Do I have to pay the 50% tariff on goods from Canada?

Status, and the time it was taken: as of 22 August 2026, 10:00 UTC, the additional 50% duty is in effect. It took effect at 12:01 a.m. Eastern on 22 August 2026 (04:01 UTC) and attaches to goods entered for consumption — or withdrawn from warehouse for consumption — on or after that moment. That effective date was set by a fourth proclamation signed 18 August 2026, which moved it from the original date of 19 August. This is the only block on this page that depends on when you are reading it. Everything below is written against your entry date, not against ours — so it stays correct however long this page sits here. The effective date has already moved once, and the proclamation reserves the power to move it again. Check the presidential-actions feed before you rely on it.

Method, so you can weigh it — including which parts are fresh and which are not: the effective date and the absence of any later Canada/Section 338 action were re-checked on 21 August against two independent sources, the White House presidential-actions index and the Federal Register API. The absence of these headings from the USITC tariff schedule was measured on 21 August with controls. The term search for energy, potash, fish, critical minerals was run on 20 August against the three Federal Register full texts, with positive controls, and was not re-run on 22 August. The reading of the exclusions clause and the annex headings is from a pass on 19 August and has not been re-read since. A machine-readable copy of Annex I WAS read directly on 22 August and counted — see the update below; that closes a residual this page previously carried open.

Short answer: it depends on one thing you already know — the date your goods are entered for consumption, or withdrawn from a warehouse for consumption. Entered before 12:01 a.m. Eastern on 22 August 2026: this duty does not apply. On or after that moment: quite possibly yes, and USMCA will not save you. The date on your entry summary is the whole question. Not the date you ordered, not the date it shipped, not the date it crossed.

These duties were originally scheduled for 19 August. They did not take effect. A fourth proclamation, signed 18 August 2026, moved the date: “The effective date of the additional ad valorem duties imposed in Proclamations 11046, 11047, and 11048 shall be 12:01 a.m. eastern time on August 22, 2026.” It is titled a Temporary Suspension and its recitals say it suspends the duties “for a period of 3 days” — so it is both a three-day suspension and an amendment to an effective date. It cancels nothing.

⏱ The detail that should change how you watch this. That proclamation was signed 18 August, took effect 22 August — and its Federal Register publication date is 24 August: two days after it started binding importers. We confirmed this from the public-inspection filing itself (document 2026-17294, filed 21 August, 11:15 a.m. Eastern). If your compliance process is “watch the Federal Register,” it is structurally two days late on an instrument that has already moved its own deadline once. The feed that moves first is the White House presidential-actions page, then the Federal Register public inspection desk — not the published issue.

If your product is listed in the annexes to Proclamations 11046, 11047 or 11048, and you enter it for consumption — or withdraw it from a warehouse for consumption — on or after 22 August 2026, 12:01 a.m. Eastern, an additional 50% applies. It is imposed under Section 338 of the Tariff Act of 1930 (19 U.S.C. 1338). Qualifying for USMCA does not exempt you. There is no in-transit relief.

⚠️ First, the discrepancy that matters most — and it is not a case of anyone being sloppy

Widely-published guidance on this measure — MLT Aikins, Zonos, and most trade press — states that it excludes energy, potash, fish and critical minerals.

They are not making it up. They are quoting the White House. The administration’s own fact sheet for these proclamations says it in as many words:

“These Section 338 tariffs will not apply to energy, potash, products subject to tariffs under Section 232, and certain other goods, such as fish or critical minerals.”

But those four terms appear zero times in the three operative proclamation texts — a term search we ran on 20 August 2026 with positive controls — and no annex exclusion heading we could find corresponds to them. That is the discrepancy, and it is the whole point of this page: a fact sheet is not law. The proclamation and its annex are.

Here is the exclusions clause, quoted in full. It is identical in all three proclamations:

“Except as otherwise provided in this proclamation and in Annex I to this proclamation, the duties imposed in this proclamation are in addition to any other duties, taxes, fees, exactions, and charges applicable to such products. The duties imposed in this proclamation shall not apply to articles subject to duties pursuant to section 232 of the Trade Expansion Act of 1962, as amended (19 U.S.C. 1862), or articles, excluding unmanned aircraft, subject to the World Trade Organization Agreement on Trade in Civil Aircraft.”

It names two exclusions. Articles already subject to Section 232, and civil aircraft under the WTO Agreement on Trade in Civil Aircraft — with unmanned aircraft expressly excluded from that exclusion, so drones get no relief. The words energy, potash, fish and critical minerals do not appear anywhere in any of the three proclamation texts.

The annex headings are consistent with that reading. As reported in trade advisories — not verified by us against a primary — the exclusion headings are 9903.03.15 (articles already under Section 232 — aluminium, steel, copper, vehicles and parts, wood, semiconductors, patented pharmaceuticals) and 9903.03.16 (civil aircraft, engines, parts, ground simulators), both marked “No change.” No energy, potash, fish or critical-minerals heading was found among them.

🔴 The residual, stated rather than hidden — because it is the part most likely to catch us out. The clause opens “Except as otherwise provided in this proclamation and in Annex I.” Annex I is a separate document. We have now read a machine-readable Annex I published at whitehouse.gov and counted it (see the update below) — but that document is headed as a list of articles the duty applies to, and our notes record further provisions elsewhere (certain Chapter 98 goods, personal-baggage goods). So the honest claim is: the exclusions clause names two categories, and we have not established that every carve-out is captured in the annex we read. We are not claiming no other exclusion exists anywhere. Anyone telling you they have confirmed a clean negative across these annexes should be asked how — in the Federal Register copies they are scanned images with no machine-readable text, so a term search across those is not possible and a reading of hundreds of provisions by eye is not a control. (The whitehouse.gov copy of Annex I is machine-readable — see the update below. That is the copy to search.)

What we are not claiming — read this before you act on any of it. We are not saying the exclusions won’t be honoured. The White House has said in writing that energy, potash, fish and critical minerals are outside these tariffs, and CBP may well implement exactly that. What we are saying is narrower and checkable: those four terms appear zero times in the three operative Federal Register texts — verified 20 August 2026 with positive controls — no annex exclusion heading we could find corresponds to them, and no CBP guidance has issued that would reconcile the two. Paragraph (7) of each proclamation lets CBP make “any technical correction to the annexes” by Federal Register notice — so this gap is precisely the kind of thing that can be closed at any moment, and may already have been by the time you read this.

What that means for you, concretely: if you are clearing Canadian seafood, potash or energy on the basis of the fact sheet, you are relying on a document that does not control classification. That may be fine. It may also arrive later as a bill, with interest. The cheap version of this is asking your broker to show you the annex heading your goods fall under. The expensive version is finding out after entry.

Check your own codes against the annex, not against this page.

And here is why this gap is so hard for anyone to close, which is more useful than assigning blame. The annexes — the actual lists of covered goods — are published in the Federal Register as scanned images. The machine-readable text of each document contains no HTS codes at all. So that copy cannot be searched, quoted or diffed; checking a code against it requires reading the PDFs by eye. The whitehouse.gov copy of Annex I is a different matter — it extracts cleanly, and it is the one we counted (see the update below).

That is the practical reason coverage of this measure leans on the fact sheet and on secondary summaries rather than on the annex: the fact sheet is readable and the Federal Register copy of the annex is not. It is also why “check your own codes against the annex” is real advice rather than a formality: we have not found a published source that says it did this line by line, and we could not do it from the Federal Register copy either.

Why this matters in money: an importer of Canadian seafood or potash who read the common guidance would conclude they were exempt and clear entries on that basis. If they are wrong, the correction arrives later as a bill, with interest.

(Verification method, so you can repeat it: the three full texts are at federalregister.gov/documents/full_text/text/2026/07/23/ under document numbers 2026-14991, 2026-14992 and 2026-14997. Note that these files contain NUL bytes — grep returns nothing rather than erroring. Strip them first with tr -d '\000'.)

The four things people get wrong

1. “We’re USMCA-qualified, so we’re fine”

No. U.S. Note 51(a) is explicit: “Products that are eligible for special tariff treatment under general note 3(c)(i) to the tariff schedule… shall be subject to the additional ad valorem rate of duty imposed by this heading.” The same good, from the same supplier, under the same USMCA certificate, enters duty-free on one side of the effective moment and carries an additional 50% on the other. Preference status and this duty are separate questions.

2. “We don’t import cars, dairy or alcohol, so this isn’t about us”

The proclamation titles describe what the administration says Canada did wrong. They do not describe the goods that get taxed. The clearest evidence is the exclusions clause quoted above: passenger cars and light trucks are carved out of the “Motor Vehicles” proclamation, because articles already subject to Section 232 are excluded from these duties. On its own operative text, a proclamation named for motor vehicles is substantially not about motor vehicles.

✅ UPDATE, 22 August 2026 — we stopped relying on other people's counts and counted it ourselves. You can repeat this in about two minutes. There is a machine-readable copy of Annex I published at whitehouse.gov — headed “A 50% ad valorem Section 338 tariff shall apply to the following articles…” — and unlike the Federal Register copy, its text extracts cleanly. We downloaded it and counted:

• 439 unique 8-digit HTSUS lines — counted from the Product column, one code per row.
• 56 HS chapters — chapters 04 through 97.
• Zero Chapter 99 headings anywhere in it.
• Exactly one line in chapter 87, the vehicles chapter: 8711.50.00 — which the tariff schedule defines as motorcycles “with internal combustion piston engine of a cylinder capacity exceeding 800 cc.”

That settles a disagreement this page previously reported as unresolved — and our count agrees with the commonly printed figure exactly. The widely-cited number is 439, and a direct count of the Product column returns 439. The reading that this list contains no line in the tariff schedule's vehicles chapter is nonetheless wrong: 8711.50.00 is one of those 439 — a motorcycle over 800 cc. If you import heavy motorcycles or their parts from Canada, this is your line.

✍️ Correction, same day, against ourselves. An earlier version of this section said the count was 440 and that the extra line over 439 was the motorcycle. Both halves were wrong. Our first pass matched any 8-digit code anywhere on a line, which swept in 6203.41.25 — a code that appears only inside a product description, as the thing a listed line is defined against ("trousers and breeches, other than of heading 6203.41.25"). It is a carve-out reference, not a covered article. Anchoring the count to the Product column gives 439. And 8711.50.00 was never the "extra" line — it sits inside the 439. On a page telling you to count it yourself, we owed you a correct count.

Precision about what we verified: the document is titled “Annex I” and does not itself name a proclamation number, so attributing it to the Motor Vehicles tranche rests on its count matching the figure published for that tranche. What is ours and checkable is the count, the chapter spread, and the single chapter-87 line. (The document also miscites the Section 232 statute as “18 U.S.C. 1862”; it is 19 U.S.C. 1862 — a transcription slip in the source, noted so you are not confused by it.)

For comparison, here are the figures the trade press has been circulating, and whose they are:

• Motor Vehicles (11048) — 439 HTSUS subheadings. White & Case: “imposes a 50% additional tariff on 439 HTSUS subheadings covering a wide variety of agricultural and manufactured products.” McMillan LLP and Global Trade Alert print the same figure. Treat that agreement carefully: none of the three states how it counted, and the annexes are page images in the Federal Register — so three sources agreeing is consistent with one number propagating, which is the very thing this page warns about.
  There was a live disagreement here, and we have now resolved it ourselves — see the update above. Holland & Knight reads the list as containing no line in the tariff schedule’s vehicles chapter. Our own count of the Product column shows that reading is wrong: 8711.50.00, a motorcycle over 800 cc, is one of the 439. If you import motorcycles or motorcycle parts from Canada, this is your line — and you should still check the annex for your own codes rather than take ours.
• Dairy (11047) — 52 HTSUS subheadings. White & Case; McMillan concurs.
• Alcoholic Beverages (11046) — 63 HTSUS subheadings, covering, in White & Case’s words, “a variety of alcohol products, certain wood and paper products, and hockey equipment.” Butzel Long corroborates that description — “certain paper and paperboard products and hockey equipment” — though Butzel gives no subheading count of its own.

Global Trade Alert and McMillan LLP both put the combined total at roughly 554 tariff lines — which is the sum of the three annex figures above. Most other sources give no total at all; Butzel Long says “more than 550”, and several say only “hundreds”. Note what that means: a proclamation titled “Alcoholic Beverages” is where hockey sticks and paperboard sit. We are not aware of any published count of the HS chapters involved, and an earlier version of this page asserted one. We could not source it, so it is gone. That is the same test we are asking you to apply to every other source on this measure, and it would be dishonest to exempt ourselves from it.

If you checked the headline and concluded you were unaffected, you checked the title of a document rather than its annex.

3. “We moved inventory into a bonded warehouse before the deadline”

This is the expensive one. The trigger, as written in the original proclamations, is “goods entered for consumption, or withdrawn from warehouse for consumption, on or after 12:01 a.m. eastern time on August 19, 2026.” Read that date as 22 August — the quote is verbatim from the July proclamations, and the 18 August proclamation amended only the date, leaving the mechanism untouched. The duty attaches on withdrawal, not arrival. Pre-positioning inventory does not lock in the old rate — it defers the moment you pay the new one. A search of all three texts for transit, on the water, vessel, lading and exported before returns nothing: there is no in-transit exclusion and no grandfather.

⚓ Do not assume that is normal, because it is not — and this is checkable in one query. At least one comparable programme does grandfather goods already on the water — we checked one and found it. The live heading 9903.02.12, quoted from the published tariff schedule, opens: “Except for goods loaded onto a vessel at the port of loading and in transit on the final mode of transit before 12:01 a.m. …” That is what an in-transit carve-out looks like when a programme has one. These three proclamations contain no such words. If your container sailed from Canada well before the effective moment but clears on or after it, the fact that it left early does not help you. Reason from the entry date, not the sailing date.

4. “It replaces the duties we already pay”

It does not. It is “in addition to any other duties, taxes, fees, exactions, and charges.” It stacks on the general rate, on other Chapter 99 duties, and on antidumping and countervailing duties. The duty column reads “The duty provided in the applicable subheading + 50%.” The one thing it does not stack with is Section 232 — where 232 applies, 338 does not.

Where it sits in the tariff schedule

Exclusions are reported to sit at 9903.03.15 (Section 232 articles) and 9903.03.16 (civil aircraft). All governed by U.S. Note 51 to Subchapter III, Chapter 99, HTSUS. Signed 20 July 2026, published 23 July 2026. Originally effective 19 August 2026; moved to 22 August 2026 by the proclamation of 18 August.

Authority: 19 U.S.C. 1338; 3 U.S.C. 301; 19 U.S.C. 2483.

Has CBP told brokers how to file these?

Not as at our last check — and not at any point since the proclamations were signed. We read CBP’s Cargo Systems Messaging Service feed directly. The 100 most recent CSMS messages run 12 June to 21 August 2026, 10:21 a.m. Eastern, unfiltered, covering the entire window since the proclamations of 20 July — 27 of them are from August alone. Across all 100 there is no Section 338 message, no Canada tariff implementation guidance, and no mention of Canada, 11046, 11047, 11048, or 9903.03 at all. This is not a quiet period; CBP published routinely throughout it.

CBP does normally issue one. The same 100 messages include CSMS # 69326983 (Section 301 forced-labour duties), # 69302472 (Section 301, Brazil), # 69252300 (Section 232 copper) and # 69395344 (Section 232 pharmaceuticals). For this measure there is nothing.

And when we checked, the headings themselves were not in the published tariff schedule

This is a second, independent check, and it points the same way. The USITC publishes the Harmonized Tariff Schedule with a public search endpoint. On 21 August 2026, 03:15 UTC, re-run 22 August 2026, we queried it for the five Chapter 99 headings these proclamations are reported to create:

9903.03.12 (alcoholic beverages), 9903.03.13 (dairy), 9903.03.14 (motor vehicles), 9903.03.15 and 9903.03.16 (the two exclusions). All five returned an empty result — literally [], three bytes.

🔴 One qualification on those five numbers, and we would rather state it than let you assume we sourced something we did not. The subheading numbers .12–.16 come from trade advisories, not from the proclamations themselves. We searched the operative Federal Register text of Proclamation 11046 for the string 9903.03 and it does not appear — 0 occurrences using grep -a, where the same command returns 168 for the word the, so the zero is a real absence and not the well-known NUL-byte trap that makes this file return nothing for everything. The codes live in the annexes, and the annexes are page images in the Federal Register. So the claim we can stand behind is the narrower one: the published schedule carries 9903.03.01 through .11 and nothing above it. Whether the missing headings are numbered .12–.16 is something we have read, not something we have verified. That distinction is the entire subject of this page, so it would be indefensible to exempt ourselves from it.

🔴 And here is why that matters operationally, not academically — this is a one-digit error that changes which duty you are declaring. Published advisories on these duties do not all print the same Chapter 99 code: some show 9903.03.12, others show 9903.02.12. Those differ by one digit and they are not the same thing. We queried both on 22 August 2026:

(We have not counted how many advisories print which, so we are not calling one variant rare or common — only showing what each code returns.)

• 9903.03.12 → empty, literally [].
• 9903.02.12 → a real, live heading — and it is not this measure and not Canada. It covers “articles the product of Cameroon” under a different programme, with its own in-transit dates in 2025.

So one of those codes returns nothing and the other returns the wrong country. If an advisory in front of you prints a 9903.02 heading for Canadian goods, that is not the Section 338 duty. Ask where the code came from before anyone files it. We are describing what the public tariff endpoint returns for each code, which you can re-run yourself in a browser; we are not characterising any particular firm's advice.

The control is what makes that worth reading. We then queried the prefix 9903.03 — the same block these headings sit in. It returns eleven records: 9903.03.01 through 9903.03.11, each with a full description. The published schedule runs contiguously up to .11 and stops — exactly one heading before the five headings these proclamations are reported to create. The endpoint is live and it serves this block; the gap begins exactly where those reported headings would sit.

Read that precisely, because the distinction is the whole point. This does not mean the headings do not exist or that the duty will not apply. The proclamations create the relevant headings by operation of law, and goods entered on or after 22 August 2026 are liable whatever a lookup returns. What it means is narrower: as measured on 21 August 2026, the heading you would file under was absent from the published schedule, so it could not be looked up, validated, or auto-populated by ordinary means. Re-run that query yourself before relying on it — it is a public endpoint, and this is exactly the kind of gap that closes without announcement. That is the same practical problem as the missing CBP guidance, arriving from a different direction — and the two were measured with different instruments, so neither is an inference from the other.

So if a broker tells you how these entries should be filed, it is worth asking what they are basing it on. The proclamation annexes were the authoritative list when we last checked, on 21 August 2026. This can change at any time — CBP typically issues guidance close to an effective date, so a message may well have appeared since. If one has, it supersedes this section, and your broker should be able to cite it by number. "No CBP guidance has issued" is a checkable statement, not a reassurance: the CSMS feed is public.

What to actually do

1. Pull your last twelve months of Canadian entries and match your own classification codes against the annexes to all three proclamations. Not a summary of the annexes — the annexes.
2. Ask your broker in writing which entries landing on or after 22 August fall under the new headings. Ask for entry numbers, not reassurance.
3. If something has already been withdrawn and classified wrongly, correct it yourself rather than waiting for it to be found. A voluntary correction costs less than a retroactive assessment.

One thing that could change all of this — and it already has, once

Proclamation 11046 preserves the President’s authority to “suspend, revoke, supplement, or amend” a Section 338 proclamation at any time. There is no notice-and-comment step and no agency process to watch.

This is not hypothetical. It is exactly what happened on 18 August, when a fourth proclamation moved the effective date from the 19th to the 22nd — and it demonstrates the pattern you should expect: the action appeared on whitehouse.gov/presidential-actions and, as of 20 August, still had not reached the Federal Register. The FR lags. If you are watching only the Federal Register, you will learn about the next change after it has already bound you.

Re-verified 21 August 2026, 03:15 UTC, against two independent sources: no presidential action dated 19 August or later concerns Canada, Section 338, or Proclamations 11046/11047/11048. The White House presidential-actions index shows the most recent action of any kind as The National Space Transportation Policy (20 August), and the most recent Canada action as the Temporary Suspension proclamation of 18 August. The Federal Register API returns exactly one presidential document published since 18 August — document 2026-16979 of 19 August, on unmanned aircraft systems, which does not concern Canada or Section 338. The 18 August proclamation was the operative instrument when we last checked. A further extension, or a negotiated deal, remains entirely possible at any point — that is the nature of this instrument, not a prediction about a particular week. Check the presidential-actions feed before you rely on the date in this page — it can change with no notice-and-comment step and no agency process to watch, and it has changed once already.

Sources are linked to primary documents throughout — Federal Register texts, the HTSUS notes, and CBP’s own message index. Every figure above can be checked against them. If you find something here that is wrong, it will be corrected and the correction dated.