Import Duty Rates for Overseas vs Domestic Merch 2025

We live in interesting times, to say the least.

One of the current hot topics is tariffs. The current administration has decided to use tariffs as a cudgel to try to achieve certain economic goals. Some are punitive, in an attempt to punish countries they don't like by making it more expensive (and thus less likely) to import from those countries. Others are aimed domestically, in an attempt to reduce reliance on imports and spin up domestic production as a replacement.

Until recently, large swaths of Americans probably never really thought about tariffs. Until they became a hot topic politically over the last year, they just existed quietly in the background, doing their job in a passive way.

If you want to buy a thousand branded shirts for your business, you have to decide where you're getting them. The usual calculus is the balance of sustainability and price; domestic producers don't have the emissions of overseas shipping or the human rights issues, but are correspondingly more expensive. Foreign imports are cheaper, but do damage to the environment, to people involved in production, and elsewhere in the supply chain.

Tariffs change that equation. By levying a steeper import duty on goods imported from abroad, it makes less financial sense from a purely monetary perspective to import at all.

So, what are the current rates, and what should you know if you're looking to import promotional goods and merchandise in 2025 and beyond?

A Changing World

Before we dig in, it's worth keeping in mind that discussing specific numbers right now is an exercise in frustration. Tariffs are proposed, implemented, reversed, changed, undone, tweaked, and re-implemented seemingly at the drop of a hat.

As merchants ourselves, it's a bad position to be in. You never know if an order you're making now will be hit with tariffs before it's fulfilled and shipped.

Certainly, one of the stated goals of the tariffs is to discourage importing at all. Since domestically-produced merchandise doesn't have an import duty (not being imported, after all), it's a fee you don't have to worry about if you purchase merchandise domestically.

For one example, the tariff rate on imports from China increased at the end of January, then again in March, which lasted for just a few days before it was decreased (though to a level still higher than previously), which again lasted just a few days before it was increased again. It was further increased in April, then a few days later increased yet again, before mid-May it decreased, settling at a point still higher than any point before April. All of that is just 2025 from January to June.

The other reason discussing specific numbers is difficult is that import duties vary not just based on the country of origin, but also on the material being imported. For example, for a simple t-shirt produced and shipped from China, you have:

• A base 10% tariff on all apparel imports.
• A 20% "fentanyl-related duty" tariff on anything from China.
• A variable up to a 20% tariff holdover from years ago.

And that's not even that bad. "But wait; paying an additional 50% of the cost of a shipment in tariffs isn't that bad?" you might say?

A few months ago, the New York Times analyzed just one shipment of t-shirts from China. The timing, at the peak of the tariff war at the time, resulted in stacking tariffs that equated to, effectively, 185%.

For every dollar worth of material imported, nearly two additional dollars had to be paid in tariffs.

De Minimis and Suspended Shipping

Another concern you might have in the near future is something that happened recently enough that the full repercussions have yet to be felt.

The actual act that happened is the removal of the "de minimis" exemption. The words "de minimis" simply mean "about trifles", in the sense of "the law does not concern itself with trifles." Basically, it just refers to things that are too small to worry about. It's why you aren't going to get a felony if you steal a candy bar, you aren't required to pay income taxes on the proceeds from a garage sale, and why, until recently, you didn't have to pay an import duty on packages under $800.

Known as the de minimis trade rule, any package being shipped from overseas that had a declared value of under $800 was exempt from import duties. There were occasional exceptions, but for the most part, this kept customs running smoothly and cut back dramatically on the amount of paperwork that needed to be done every day about imports.

The de minimis exemption has been removed, now. Any package coming to the US from overseas now has to pay an import duty, regardless of the value of the package. Ordering one shirt or ordering a thousand, it makes no difference now.

There's one significant problem here, and it's not the requirement to pay tariffs on small imports. It's that it's unclear to most suppliers how to even pay them. The systems are not set up or in place, so even if you want to make those imports, you have no way of doing so.

Because of this confusion, numerous countries (a list of at least 25-30 at last check) have chosen the sensible option. That is, they've suspended shipping to the US entirely. It doesn't matter if it's a commercial package, a shipment from a friend, or a birthday gift from relatives overseas. Shipping is entirely suspended.

Depending on how this shakes out, you might find you have trouble locating someone who can ship you merchandise at all, even if you're willing to pay.

Dealing with Import Duties

As a business looking to purchase merchandise, you have a decision to make. How do you handle import duties?

From the outset, you have three options.

• You can simply pay them and get your merchandise, to do with as you will.
• You can look for an alternative supplier from a country with lower tariffs, for now, and switch.
• You can seek out domestic production of the items you need instead.

Depending on the kind of merchandise you're hoping to provide, you might not be able to find it made domestically. The United States doesn't have very much in the way of electronics manufacturing, we don't grow much chocolate or coffee, and we don't make things like stainless steel water bottles, at least not in large quantities. Even things we do make might themselves require components that are imported.

If you do choose to pay import duties on whatever merchandise you're importing, you then have another choice. Do you eat the cost, or do you pass that cost on to the consumer? If you're buying merchandise to hand out for free at trade shows or events, you don't have the opportunity to make back the money. But, if it's merchandise you're planning to sell in your storefront, you can pass that cost on.

Paying the Import Duties

If you're willing to pay the import duties and get your merchandise, that's fine, but it can be tricky to even know what you're going to pay.

The easy way to deal with it is to just wait until customs and border patrol send you the bill, and pay it to finish the shipping. But, with an uncertain landscape and changing tariff rates, you don't want to be blindsided by paying 3x your budget just to get your merchandise.

What do you need to know to figure out the effective tariff rate you'd be paying on your merchandise?

First, you need to know the country of origin of the products you're ordering. A lot of merchandise comes from places like China, Vietnam, and Taiwan, so you're generally looking at somewhere between a 20% and 50% rate for these countries. Even nearshore countries like Canada and Mexico are not free of tariffs, either.

Next, you need to know the category for the product. The government maintains a huge database called the Harmonized Tariff Schedule, which categorizes products by their materials and type of product. It's immense ( you can see the full thing here), and different kinds of products fall under different categories for different tariff levels.

For something like a t-shirt, Chapter 61 of the HTS deals with articles of apparel. Different kinds of apparel have different levels of tariff, which can be a percentage or a flat rate per weight of material, or both. Nice and easy, right?

On top of that, you might need to look into additional tariff duties like the fentanyl tariff, which is simply a punitive fee imposed on countries that people believe produce fentanyl, even if they don't, or they don't import it to us. Why should your t-shirts be tariffed for fentanyl? Politics.

When all of this is done, you'll have a rough idea of how much you're going to be paying in import duties for your merchandise. For most of the common producers of common merchandise you might see in a shop like ours (if we bought ours from overseas, which we generally don't), you're looking at somewhere between 30% and 90% tariffs when you add it all up.

You can also try to explore additional resources on import duties, like the UPS guide page. Unfortunately, it's all just such an immense and complicated topic that it can't be summed up in just a blog post or two, and it's changing every few weeks, it seems.

Buying Domestic Products Instead

If you don't fancy paying a significant additional cost on top of everything you import, you can always just buy domestic.

If, of course, the products you want are made domestically.

The good news is, many are! Not everything, not by a long shot, but a lot of the kinds of items you want as company merchandise are items you can find from domestic producers.

It's not necessarily all upside, though.

• Domestic producers need equipment and machines to produce, and a lot of those are imports.
• Increased demand can make for higher prices, longer wait times, and slower turnaround.
• Some of the secondary materials, like chemicals or dyes, might be imports.
• Some USA-based companies still rely on imports and launder them through USA processes to make their claims.

All of this means that you're going to have a bit of a harder time finding local producers, and those you do find might have longer turnaround times and higher prices as they, too, are affected by tariffs, either directly or indirectly.

If all of what we've said above makes it seem like we're opposed to import duties and the barriers to imports, that's not really our intention. There's a good side and a bad side to global commerce.

We believe that if you can produce it domestically, you probably should; local production and local economies are more beneficial to the people around you, and are much less devastating to the environment. Plus, local production in the USA is less exploitative and less likely to involve human rights violations.

The issue is that broad-spectrum import duties are not really the weapon that should be used to fight this fight. Sure, it puts pressure on local producers in the USA to ramp up production of things like t-shirts, and that's fine. It may do a good job of reducing global carbon emissions.

On the other hand, there are a lot of things that we simply can't produce in the United States. A lot of technology, medicine, and other items simply can't be made here, no matter how expensive you make it to import from somewhere else. Even if we do spend the 5-10 years and tens of millions of dollars to build the facilities to make it, then the raw materials may need to be imported. Some legitimately cannot be produced in the states, at all, period.

And, as always, it's worth remembering that import duties are almost always a cost passed onto the consumers, which means prices for everything going up in a time of already stark wealth disparity and economic uncertainty.

So, buy your merchandise domestically if you can, eat the tariffs if you can't, and we'll all try to get through this together. We offer a lot of brandable merchandise in our store that is produced in the United States, so if you're interested in these products, drop us a line.