178 Tariff Exclusions Expire November 10: What Importers Should Check First

If your business imports anything from China, the date worth putting in the diary is not January. It is November 10.

The headline most people saw in late September was that the US-China trade truce had been pushed back. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent said the Busan Agreement, due to lapse on November 10, 2026, would run instead to January 10, 2027. That is real, and it is helpful, because it means no scheduled tariff change lands in the middle of the holiday selling season.

It also drew attention away from two smaller deadlines that arrive much sooner.

1. The 178 product exclusions

A set of 178 Section 301 product exclusions is scheduled to expire on November 10. These cover a broad mix of goods, including machinery, solar manufacturing equipment, EV-related components and medical supplies. If the US Trade Representative does not extend them, entries filed on or after that date lose the carve-out and revert to the standard Section 301 rate, which is typically 25 percent. No further extension has been announced.

Each extension cycle so far has been short, and the decision has often arrived close to the deadline. That is not a reason to panic, but it is a reason to know now whether any of your products sit on that list, rather than finding out from an invoice.

2. The port fees on China-linked ships

Section 301 fees on China-built and China-linked vessels calling at US ports were suspended on November 10, 2025. Reporting indicates the truce extension is understood to carry that suspension to January as well. The catch is that the published Federal Register notice, which is the instrument that actually governs it, still sets expiry at 11:59 p.m. Eastern on November 9, 2026, and as of early October no notice extending it had appeared. More than 200 trade and transport associations have written to the USTR asking for an extension.

These fees are charged to carriers rather than to importers directly, but costs of that kind tend to surface in freight quotes.

What to do in the next three weeks

• Pull the HTS codes for every product that currently relies on an exclusion, and model your landed cost with the duty reinstated.
• Ask your freight forwarder whether your booked sailings use China-built or China-linked vessels, and get written quotes for any late-November or December arrivals.
• Price your fourth-quarter stock on the duty rates you pay today. Tariff reductions recommended by the US-China Board of Trade have no published amount and no start date.
• Put a cushion in your first-quarter landed costs. Those orders usually go in during December, before anyone knows what January 10 brings.

None of this calls for a change of strategy. It calls for a few specific checks made before the dates rather than after them.

A longer breakdown, including what the Board of Trade actually recommended, is in US-China Trade Truce Extended: What Sellers Need to Know.

DSCP Smart Fulfillment is a third party logistics and ecommerce fulfillment provider and a member of the Princeton Mercer Regional Chamber. We run an East Coast warehouse in New Brunswick, New Jersey and a second site in Pomona, California.