A synthetic hoodie's base duty rate is 32%
Last week I was choosing which product lines Duty Diligence should monitor. Rather than guess, I took the public distribution of what Shopify stores actually sell (apparel is about 27% of the 2.9 million live stores) and checked the duty rate on each common product against the current US tariff schedule.
The line I had to look at twice was the synthetic hoodie. It sits at 6110.30.30 in the schedule, a knitted pullover of man-made fibres, and the base US duty rate on that line is 32%. It's worth being clear about what that number is: it is the ordinary rate that has been in chapter 61 for decades, and it applies before any of the recent trade actions are layered on top. After 20 years of importing physical products I still assumed I'd misread the schedule!
The cotton comparison is what I found most useful, so here it is in full:
| Product | HTS line | Base duty |
|---|---|---|
| Hoodie, man-made fibres | 6110.30.30 | 32% |
| Men's knitted cotton shirt | 6105.10.00 | 19.7% |
| Hoodie or jumper, cotton | 6110.20.20 | 16.5% |
| Cotton t-shirt | 6109.10.00 | 16.5% |
So the choice of fibre roughly doubles the duty on a hoodie. At a $10 factory cost the polyester version owes $3.20 at the border and the cotton one $1.65, and that difference was decided at the design stage, long before anyone thought about pricing.
I think the reason this is worth writing down is that duty tends to be the estimated number in a costing. Factory costs get quoted to the cent and freight gets a real quote, but in my experience the duty line is usually a round guess, and for polyester garments a guess of 10% is a long way out.
It also puts the last six months in context. The layers that sit on top of the base rate (the Section 301 lists, the surviving Section 232 measures, and the new Section 338 duties on Canadian goods from 19 August) have changed three times since February. The base rates haven't moved at all, and for a lot of apparel the base is still the biggest single component of the duty bill.
This is the problem Duty Diligence works on. It reads the cost, HS code and country of origin already kept in a Shopify catalogue and shows the effective duty and duty-inclusive landed margin per variant, re-verified against the published sources twice a day, with the source on every figure. The app is live on the Shopify App Store, and the front page has a free checker for the 19 August Canada list. If it looks useful, I'm happy to answer any questions about how the rates are built.
The working: rates are the general (MFN) column of the current USITC HTS release, resolved on 23 July 2026, before any chapter 99 layer is applied. Lines shown are the 10-digit statistical lines 6110.30.30.05, 6105.10.00.10, 6110.20.20.05 and 6109.10.00.04. Store-distribution figure from Store Leads' public census of live Shopify stores. Duty rates are informational estimates from published sources - not customs, legal or financial advice.