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 buy cabinets from Vietnam, kitchens from Germany or wooden furniture from Brazil, 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 us — entries are filed by our licensed customs brokers.

What the measure actually covers

Two bands matter for most importers:

• Softwood timber and lumber, at the lower of the two rates.
• Kitchen cabinets and vanities, and upholstered furniture, at a higher rate — with negotiated all-in caps for imports from the EU, Japan and the UK.

The rates, the caps and the covered lines are set out in the proclamations published in the Federal Register and in Chapter 99 of the US tariff schedule, and we confirm them for your HS lines at quoting.

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

So today’s rates are the ones that took effect in October 2025, with a scheduled step up — steepest on cabinets and vanities — at the start of next year. The step does not raise the EU, Japan or UK caps. 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 moving production to another country has long been the standard response to them. Section 232 does not work that way. A cabinet made in Vietnam, Malaysia, Poland or Mexico is inside the measure just the same. The only difference origin makes is the negotiated all-in caps for the EU, Japan and the UK.

It stacks. It does not replace the Section 301 duties on Chinese goods, and it does not replace AD/CVD. A Chinese cabinet can owe Section 232, Section 301 and an AD/CVD cash deposit on the same entry. (The Section 301 layer applied to other trading partners since July 2026 works differently: goods covered by Section 232 are outside it.) This is the scenario where a landed-cost estimate built on freight plus the Section 232 rate alone 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 Commerce was due 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, watch for the outcome rather than assuming stability.

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 origin documentation in order now. The EU, Japan and UK caps apply only to goods that actually originate there, so proof of origin — not the port the goods ship from — decides which rate you pay. Get that documentation 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 up on cabinets, vanities and upholstered furniture 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, partner 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 can still work against AD/CVD, where the orders are country-specific. Against Section 232 it changes the rate only where an origin has a negotiated cap — the EU, Japan, the UK — and nowhere else. 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 Section 122 surcharge that followed was ruled unlawful for the plaintiffs in May and expired in July, a new Section 301 layer has applied since 24 July, 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, restaurant furniture 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.