Why There Is a Tariff Line on Your Furniture Quote, and Why Your Dealer Usually Cannot Remove It

August 26, 2026
Industry Trends

A tariff line on a furniture quote tends to produce the same question: What is this, and can you take it off?

Fair question.

Usually, the answer to the second part is no, at least not in the way most buyers mean it. But the reason matters, because tariff charges are more complicated than a percentage someone simply decided to add to your furniture.

What that line actually is

In many contract-furniture transactions, the dealer is not the importer of record. The manufacturer, its importing affiliate, or another party upstream may be.

That distinction matters, because customs duties are assessed to the importer of record. A manufacturer may then recover some or all of that cost through its pricing, through a separate tariff surcharge, or through another published policy. The surcharge on your quote is therefore not necessarily a copy of the customs bill for that exact chair or table. It is a manufacturer-set commercial charge tied to its tariff exposure.

By the time that charge reaches a dealer quote, the dealer generally does not have authority to simply delete the manufacturer’s published surcharge. We can explain it, verify how it is calculated, show you which products it applies to, and compare it with alternatives. Changing the manufacturer’s tariff policy is a different thing.

And that distinction has become unusually important because the underlying rules have moved several times in less than a year.

How quickly the rules changed

Consider what a manufacturer trying to price furniture has dealt with since last fall.

October 14, 2025. Section 232 tariffs on wood products took effect. The proclamation imposed a 10 percent additional duty on covered softwood timber and lumber, 25 percent on certain upholstered wooden furniture, and 25 percent on completed kitchen cabinets and vanities (Federal Register, Proclamation 10976).

December 31, 2025. A scheduled January 1, 2026 increase was postponed for a full year. The higher rates were moved to January 1, 2027 (Federal Register, Proclamation 11000).

February 20, 2026. In Learning Resources, Inc. v. Trump and the consolidated tariff cases, the Supreme Court held 6 to 3, Chief Justice Roberts writing, that the International Emergency Economic Powers Act did not authorize the President to impose tariffs. The IEEPA tariff regime that manufacturers and importers had been navigating was dismantled, and collection stopped four days later (WilmerHale, February 20, 2026; White & Case, February 2026).

February 24, 2026. A new 10 percent temporary global import surcharge took effect under Section 122 of the Trade Act of 1974. Section 122 has a statutory 150-day limit unless Congress extends it (Nakachi Eckhardt & Jacobson, July 2026).

April 6, 2026. The steel and aluminum rules changed again. Proclamation 11021 moved covered metal articles and derivatives to a full-customs-value methodology, applying the duty “to the full customs value of the imported product, regardless of metal content.” At the same time, its Annex II removed 247 HTSUS codes from the derivative lists, including a number of furniture classifications (Federal Register, Proclamation 11021; ArentFox Schiff, April 2026).

July 24, 2026. The Section 122 surcharge reached the end of its statutory window. At essentially the same time, a new Section 301 action took effect covering 60 trading partners over their treatment of forced-labor imports. The final rates are not one blanket number. Indonesia, Malaysia, Canada, India, Mexico, the United Kingdom and eleven others are at 10 percent. Canada’s 10 percent under this action is now the smallest part of its exposure, for reasons in the next entry. China, Vietnam and the remaining investigated economies fall into the 12.5 percent group. Several trading partners, including the EU, Taiwan, Japan, Korea and Switzerland, have special net-of-MFN formulas. Products already subject to Section 232 are exempt from this particular Section 301 action (Wiley, July 2026; USTR final action notice, July 23, 2026).

August 22, 2026. The United States imposed additional duties of up to 50 percent on a list of Canadian goods under Section 338 of the Tariff Act of 1930, an authority that had sat effectively unused for decades. Three proclamations cover alcoholic beverages, dairy and motor vehicles, and the annex attached to the motor vehicle proclamation is the broad one, reaching past vehicles into cement, plywood, textiles and furniture. The action was scheduled for August 19, suspended for three days, and took effect at 12:01 a.m. Eastern on August 22 (Troutman Pepper Locke, August 2026; CBP CSMS # 69606660).

Two features of it are worth knowing before you assume it does not apply to you. A USMCA certificate of origin does not exempt covered goods; it reduces the ordinary rate, and the 50 percent sits on top of the reduced rate. And the annexes match at the eight-digit level, not at your full ten-digit classification. A separate heading, 9903.03.15, carries a zero rate for excluded categories including steel, aluminum and copper derivatives, vehicles and parts, and wood products, so whether a specific piece of Canadian furniture is covered at 50 percent or excluded at zero turns on where its classification lands (Zonos, Section 338 guide). CBP guidance on that is still settling.

All of that lands on a manufacturer who publishes pricing on a much slower cycle than Washington changes tariff treatment. A cost that looks permanent when a price book is built can disappear, change statutory authority, move to a different rate, or stop applying to a particular HTS classification before the next price book is even issued.

Keeping some of that exposure outside base list price is not hard to understand in that environment.

Which of these actually touch furniture?

This is where the conversation needs to get more specific, because not every tariff headline applies to every piece of furniture.

Section 232 wood tariffs are directly relevant to a defined group of products.

Covered upholstered wooden furniture is classified under specified 9401.61 tariff lines, reported as 9401.61.4011, 9401.61.4031, 9401.61.6011 and 9401.61.6031. Covered kitchen cabinets and vanities and specified parts fall under 9403.40.9060, 9403.60.8093 and 9403.91.0080 (RVIA, 2025; customs intel, 2025). Worth noting that the rate is not uniform across those lines: completed cabinets and vanities enter under Chapter 99 heading 9903.76.03, while the companion heading for items other than completed products, 9903.76.04, currently carries a zero rate (GHY International).

This is not a tariff on “anything with wood in it.” Classification, product construction, and country of origin matter.

Country treatment matters too. Clause 7 of the original wood proclamation created different treatment for the United Kingdom, capped at 10 percent, and for the European Union and Japan, where the Section 232 duty plus the applicable Column 1 rate cannot exceed 15 percent combined. Subsequent trade arrangements have added other country-specific rules, including a combined 15 percent treatment for covered South Korean wood products under heading 9903.76.23, effective November 14, 2025 (customs intel).

So two lounge chairs that look almost identical on a furniture plan can carry different tariff exposure because they were built differently or came from different countries.

The metal-furniture story is even more instructive.

In August 2025, Commerce added 407 categories of derivative products to the Section 232 steel and aluminum program. Furniture was specifically included (ArentFox Schiff, August 2025).

If you stopped researching there, you could reasonably conclude that imported metal-frame seating and office furniture still carried those Section 232 metal tariffs.

But the rules changed.

Effective April 6, 2026, Proclamation 11021 placed a number of those Chapter 94 furniture classifications on its removed-from-scope list. Annex II includes 9401.71.00 and 9401.79.00, metal-frame seats upholstered and not upholstered, 9403.10.00, furniture of metal of a kind used in offices, 9403.20.00, other metal furniture, and several furniture parts provisions under 9403.99 (Proclamation 11021 annexes).

And then it changed again, in the other direction, at a finer level of detail. CBP guidance shows two statistical lines under 9403.20, specifically 9403.20.0075 and 9403.20.0082, becoming subject to Section 232 duties effective June 8, 2026 (CBP CSMS # 68855869).

An eight-digit heading came out of scope in April, and two ten-digit lines underneath a neighboring heading went back into scope in June. Both moves happened inside a single quarter, on the same product category.

This is why we are careful with any sentence that starts “furniture tariffs are X percent.”

There is no single furniture tariff.

There are tariff programs, classifications, origins, exclusions, trade agreements, and manufacturer policies. The only useful question is what applies to the actual products on your quote.

What is still scheduled for January 1, 2027

There is one date we would keep on any 2027 project budget.

When the wood-product increase was postponed, it was not cancelled. Proclamation 11000 moved it to January 1, 2027. The operative sentence reads:

“Effective January 1, 2027, the duty rate in clause 2 shall increase to 30 percent and the duty rate in clause 3 shall increase to 50 percent.”

Under the schedule currently on the books, the Section 232 rate on covered upholstered wooden furniture is set to move from 25 percent to 30 percent, while the rate on covered kitchen cabinets and vanities is scheduled to move from 25 percent to 50 percent. Country-specific treatment can change the actual result.

Could that schedule change again? Yes. It already has once.

That is why we would not want today’s assumption buried permanently inside a base furniture price, as though anyone knows what the rate will be next year.

For a project installing in early 2027, this is a legitimate budget variable. It is not a reason to panic-buy furniture in August.

The counterweight nobody should leave out

A visible tariff charge can look dramatic on a quote. The broader furniture pricing data are less dramatic.

The Bureau of Labor Statistics’ Producer Price Index for commercial furniture, series WPU122, was 331.190 in June 2025 and 343.011 in June 2026, an increase of about 3.6 percent. The July 2026 reading is 344.083. For longer context, that index was 233.6 in June 2019, so commercial furniture producer prices are roughly 47 percent higher than they were seven years ago (BLS via FRED, series WPU122).

What the index does not tell us is how much of that increase came from tariffs versus labor, materials, freight, energy, margins, or any other input. Anyone assigning the whole movement to one cause is going beyond what the data say.

The important distinction is simpler:

A visible tariff surcharge is not the same thing as the total increase in furniture prices, and a 25 percent tariff on a specific imported classification does not mean your whole package is suddenly 25 percent more expensive.

What to ask when you see the line

Is the manufacturer’s surcharge fixed when I order, or can it change before shipment? That difference can matter more to your budget than the headline rate itself.

What is the surcharge calculated against? Ask whether it is applied to list price, dealer net, product net, or another defined base. Do not assume every manufacturer uses the same method.

Which actual products on my quote are subject to it? Ask for country of origin and classification on the meaningful exposed lines. Do not accept “everything is going up because of tariffs” as an analysis.

What does the quote hold in writing? Look at the expiration date, tariff language, escalation provisions, and what happens if the purchase order is issued after the quote expires.

What is the manufacturer’s policy if the underlying tariff is reduced, eliminated, or refunded? That question matters more now than it did six months ago.

Budget the exposure, not the headline

If only a portion of the package is exposed, build the contingency around that portion.

A blanket 10 percent contingency across a $500,000 furniture package is $50,000 whether the exposed product is $50,000 or $400,000, which tells you very little about the risk you are actually carrying.

Instead, identify the exposed lines, document the tariff assumption beside them, and build the contingency there.

That approach is easier to defend in a finance review and much harder to accidentally erase during value engineering.

There is another timing point worth understanding. Customs treatment generally turns on when goods are entered for consumption or withdrawn from warehouse for consumption, not the date the furniture is installed in your office. That language appears repeatedly in the governing proclamations and CBP guidance.

That is a more precise way to think about it than “get it into the country before January.”

If timing could materially change the tariff treatment on a large order, bring the manufacturer and a customs professional into that conversation. Physical arrival, customs entry, bonded storage, and final delivery are not interchangeable concepts.

And do not let a tariff date rush a program that is not ready.

If your headcount plan is unsettled, your space plan has not been tested, or you still do not know what your meeting rooms are supposed to accomplish, solve those problems first.

Five percentage points on covered upholstered furniture is a real cost. It is a smaller one than ordering $150,000 of the wrong furniture because you were racing a date.

About refunds, because somebody is going to ask

This part has changed materially since the Supreme Court decision.

For the IEEPA tariffs that were struck down, refund processing is no longer merely theoretical. Pursuant to Court of International Trade orders in Atmus Filtration v. United States and Euro Nations Florida Inc. v. United States, CBP launched its Consolidated Administration and Processing of Entries system, known as CAPE, on April 20, 2026. The importer of record or the broker that filed the original entry summaries can submit CAPE declarations through the ACE portal, and CBP adds interest under 19 U.S.C. 1505(c) running from the date of original payment (Holland & Knight, April 2026; CBP, IEEPA Duty Refunds).

It is not universal yet. Phase 1 covers roughly 63 percent of affected entries, and later phases for entries with final liquidation have not been given a timeline (Holland & Knight, April 2026).

One distinction matters more than the rest to a furniture buyer:

The customs refund belongs in the importer-of-record chain. It does not automatically create a refund from your dealer.

If the manufacturer or its importing affiliate was the importer of record and collected a tariff surcharge from customers, the practical question becomes whether its commercial policy provides any credit or adjustment when underlying duties are refunded.

The place to ask is the manufacturer, and we are happy to route that question to the right person there. Asking your dealer to get the tariff money back will not get you very far, because the money never sat with us.

Not every manufacturer is making the same choice

One North American manufacturer we carry told its dealers this week that it will not add a tariff surcharge and will not raise prices, and that it intends to absorb the additional cost instead. Its reasoning was that dealers and their customers already have enough variables, and that a price which does not move is worth something on its own right now.

That is a legitimate strategy, and it is mostly available to manufacturers whose production and material sourcing sit where the tariffs are not. It is also, in that manufacturer’s own words, subject to reassessment if conditions change materially. So treat it as a reason to ask your dealer which of your specified lines are currently holding price, not as a guarantee that any of them will hold indefinitely.

Those are two reasonable responses to the same uncertainty. One keeps the charge visible and adjusts it as the rules move, and the other absorbs it and competes on not having one. Either way the environment underneath is the same, and it is worth asking which approach each of your specified lines is taking.

What you should be able to expect from a dealer

The tariff line on your quote is not the customs entry itself. It is a manufacturer-imposed charge intended to recover some form of tariff-related cost or exposure.

Your dealer usually cannot unilaterally rewrite that manufacturer’s policy.

But that does not mean you should accept the line without understanding it.

We should be able to tell you what manufacturer imposed it, how it is calculated, which products it attaches to, whether it can change before shipment, what assumptions are built into the quote, and where alternatives would change the exposure.

All of that is knowable, and working it out with you is the part of our job that actually helps. Telling you that tariffs are coming and you should sign today would not.

If you have a 2027 project in budget and want us to go through the furniture package line by line and identify what is actually exposed, ask us. The useful work is not predicting Washington. It is separating the part of your budget that is truly at risk from the part that is not.

This article provides general information about a fast-moving trade environment and is not customs, tax, or legal advice. Product classification, valuation, country of origin, importer-of-record status, and entry treatment should be confirmed with the applicable supplier and a qualified customs professional. Tariff schedules and exclusions can change after publication. Rates and scope described here are current as of August 2026.

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