The Quartz Safeguard Starts August 15, 2026: 25% Inside the Quota, 50% Above It

Key takeaways

• The effective date is August 15, 2026. The proclamation, signed July 31, 2026 and published in the Federal Register on August 5, 2026 at 91 FR 50645, applies to quartz surface products "entered, or withdrawn from warehouse for consumption, on or after 12:01 a.m. eastern time on August 15, 2026."
• The relief is a Section 201 safeguard shaped as a tariff-rate quota, and it runs four years. It covers three ten-digit HTSUS lines under a new note 41: 6810.99.0020, 6810.99.0040, and 7020.00.6000. The proclamation says within-quota quantities increase and duty rates decrease in years two, three, and four.
• The exclusion list is much longer than Canada and Mexico. Products of Australia, Colombia, Israel, Jordan, the Republic of Korea, Panama, Peru, Singapore, the six CAFTA-DR countries, and CBERA beneficiary countries are excluded too, along with qualifying developing countries. Origin records now decide whether this duty applies to your goods at all.
• Year one is 25% within the quota and 50% above it, and the President set that above-quota rate higher than the ITC recommended. The Annex creates two new headings, 9903.45.30 for in-quota entries and 9903.45.31 for over-quota entries. The ITC had recommended 40% above quota. Summaries still quoting 40% are describing that recommendation. The measure that takes effect says 50%.

The quartz safeguard tariff applies to entries on or after August 15, 2026

The quartz safeguard tariff takes effect on August 15, 2026. Covered imports pay 25% within an annual quota and 50% above it in year one, under new HTSUS headings 9903.45.30 and 9903.45.31. Products of Canada, Mexico, Korea, and a dozen other trading partners are excluded.

That paragraph is the whole event. The rest of this brief is about what the event does to a specific reader: a business that imports engineered quartz surfaces, or buys them from someone who does, and now has one week to get its paperwork in order.

One framing point comes before the details. A Section 201 safeguard responds to injury from import competition that the ITC investigated and found. It is a different instrument from the tariff actions many importers dealt with earlier in 2026, and its exclusions follow different rules. The most important of those differences, for anyone sourcing outside China, is that origin can take your goods out of the action entirely.

A proclamation signed July 31 created a four-year tariff-rate quota on quartz surface products

On July 31, 2026, the President signed a proclamation imposing safeguard relief on imports of quartz surface products, the category that includes engineered quartz countertop material. The Federal Register published it on August 5, 2026 at 91 FR 50645. The legal basis is section 203(a)(3) of the Trade Act of 1974, codified at 19 U.S.C. 2253(a)(3).

The relief is a tariff-rate quota. The proclamation describes a four-year structure, "with annual increases in the within-quota quantities and reductions in the rates of duty applicable to goods entered within and in excess of those quantities in the second, third, and fourth years, as provided in the Annex."

A new note 41 carries the product scope. Three ten-digit HTSUS lines are covered. The two 6810.99 lines fall under the heading for articles of cement, concrete, or artificial stone, and 7020.00.6000 falls under the heading for other articles of glass. The effective language is exact:

"entered, or withdrawn from warehouse for consumption, on or after 12:01 a.m. eastern time on August 15, 2026"

The exclusion list runs well past Canada and Mexico

Most coverage of this action names two excluded countries. The proclamation names many more, in paragraphs 11 through 14, and the difference is worth money to anyone sourcing outside China.

The proclamation, which shortens quartz surface products to QSP, states that "pursuant to section 302(b) of the USMCA Implementation Act (19 U.S.C. 4552(b)), I exclude QSP that is the product of Canada or Mexico." That exclusion follows negative findings by the ITC under section 301(a) of the same Act.

A second group comes from the ITC's free trade agreement findings, recited in paragraph 4: imports of QSP that are a product of "Australia, each Dominican Republic-Central America-United States Free Trade Agreement country (i.e., Costa Rica, the Dominican Republic, El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras, and Nicaragua) (CAFTA-DR countries), as well as Colombia, Jordan, the Republic of Korea, Panama, Peru, and Singapore, individually, are not a substantial cause of serious injury or threat thereof." Paragraph 13 is where the President makes his own determination for each of them, item by item, and it also covers Israel under the United States-Israel Free Trade Agreement finding and CBERA beneficiary countries under their duty-free treatment.

A third exclusion covers developing countries listed in subdivision (c) of note 41, so long as a country's share of total imports "does not exceed 3 percent, provided that imports that are the product of all such countries with less than 3 percent import share collectively account for not more than 9 percent of total imports." Two thresholds are at work there: 3 percent for a single country, and 9 percent for all listed countries added together.

Crossing a threshold does not switch the duty on by itself. The proclamation says the action "shall be modified" in that case, and clause (4) sets out how: the U.S. Trade Representative is authorized, on publication of a notice in the Federal Register, to revise the list and remove a country from it. So the signal to watch for an excluded developing country is a Federal Register notice.

One detail in that section is easy to miss and tells you how the exclusions were built. The ITC recommended excluding Jordan under the United States-Jordan Free Trade Area Implementation Act. Paragraph 14 says the President instead excluded Jordan "because Jordan is a developing country." The outcome for a Jordanian shipment is the same either way, but the legal route is different, and the developing-country route carries those 3% and 9% thresholds with it.

For readers importing from Korea, this is the practical headline: Korean-origin quartz surface products sit outside the safeguard, and the proof of that is your origin documentation.

The proclamation also closes off one workaround in advance. Covered goods admitted into a US foreign trade zone on or after August 15, 2026 must be admitted under "privileged foreign status" as described in 19 CFR 146.41. We come back to what that means below.

This action ends a process that began late last year. The ITC opened its investigation on a petition filed by the Quartz Manufacturing Alliance of America, with the notice of institution published at 90 FR 55165 on December 1, 2025. Because the relief runs longer than three years, the ITC is required by 19 U.S.C. 2254(a)(2) to report on its monitoring at the mid-point of the period, which puts the first statutory checkpoint around August 2028 rather than at the end.

The duty will reach more businesses than the direct importers

The obvious reader is the company whose name appears as importer of record on entries under the three covered lines. From August 15, the tariff-rate quota prices those entries. But the exposure runs further, through three common setups:

1. You import and resell. You are the importer of record, the duty is on your entry, and your margin absorbs it until your prices move.
2. You buy from a foreign supplier on delivered terms. Your supplier owes the duty at the border. Your next quote is where you will meet it, and your current contract decides whether the seller can reprice mid-term.
3. You fabricate or install on fixed bids. Kitchen, bath, and commercial surface work priced on pre-safeguard slab costs will be performed at post-safeguard slab costs unless the contract says otherwise.

If you are in the first group, the rest of this brief is directly your paperwork. If you are in the second or third, it is the paperwork of someone you depend on, which is a reason to ask them these questions this week.

The President raised the above-quota rate above what the ITC recommended

A tariff-rate quota has two duty rates. Imports within a set quantity pay the lower in-quota rate, and imports beyond that quantity pay the higher above-quota rate. So an importer needs three numbers: the in-quota rate, the above-quota rate, and the quota quantity.

All three are in the Annex to the proclamation, which the White House publishes as a separate PDF.

The Annex creates two new HTSUS headings, 9903.45.30 for goods entered within the quota and 9903.45.31 for goods entered above it, and sets this schedule:

Read the two sides against each other and the President's edit is visible. The ITC recommended both rates falling one point a year from 25% and 40%. The adopted schedule starts the above-quota rate ten points higher at 50%, then walks it down one point a year, while dropping the in-quota rate twice as fast, two points a year. Section 203 leaves that adjustment to the President, and here he used it in both directions: harsher on the goods that exceed the quota, and faster relief for the goods inside it.

The quota volumes, by contrast, were adopted exactly as recommended. The Annex states them in square meters: 13,006,426 for year one, then 14,771,583, 15,236,099, and 15,700,614. Converted, that is the ITC's 140, 159, 164, and 169 million square feet.

Other coverage this week may still quote 40% for year one. Those summaries are describing the ITC recommendation. The rate that will appear on your entry is 50%.

A 50% above-quota rate is also where the petitioner asked it to be. According to industry coverage of the petition, the Quartz Manufacturing Alliance of America requested a 50% tariff on all quartz surface products regardless of origin. The ITC advised less. The proclamation landed on the petitioner's number for imports past the quota line.

The quota is metered by the quarter, and the calendar is fixed

The Annex splits each annual quota into four equal quarters and names the boundaries, which matters if you can choose when a container arrives. In year one, each quarter carries 3,251,606 square meters, roughly 35 million square feet, on this calendar:

Two mechanics come with it. Unused quota carries forward, and the Annex tells CBP when to post it: the agency "shall add any unused quantity of the total quota for a quarterly period to the total quota for the next quarterly period no later than 14 days after the last day of the prior quarterly period." So a quarter can open with less headroom on the books than it will eventually have, for up to two weeks.

Anything beyond the quarter's quantity, plus whatever was carried over, "shall be entered under the over-quota heading 9903.45.31." That is the 50% line in year one. Imports from the excluded countries are not counted against these quantities at all, which is a second reason origin documentation now has a price attached to it.

Here is what to check before August 15

1. Confirm whether your goods are quartz surface products under the Annex definition. The Annex defines the scope in material terms as well as by classification. It covers slabs and surfaces made from a mixture in which silica "is greater than any other single material, by actual weight," bound with a resin. Countertops, backsplashes, vanity tops, tabletops, flooring, wall facing, shower surrounds, and tiles are named. Finishing or fabricating in a third country does not take goods out of scope. Two carve-outs are worth knowing: quarried stone such as granite, marble, soapstone, and quartzite is not covered, and when quartz arrives attached to a sink or a cabinet, only the quartz portion is in scope. The covered classifications are 6810.99.0020, 6810.99.0040, and 7020.00.6000. If your products sit near that line, get your broker's classification in writing before the effective date rather than after.
2. File what you can before the date. The trigger is the entry, in the proclamation's words goods "entered, or withdrawn from warehouse for consumption, on or after 12:01 a.m. eastern time on August 15, 2026." Goods that arrive and are entered before August 15 clear under current rules. Goods already sitting in a bonded warehouse are covered if they are withdrawn for consumption on or after that date, so a warehouse withdrawal you were planning for late August may be cheaper in early August. For goods now in transit, the question for your broker is whether entry can be filed before the date.
3. Time future shipments against the quarterly calendar. The gap between 25% and 50% is the whole reason quarter timing is worth money. Each quarter carries about 35 million square feet in year one, the quarters run August 15 to November 14, November 15 to February 13, February 14 to May 15, and May 16 to August 14, and once a quarter's quantity is filled the rest of that quarter enters at 50%. Arriving early in a quarter is the cheaper option. Carried-forward quota can take CBP up to 14 days after quarter end to post, so a container timed to the first days of a quarter may be measured against a quota figure that CBP has not updated yet.
4. Treat origin paperwork as a duty question now. The exclusion list is long: Canada, Mexico, Australia, the CAFTA-DR countries, Colombia, Israel, Jordan, the Republic of Korea, Panama, Peru, Singapore, CBERA beneficiaries, and qualifying developing countries. In late July the situation ran in the opposite direction: in our brief on the Section 338 duties, a USMCA origin claim gave Canadian goods no relief at all. This safeguard is different. A product of an excluded country is outside its scope entirely, so the records that prove where your slabs were actually produced now switch a duty on or off. Origin is a customs determination, and claiming it without support is its own problem, so this is documentation work, and it has a deadline.
5. A foreign trade zone will not preserve the old treatment. Covered goods admitted into a zone on or after August 15 must take "privileged foreign status" under 19 CFR 146.41, which ties the goods to the tariff treatment in effect at admission. Parking covered inventory in a zone after the effective date does not hold open the pre-safeguard rules for a later entry.
6. Read your contracts for who carries the duty. DDP means delivered duty paid. If you sell DDP to US customers and you import, this duty is your cost from August 15. If you buy DDP from a foreign supplier, check whether your agreement lets the seller reprice when duties change. And remember that money moving in either direction follows the entry paperwork: we worked through why in who gets the tariff refund, and the rule is the same here, because the party named on the entry is the party CBP deals with.

The entry decides who owes the duty and where CBP sends the mail

Everything in this safeguard attaches to an entry, and an entry names an importer of record. That name determines who owes the duty, who answers questions about classification and origin, and who receives whatever CBP sends back.

If your importer of record is a company organized outside the United States, a separate 2026 action already examines that setup. Executive Order 14411 tests where an importer is organized, where it is located, and who its controlling owners are. We covered the three tests in foreign importer of record: a US LLC answers only one of three tests. If the quartz safeguard is about to put real duty amounts on your entries, the identity behind those entries deserves the same review.

There is also a plain mail question here. CBP reaches an importer of record at the address on its importer record. Requests for information and notices about entries arrive there, and some of them carry response deadlines. An address that no one checks turns a routine question about your origin documentation into a missed deadline.

Be precise about what an address can do. A business address does not change a duty rate, and no address product does. What a steady US business address does is keep you reachable at the place these documents go, and keep your records consistent across the agencies and partners that hold them.

That is the product we are building. Auteur Mailbox is a US virtual mailbox opening first in San Francisco, Silicon Valley, and Los Angeles, where every letter is opened, scanned, and explained in plain language, in English, Korean, or Spanish. It is pre-launch, so reserving is free and holds the founding price rather than starting service today. If your importer record still points at a home address or at an address you have left, that is worth fixing before a request for information arrives with a deadline on it.

FAQ

When does the new quartz tariff take effect? The safeguard applies to quartz surface products "entered, or withdrawn from warehouse for consumption, on or after 12:01 a.m. eastern time on August 15, 2026." The proclamation was signed on July 31, 2026 and published in the Federal Register on August 5, 2026 at 91 FR 50645. The date that matters is the entry date or the warehouse withdrawal date, so goods entered on August 14 clear under current rules and identical goods entered on August 15 do not.

Which countries are excluded from the quartz safeguard? More than most coverage suggests. The proclamation excludes products of Canada and Mexico under the USMCA Implementation Act. Paragraphs 13 and 14 add Australia, the six CAFTA-DR countries (Costa Rica, the Dominican Republic, El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras, and Nicaragua), Colombia, Jordan, the Republic of Korea, Panama, Peru, and Singapore, with Israel covered under a separate finding and CBERA beneficiary countries keeping duty-free treatment. Developing countries listed in note 41(c) are excluded while a country's own share does not exceed 3% and while all listed countries together account for no more than 9%. Removing a country from that list takes a revision by the U.S. Trade Representative, published in the Federal Register under clause (4). The exclusion turns on where the product was actually made, which is a customs origin determination, so the practical work is documentation that supports the claim.

What are the tariff rates and quota amounts under the quartz safeguard? Year one is 25% within the quota, under new heading 9903.45.30, and 50% above it, under 9903.45.31. The schedule then runs 23% and 49%, 21% and 48%, and 19% and 47% in the following annual periods. The year one quota is 13,006,426 square meters, about 140 million square feet, split into four equal quarters. Those figures are in the Annex to the proclamation, which the White House publishes as a separate PDF. Note that the ITC had recommended 40% above quota, so summaries quoting 40% are describing the recommendation rather than the measure that takes effect.

Which HTS codes does the quartz safeguard cover? Three ten-digit lines, listed in the new note 41: 6810.99.0020 and 6810.99.0040, under the heading for articles of cement, concrete, or artificial stone, and 7020.00.6000, under the heading for other articles of glass. Entries themselves are reported under the two new headings the Annex creates, 9903.45.30 for in-quota and 9903.45.31 for over-quota. The Annex also defines the merchandise in material terms, silica-predominant by actual weight with a resin binder, and excludes quarried stone such as granite, marble, soapstone, and quartzite. If your products sit near that line, confirm the classification with your customs broker.

Can I avoid the quartz safeguard by moving goods into a foreign trade zone? No. The proclamation requires covered goods admitted into a foreign trade zone on or after August 15, 2026 to be admitted under "privileged foreign status" as described in 19 CFR 146.41, which ties them to the tariff treatment in effect at admission. A zone can still serve its normal logistics purposes, but it does not preserve pre-safeguard duty treatment for covered goods admitted after the effective date. The timing lever that does exist is on the entry side: goods entered, or withdrawn from a bonded warehouse, before August 15 are outside the action.

Bottom line

A four-year Section 201 safeguard on quartz surface products takes effect for entries on and after August 15, 2026. Year one is 25% inside the quota and 50% outside it, the quota is about 140 million square feet split into four quarters, and the measure cannot be waited out inside a foreign trade zone.

Two things in that are easy to get wrong from secondhand coverage. The above-quota rate is 50%. The ITC recommended 40%, and the President adjusted the remedy upward at that end while speeding up relief inside the quota. And the exclusion list runs well past Canada and Mexico, reaching Korea, Australia, the CAFTA-DR countries, Colombia, Israel, Jordan, Panama, Peru, Singapore, CBERA beneficiaries, and qualifying developing countries.

So the checklist for this week is short: whether your goods meet the Annex definition, whether anything can be entered or withdrawn before August 15, whether your origin records support an excluded-country claim if one is true, and which side of your contracts this duty lands on. The gap between 25% and 50% is what makes the last three worth doing now rather than in September.

This is general information about a US trade action, current as of August 8, 2026. It is not legal, tax, or customs advice. Classification, origin, and entry decisions depend on facts specific to your goods, so confirm your position with US Customs and Border Protection or a licensed customs broker before acting on it.