The 150-Day Clock on Trump’s New Tariffs—And What Legal Authorities Come Next

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President Trump’s temporary import surcharge had a built-in limit: 150 days, unless Congress extended it. The surcharge, a 10 percent tax on imports under Section 122 of the Trade Act of 1974, expired on July 24, 2026. New import taxes, or tariffs, of 10 to 12.5 percent on imports from sixty economies, with certain exemptions, took effect the same day under Section 301 of the same law.

By its text, Section 301 sets no such limit: the trade representative decides how long an action lasts, and one ends at four years unless a continuation is requested. Which law a tariff rests on decides how long it can last and who is exempt.

The July deadline passed, but import duties continued

Trump’s proclamation under Section 122 imposed a 10 percent surcharge for 150 days, effective February 24, 2026. It ran from 12:01 a.m. eastern standard time on February 24 through 12:01 a.m. eastern daylight time on July 24, 2026, unless ended or modified earlier or extended by an Act of Congress. That was a deadline for this particular surcharge, rather than a date when the United States would stop collecting every import duty.

On July 23, 2026, the Office of the United States Trade Representative (USTR) announced final Section 301 action imposing tariffs on sixty economies over what it determined was their failure to prohibit and effectively enforce bans on imports produced with forced labor. U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP), which administers import entries, instructed importers and brokers to apply the new duties to goods entered for consumption, or withdrawn from a warehouse for consumption, starting July 24, 2026. Entry for consumption means filing the required entry summary with Customs in proper form, with estimated duties attached. For goods held in a bonded warehouse, withdrawal for consumption requires a separate Customs filing. The new duties range from 10 percent to 12.5 percent, with certain exemptions.

Section 301 allows the trade representative to impose duties or other import restrictions for the time the trade representative determines appropriate. Under the statute’s text, the replacement does not inherit the 150-day limit just because it covers imports the surcharge once covered.

CBP’s guidance exempts Canadian products entered free of duty under the United States-Mexico-Canada Agreement (USMCA) from the new Canadian Section 301 duty. Qualifying Mexican goods entered duty free under USMCA receive a corresponding exception from the new Mexican duty. An exemption has to be checked against the particular duty being charged: qualifying for one does not establish an exemption under a different statute.

Why Section 122 gives Congress a role at the deadline

Section 122 permits special import restrictions to address large and serious U.S. balance-of-payments deficits, prevent imminent significant dollar depreciation, or cooperate in correcting an international balance-of-payments disequilibrium. The balance of payments records transactions between U.S. and foreign residents, including goods, services, income, assets and liabilities. The trigger is a problem with the country’s international payments, not simply a foreign trade practice the government objects to. What counts as a balance-of-payments deficit was later disputed in court. The statute caps a temporary surcharge at 15 percent in addition to existing duties and limits its duration to 150 days unless Congress extends it by an Act.

The 15 percent figure is the law’s ceiling, not the rate Trump set, which was 10 percent. The president cannot extend the 150 days alone: an extension requires an Act of Congress. Nor is the clock a grant of another term whenever the administration wants the same tariff to continue.

Congress required such a surcharge to apply broadly and uniformly across products. The president may make exceptions for the needs of the U.S. economy, limited to reasons such as domestic supply that is unavailable at reasonable prices, necessary raw-material imports and avoiding serious supply disruptions, and where a restriction would be unnecessary or ineffective. Trump’s temporary surcharge excepted articles subject to import restrictions under Section 232, a national-security trade law described below, and Canadian or Mexican goods entered duty free under specified USMCA provisions.

The Constitution assigns Congress the powers to regulate foreign commerce and impose duties, and courts have found no inherent presidential power to impose tariffs in peacetime. A president’s tariff therefore has to rest on a statute in which Congress has handed over part of that power.

For more about the law, read what Congress intended when it wrote the temporary-surcharge provision.

The border bill and the store price are different

A tariff, also called a duty, is a tax on imported goods. The most common kind, an ad valorem duty, is a percentage of the merchandise’s value, while a specific duty is an amount per unit of weight or another quantity. The obligation to pay customs duty rests on the person or firm in whose name the import entry is filed. Paying a customs broker does not relieve an importer of liability if the broker fails to pay CBP. So the importer pays the tariff at the border. Whether, and how much, that cost reaches the store price is a separate question.

In a paper in the Federal Reserve’s Finance and Economics Discussion Series, revised in August 2026, Sinem Hacıoğlu Hoke and Leo Feler used transaction-level data linked to tariff exposure, along with a survey of tariff sentiment, to estimate the effects of the 2025 tariffs on households. They found higher retail prices and lower spending on affected goods. Those findings do not mean every product’s store price rises by the percentage printed in its tariff schedule.

When one tariff expires and another replaces it, what matters for a particular shipment is how each treats that product and country, not the two headline percentages.

The other powers come with different conditions

Section 232: a national-security finding

Section 232 of the Trade Expansion Act applies when the Commerce Department finds that a product is being imported in quantities or under circumstances that threaten to impair national security. Commerce must submit its investigation report within 270 days of initiation. Once Commerce reports a national-security threat, the president has 90 days to decide whether to agree and what action to take. If the president decides to adjust the imports, that action must be implemented within 15 days of the decision. The statute lets the president determine the nature and duration of the action needed to address the identified national-security threat.

On September 23, 2026, Commerce’s Bureau of Industry and Security published guidance for carrying out tariffs on specialty pharmaceuticals and associated ingredients under Proclamation 11020. The notice describes a 100 percent tariff on certain patented pharmaceuticals and associated ingredients, imposed under Section 232 and effective July 31, 2026 for companies listed in the proclamation and September 29, 2026 for all others. Different rates apply to products from certain jurisdictions and from companies with Commerce-approved onshoring agreements, and the notice says the tariffs do not apply to generic pharmaceuticals. The surcharge’s July deadline did not affect those tariffs. The Bureau of Industry and Security’s investigation inventory also lists an anthracite-coal investigation initiated June 29, 2026. Opening an investigation is a step toward a possible response, not itself a tariff on the investigated goods.

Section 301: findings about foreign practices

Section 301 allows action when USTR determines that a foreign act, policy or practice is unreasonable or discriminatory, burdens or restricts U.S. commerce, and warrants a U.S. response. For the 2026 forced-labor action, USTR invited comments on the proposed response through July 6 and held hearings from July 7 to July 9. Those dates have passed, so the comment period is no longer open.

An action under this authority ends after four years unless the petitioner or a representative of a domestic industry that benefits from it asks, during the final sixty days, for it to continue. A qualifying continuation request requires USTR to review effectiveness, possible alternatives and effects on the U.S. economy, including consumers.

Section 338: discrimination and possible exclusion

Section 338 of the Tariff Act applies when the president finds that a foreign country imposes unreasonable charges or restrictions on U.S. products that it does not enforce equally on other countries’ products, or discriminates in a way that puts U.S. commerce at a disadvantage. The president must also find that acting serves the public interest. The law permits new or additional duties to offset that disadvantage, up to 50 percent of the goods’ value or the equivalent, collected thirty days after a proclamation. The U.S. International Trade Commission has a duty to track discrimination against U.S. commerce and to give the president that information along with recommendations. A Section 338 duty must be tied to the discrimination found; the 50 percent ceiling is not a general power to tax imports worldwide. If the president finds that the country has kept up or increased the discrimination after an initial duties proclamation, Section 338 allows a further proclamation excluding its products from importation, when the president considers that consistent with U.S. interests.

Section 338 tells the president to suspend, revoke, supplement or amend a proclamation when the public interest requires it. Unlike Section 122, Section 338 has no fixed 150-day period, so the July clock does not supply an end date for a Section 338 measure. Nor should a statutory power to impose duties be read as a guarantee that every use of it would survive a court challenge.

Canada shows how a replacement can change the kind of restriction

On July 20, 2026, the White House announced three Section 338 proclamations imposing additional 50 percent tariffs on specified Canadian goods, including covered USMCA goods. It called them a response to Canada’s discriminatory treatment of American products, naming cars, alcohol and dairy. A subsequent suspension proclamation reset the effective time for those duties to 12:01 a.m. eastern time on August 22, 2026. That was a separate clock from the surcharge’s, which had already run out in July.

In September, in what the White House called a response to Canadian retaliation, the president changed which products the tariffs cover, removing items such as rock salt and cement and adding products including all-terrain vehicles and additional dairy products, effective September 15, 2026. The White House said the covered Section 338 tariffs apply to USMCA goods and in addition to Section 232 tariffs. So a USMCA exemption from the surcharge or from the Section 301 duties does not carry over to the Section 338 tariffs.

A further proclamation excluded specified Canadian alcoholic beverages from importation for goods imported on or after September 29, 2026. The proclamations on dairy and on motor vehicles also excluded specified Canadian products from the same date. For covered goods imported from that date, the restriction is no longer a tariff but a bar on importation into the United States. Under the alcoholic-beverage proclamation, covered goods imported before September 29, 2026 but not yet entered for consumption or withdrawn from warehouse remain subject to the 50 percent duty. The dairy and motor-vehicle proclamations use the same transitional rule. The annexes defining the affected goods matter because these instruments do not ban every Canadian product.

Court rulings must be matched to the statute and the case

The Court of International Trade held the surcharge’s duties unlawful in May, a ruling stayed pending appeal in June, and the replacements face their own court challenge.

The Court of International Trade is a national federal court that hears civil cases involving imports and international trade.

The Supreme Court’s consolidated opinion in Learning Resources, Inc. v. Trump and Trump v. V.O.S. Selections, Inc. was decided on February 20, 2026. The Supreme Court held that the International Emergency Economic Powers Act (IEEPA) does not authorize the president to impose tariffs. Trump had used IEEPA for a series of tariff orders; he signed the Section 122 surcharge proclamation on February 20, 2026, the day the Supreme Court ruled against that use of IEEPA. That ruling concerned tariffs under an emergency-powers law, not the Section 122 surcharge or the Section 301 tariffs, which have their own cases below.

Trump’s surcharge proclamation justified Section 122 action as necessary to address what he described as a large and serious balance-of-payments deficit. The proclamation cited a 2024 current-account deficit of 4.0 percent of gross domestic product and the loss of a primary-income surplus as part of its reasoning. These were the administration’s premises for using a particular statutory power, rather than proof by themselves that its legal conditions were satisfied.

The states that sued over the surcharge argued in their complaint that a trade deficit is only one component of the current account, which is itself only part of the balance of payments, and that the proclamation wrongly treated those concepts as interchangeable. The Court of International Trade reported that the states also argued that the tariffs were not applied consistent with the nondiscrimination principle the law requires, and that large and serious balance-of-payments deficits cannot occur under a floating exchange-rate system. The trade court quoted the government’s reply that the states’ floating-rate position would mean Section 122 was a nullity from the day it was enacted. The court said both sides overstated the consequences of the United States’ move from a fixed exchange-rate system to a floating one. The majority held that the proclamation exceeded Section 122’s authority because it substituted trade and current-account deficits for the balance-of-payments deficits the statute means.

The Court of International Trade struck down the Section 122 tariffs on May 7, 2026, in the words of Oregon’s official litigation tracker, though its permanent injunction ran to three plaintiffs: Washington and two companies, Burlap and Barrel, Inc., and Basic Fun, Inc., that had also sued. The opinion identified all three successful plaintiffs as importers, including the two companies that imported merchandise directly from overseas. The court dismissed the claims of every other state, Oregon’s included, for lack of standing, and one of the three judges dissented, disagreeing with the majority’s interpretation of Section 122. The trade court said importer plaintiffs had paid, and would continue paying absent relief, the Section 122 duties it held unlawful. On June 11, 2026, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit granted a stay pending appeal, and Oregon’s tracker said then that the parties were briefing the appeal. A stay pauses the challenged ruling during an appeal; it is not a final appellate approval of the tariff. The May opinion declined a universal injunction and limited relief to the successful importer plaintiffs, including refunds with interest for Section 122 duties they paid before the injunction took effect. The publicly available appellate docket, updated October 9, 2026, lists September 18 as its last known filing date and warns that its PACER and RECAP records may not be up to date.

The replacement Section 301 tariffs face their own court challenge. On August 19, 2026, the Court of International Trade chose Learning Resources, Inc. et al. v. United States of America et al. as the sample case, the one it will consider first, and stayed the other forced-labor cases. A group of states filed a proposed brief on September 11, 2026 supporting Learning Resources’ motion for judgment on the agency record. The sample-case plaintiffs filed their reply supporting that motion on September 18, 2026. The motion asks the court to rule on the merits using the agency record; it is a request, not a ruling that approves or invalidates the duties. This challenge is a separate proceeding, so neither the IEEPA ruling nor the expiration of the Section 122 surcharge decides it.

What to check before treating a headline as the rate

CBP’s “CSMS # 69326983 – GUIDANCE: Section 301 Forced Labor Import Duties” provides implementation instructions for importers, brokers and filers and links to USTR’s underlying action. Check the legal notice and its product annexes, then match them to the country of origin, the import’s classification and the applicable entry date. Check the current court docket separately if the issue is a stay, a merits decision or a remedy for duties already paid.