use Tax

Four costs sit outside the duty calculation and outside most quotes. The first is the bond. If you import regularly you carry a continuous bond, underwritten against a minimum that is set around 10% of your previous year's duty and taxes and subject to a CBP floor, commonly $50,000; the annual premium usually lands between roughly $400 and $700. Occasional importers buy a single-entry bond per shipment instead, which is cheaper until it is not. The second is the importer security filing, which for ocean cargo must be filed 24 hours before the vessel is loaded at the foreign port. Late or missing filings carry liquidated damages of $5,000 per violation under 19 CFR 113.64, capped at $100,000 per conveyance, so this is not a warning-letter number. The third is the broker. Expect $95 to $150 per entry plus around $35 to $50 for the filing itself, and remember that the broker is your agent, not your importer of record. The fourth is state tax. There is no federal value-added tax in the United States, which is why a US entry summary shows duty and fees but no VAT line, and that absence is exactly why importers forget the use-tax obligation attached to goods they consume in-state.

The first year I imported on my own account I bought single-entry bonds because the arithmetic looked cheaper per shipment. It was not, once I counted the broker's handling charge for arranging one each time. I now run a continuous bond and treat the premium as a fixed cost of trading. The other habit worth building is a one-page standing file per supplier: EIN, bond number, HTS codes, origin evidence and the resale certificate. When customs asks, the answer takes two minutes instead of two weeks.

• Importer of record: a US entity with an EIN is the simple route; a foreign company can be the importer of record but needs a bond and a US agent for service of process
• Entry type: 19 CFR 143.21 allows informal entry for shipments valued at $2,500 or less, and formal entry above that, which changes both the fee and the paperwork
• Documents: CBP Form 7501 entry summary, commercial invoice, packing list and bill of lading, filed electronically through ACE
• Bond: continuous or single-entry, sized against your duty exposure and subject to a CBP minimum
• Importer security filing: 24 hours before vessel loading, $5,000 per violation if it is late
• Resale or exemption certificate: register before the first container lands, or pay use tax you did not need to pay
• Budget formula: landed cost equals FOB price times one plus the MFN rate plus the Section 301 rate, plus freight, insurance, MPF, HMF, broker fee and inland delivery

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