Importing Furniture from Vietnam: Duties, Lead Times, and Landed Cost
The headline tariff rate is the number everyone quotes and rarely the number that decides anything.
Buyers importing furniture from Vietnam have spent two years watching duty rates move, get struck down in court, get replaced, and move again. That volatility has made a lot of published guidance useless, including some that is still sitting online with confident numbers attached to it.
This guide takes a different approach. The first section states where things stand and carries a review date, because that part will age. Everything after it is structural: how the duty stack is built, why classification matters more than the country rate, and the ordering mechanics that determine landed cost regardless of what the tariff schedule says in any given quarter.
Where Things Stand
Reviewed August 2026. Trade policy affecting Vietnam has changed repeatedly, so confirm current rates with your customs broker before quoting anything.
The short version: the emergency tariff regime that dominated 2025 is gone, replaced by narrower authorities that are more durable.
The 46% reciprocal tariff imposed on Vietnamese goods in April 2025 was struck down by the Supreme Court in February 2026, along with the rest of the emergency tariff programme. It was replaced by a flat 10% surcharge under Section 122 of the Trade Act, which by statute could run no longer than 150 days and expired on 24 July 2026.
A Section 301 action took effect at the moment Section 122 lapsed, applying duties of 10% or 12.5% across roughly 60 economies. Vietnam sits in the higher tier. The practical difference for most importers is modest in rate terms and significant in character: Section 301 has no statutory sunset, so this layer persists until it is removed by USTR or by the courts, rather than expiring on a calendar.
Two other things are worth knowing. Importers who paid the 46% rate between April 2025 and February 2026 may be entitled to refunds, and a claims process has been open since April 2026. A second Section 301 investigation, into industrial overcapacity, has not yet produced duties and remains unresolved.
How the Duty Stack Is Built
Understanding the structure is more useful than memorizing a rate, because the structure does not change when the rates do. Duty on an imported furniture shipment is assembled from separate layers, each calculated on the same customs value.
- The MFN base rate. The standard duty for the product's tariff classification. Much of furniture under HTS Chapter 94 carries a base rate of zero, which is why imported furniture has historically been so price-competitive.
- Country-level action. Currently the Section 301 layer described above. This is the number that moves with policy and gets the headlines.
- Product-level action. Section 232 duties apply to specific product categories regardless of origin. In furniture, this covers softwood timber and lumber, upholstered wooden furniture, and kitchen cabinets and vanities, each under its own tariff heading. Rates in this layer have been set, revised, and deferred more than once.
- Anti-dumping and countervailing duties. Product and origin specific, sometimes substantial, and easy to miss because they sit outside the headline tariff conversation entirely.
- Fees. Merchandise Processing Fee and Harbor Maintenance Fee. Individually small, and they belong in the model.
These layers stack rather than replace one another, with some exceptions where one authority explicitly excludes goods covered by another. A landed cost model needs a column for each rather than a single blended percentage.
Classification Decides More Than Origin
Here is the point most buyers miss, and it is worth more than any rate table.
The product-level duties in furniture are written against specific tariff headings, not against the word "furniture." The Section 232 wood action covers upholstered seats with wooden frames under a defined set of classifications. A chair whose seat is woven cane or rattan is classified differently from a chair with an upholstered wooden frame, even where the two sit side by side in the same lobby and cost roughly the same to buy.
The practical consequence is that two visually comparable products from the same country can carry materially different duty exposure based on construction and material composition. This is not a loophole and it is not aggressive planning. It is how the tariff schedule is written.
What to do with this
Get your customs broker to classify your actual SKUs before you build a cost model, and do it early enough that the answer can still influence what you specify. Classification is determined by the goods themselves, so a construction decision made at the design stage is also a duty decision. We can supply detailed material and construction specifications to support that classification work.
Construction and material composition determine tariff classification, which makes them a cost question as well as a design one.
Lead Times
Handwoven furniture runs on different timelines from machine-made goods. As a general guide to our own production:
- Samples and small orders: roughly two to four weeks
- Standard bulk orders: roughly six to ten weeks
- Custom or complex collections: twelve weeks and upward
Ocean freight sits on top of all three, and peak season congestion is real. The stage most often compressed is sampling, and it is the one that should not be. Approving a piece from a photograph and discovering the proportions are wrong after a container has shipped is the expensive version of saving two weeks.
For hospitality projects with a fixed opening date, work backward from the date and add a buffer. Accelerating handwork is possible and it is never cheap.
Minimum Order Quantities
Minimums in this industry are frequently negotiable by item rather than fixed by supplier. A factory quoting an identical minimum across its entire range is quoting a policy rather than a production reality, and it is fair to ask why.
Our own approach scales with the buyer:
- Boutique and independent buyers: small batches, typically in the range of fifty to one hundred units
- Retail brands: mid-sized seasonal collections
- Distributors and large programs: volume runs by SKU
The reason to start small is not caution for its own sake. Testing a design in a limited run before committing to a program is cheaper than discovering a proportion or finish problem at scale.
Shipping and Container Efficiency
Woven furniture is bulky and light, which makes container efficiency one of the largest levers on landed cost per unit, and one of the most consistently ignored.
Knock-down construction, nesting, and carton specification frequently move the per-unit landed cost further than negotiating the unit price does. A supplier who wants to discuss packing before production rather than after is telling you something useful about how they think.
On terms and documentation, we quote FOB, prepare export documentation, and coordinate with your forwarder or ours. Port congestion and equipment shortages have been recurring features of the last few years, so build schedule buffer rather than assuming a clean transit.
Container efficiency moves landed cost more than most price negotiations do, and almost nobody discusses it first.
Building a Landed Cost Model
Five inputs, and the model is only as good as the weakest one.
Classified unit cost
Unit price paired with the confirmed tariff classification for that specific SKU. Not a category estimate, and not the classification a similar-looking product carried last season.
Every duty layer separately
Base rate, country action, product action, and any anti-dumping or countervailing exposure, each in its own column. A single blended percentage hides which layer is moving when the total changes.
Freight divided by real container fit
Ocean cost allocated across the units that actually fit in the box, using the packed dimensions rather than the assembled ones. This is where knock-down construction shows its value.
Fees, insurance, and inland
MPF, HMF, insurance, customs brokerage, and delivery from port to site. Individually minor, collectively enough to erase a margin assumption.
Run the model before you commit rather than after, and rerun it when policy moves. A program planned across several seasons should treat the duty position as something to verify at each order rather than as settled once.
What We Do and What We Do Not
We manufacture in our own facilities in Nha Trang, Ho Chi Minh City, and the Binh Duong and Dong Nai provinces. That means we can give you accurate material and construction specifications for classification purposes, quote FOB with clear packing detail, and tell you plainly what a timeline will actually support.
What we are not is your customs broker. We do not classify your goods, file your entries, or advise on duty liability, and any supplier who offers to do those things is offering something outside their competence. Bring a licensed broker into the conversation early. We will give them whatever they need from our side.
Buyers earlier in the process may find our guide to sourcing furniture from Vietnam a useful starting point, and our guide to rattan and wicker manufacturing covers the material and construction detail that classification turns on.
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