Section 232 on Wood Products: The Furniture Tariff You Cannot Source Around

Most tariff news of the past two years has been about China. This one is not, and that is exactly why it catches importers out.

Since 14 October 2025, a Section 232 action on timber, lumber and their derivative products has applied to imports of wood goods into the United States from every origin. Not China specifically. Everywhere. If you moved your cabinet sourcing to Vietnam, or you buy German kitchens, or you import Brazilian wooden furniture, this reaches you.

Trade measures move fast and scope changes. Treat this as a snapshot rather than legal advice — for your specific HS lines, talk to our licensed customs brokers.

What the measure actually covers

Two bands matter for most importers:

• 10% on softwood timber and lumber.
• 25% on kitchen cabinets and vanities, and on upholstered furniture.

An escalation was written into the original proclamation — upholstered furniture to 30%, cabinets and vanities to 50% — originally effective 1 January 2026. A proclamation signed on 31 December 2025 postponed that increase by a year, to 1 January 2027.

So the current picture is 25%, with a scheduled step up to 50% on cabinets and vanities at the start of next year. If you are planning 2027 purchasing, that date belongs in your model now.

The part importers keep getting wrong

Section 232 is a national-security measure, not a trade-remedy one. That single distinction has three consequences that trip people up:

It applies to all origins. Antidumping and countervailing duties are country-specific, which is why “move production to Vietnam” has been the standard response for six years. Section 232 does not work that way. A cabinet made in Vietnam, Malaysia, Poland or Mexico is inside the measure the same as one made in Guangdong.

It stacks. It does not replace Section 301, and it does not replace AD/CVD. For Chinese-origin cabinets, all three can apply to the same entry. This is the scenario where a landed-cost estimate built on freight plus “about 25% duty” turns out to be badly wrong.

Its scope may still grow. The proclamation directed Commerce to establish a process for adding wood products to the scope, and to report by 1 October 2026 on whether to extend the action to further hardwoods and derivative products. If you import wood goods that are currently outside the covered lines, that is a date worth watching rather than assuming stability.

And the cabinet AD/CVD orders did not go away

For cabinets specifically, Section 232 is the newer layer on top of an older and heavier one.

The antidumping and countervailing duty orders on wooden cabinets and vanities and their components from China have been in force since 2020, and they were continued in September 2025 after a sunset review — Commerce and the ITC both found that revocation would likely lead to renewed dumping and injury. Company-specific rates vary enormously, with the top of the published range running to roughly 262% antidumping and 293% countervailing.

The circumvention question is settled too, and not in importers’ favour. A 2024 scope ruling confirmed that cabinets completed in Vietnam or Malaysia using Chinese components or constituent wooden parts are within the scope of the China orders. Importers now operate under a certification regime documenting component origin, and CBP has issued its own alerts on cabinet AD/CVD evasion.

Read together: sourcing an assembler outside China does not by itself escape the orders, and it never escapes Section 232. What matters is where the wooden parts were made — and whether you can prove it at entry rather than during an inquiry.

What to do about it

1. Re-run your landed costs by HS line, not by category. “Furniture” is not a duty rate. Upholstered furniture, cabinets, vanities, case goods and lumber sit in different places relative to this measure, and some wooden products are outside it entirely. The line, not the label, decides.

2. Get your component-origin documentation in order now. If you buy cabinets assembled outside China, you need the certification trail showing where the wooden components came from — obtained from your supplier while they still have a reason to cooperate, not reconstructed after a CBP request.

3. Put 1 January 2027 in your purchasing plan. The step to 50% on cabinets and vanities is currently scheduled, not hypothetical. Whether it is worth pulling volume forward is a real calculation, and it depends on your carrying cost and your storage. If the answer is yes, warehousing near the ports of LA and Long Beach is the mechanism.

4. Stop treating a sourcing move as a tariff strategy on its own. It still works against AD/CVD, where the orders are country-specific. It does nothing against Section 232. Any plan that conflates the two will produce the wrong answer.

5. Check classification before you order, not at entry. On this commodity the difference between two plausible-looking classifications can be tens of percentage points. Our brokers review classification at quoting stage as standard.

Where this sits in the wider 2026 tariff picture

Section 232 on wood is one layer in a year that has moved more than any in decades: the Supreme Court struck down the IEEPA tariffs in February, the Court of International Trade struck down the Section 122 surcharge in May, refunds are in motion on both tracks, and de minimis is gone. We keep a running account of all of it in our 2026 US import tariffs guide.

For furniture and cabinet importers specifically, the commodity guides go deeper on the compliance stack — furniture from China, kitchen cabinets from China, kitchen cabinets from Germany, furniture from India and wood furniture from Brazil — including TSCA Title VI, the Lacey Act and the certification regimes that sit alongside the tariffs.

If you import wood products and you have not repriced since October 2025, that is the job for this week. Send us your HS lines and we will tell you where you stand.