On Friday the 10 percent Section 122 surcharge stops applying to United States imports. It does not stop applying to shipments booked before Friday. It does not stop applying to containers loaded before Friday. It stops applying to goods entered for consumption after 24 July 2026. That distinction is worth 10 percent of declared value on every box sitting on the wrong side of it, and most importers cannot say today which of their in transit containers will be entered before the date and which will not.
What does the July 24 deadline actually attach to?
Proclamation 11012, signed on 20 February 2026, imposed a temporary 10 percent ad valorem surcharge on virtually all United States imports, running from 24 February to 24 July 2026. The instrument is Section 122 of the Trade Act of 1974, which caps a temporary balance of payments surcharge at 150 days without an act of Congress. Count 150 days from 24 February and you land on 24 July. It is a statutory date, not a policy preference, and it cannot be extended by proclamation alone.
The surcharge applies to articles entered for consumption, or withdrawn from warehouse for consumption, inside that window. Entry is a customs event. It is not the booking. It is not the load. It is not the vessel arrival, and it is not the discharge.
The legal position around the surcharge is unsettled. The payment obligation has not been. On 7 May 2026 the Court of International Trade held, two to one, that Proclamation 11012 exceeded the President’s statutory authority, and granted a permanent injunction only to the named plaintiffs rather than on a nationwide basis. The Federal Circuit stayed that injunction on 11 June 2026, so Customs and Border Protection has continued collecting from every other importer through the full window. Whichever way the appeal lands, refund claims for non plaintiff importers will be evaluated against entry documentation. The entry date is the pivot in both directions.
Why is July’s record volume not the good news it looks like?
The National Retail Federation and Hackett Associates Global Port Tracker projects 2.47 million TEU through United States ports in July 2026, the highest monthly total ever recorded. August is projected at 2.22 million and September below 2.00 million. Between the July peak and the September trough is a projected drop of more than 470,000 TEU.
That is not a demand curve. It is a calendar. Importers pulled autumn purchase orders into July to beat a duty date, and they paid peak season freight to do it. Drewry’s World Container Index sat at $4,547 per 40ft container on 16 July, down 2 percent on the week and ending ten consecutive weeks of gains. Shanghai to Los Angeles was assessed at $6,272 and Shanghai to New York at $7,879. Carriers announced FAK levels of $7,900 to $8,500 per FEU from 15 July.
Now put the two numbers side by side. A single 40ft box on the Los Angeles lane carries roughly $6,272 of freight. That same box, declared at $100,000, carries $10,000 of Section 122 duty if it is entered on 23 July and none at all if it is entered on 25 July. The premium paid to accelerate the shipment is smaller than the duty the acceleration was meant to avoid, which means the entire economics of the pull forward rest on a date that almost nobody is tracking with the rigour they applied to the rate.
“We booked in June, so we are covered”
Booking is not arrival, and these are the worst five weeks of the year to assume otherwise. Drewry counted 39 blank sailings across the major East West trades for weeks 30 to 34, covering 20 July to 23 August, a 5 percent cancellation rate, with nine of those falling on the Transpacific in a single week. Every blanked sailing rolls confirmed bookings onto later vessels, and a booking that rolls once in late July is a booking that clears in August.
Then there is the schedule itself. Sea-Intelligence’s Global Liner Performance report put global schedule reliability at 64.7 percent in May 2026, the highest figure of the year, with late vessels arriving an average of 5.52 days behind schedule. In the best month of 2026, more than a third of arrivals still missed, and the ones that missed missed by most of a week. A June booking with a 20 July projected arrival and a five day slip does not produce a customs entry on the right side of Friday.
“Our customs broker will flag it”
Your broker files the entry. Your broker does not control when the vessel discharges, when the terminal releases the box, or when it becomes available for pickup. In practice the broker learns your arrival date at roughly the same moment you do, from the same carrier status your own team is reading. The exposure lives in the gap between what the carrier knows and what your desk knows, and that gap is a function of how many carriers you use and how many separate places their milestone data lives.
An importer running six carriers is running six portals, six data formats and six refresh schedules. Nobody reconciles those hourly. What happens instead is that somebody checks on Monday, and the vessel that slipped on Saturday surfaces as a problem on Tuesday, by which point the options that were available on Saturday have closed.
What happens on 25 July?
Section 122 cannot be renewed without Congress. That does not mean tariff exposure ends on Friday. The United States Trade Representative opened two Section 301 investigations in early March, one on forced labour and one on manufacturing excess capacity, and those were expected to conclude in time for new duties to be imposed around the point the Section 122 window closes. The likely shape of August is a different legal instrument with different coverage and different rates. Entry date will decide exposure on the way in exactly as it decides it on the way out.
One arrival record instead of six portals
FrateZone consolidates milestone data from 200+ ocean carriers onto a single operational desk, so the arrival picture for every container sits in one place in one format. Carrier driven exception flags surface on that desk when a carrier’s own status changes, which means a rolled booking or a slipped berth window shows against the shipment record rather than sitting in a portal nobody has opened since Friday afternoon. The FrateZone features page sets out what the desk covers.
None of that moves a vessel. What it buys is lead time: enough of it to make the decision that is still available, whether that is expediting the entry, rerouting the box, filing differently, or simply accepting the duty with the number known in advance rather than discovered on an invoice three weeks later. The same visibility gap that creates Section 122 exposure this week is the one that creates demurrage and detention exposure every other week of the year.
Five checks before Friday
- Pull every in transit container with a projected United States arrival between 18 July and 5 August, and sort the list by lane rather than by carrier.
- For each one, take the latest actual carrier milestone rather than the schedule you were quoted at booking. On late arrivals the two diverge by an average of 5.52 days.
- Flag anything routed on a Transpacific service with a blanked sailing in weeks 30 to 34. That capacity has already been withdrawn and those bookings are the ones that roll.
- Confirm with your broker which entries can realistically be filed before 24 July and which cannot, then price the difference at 10 percent of declared value per box so the decision is a number rather than a hope.
- Preserve the entry documentation on everything you have already paid the surcharge on. If refund rights ever reach non plaintiff importers, they will be evaluated against entry records and nothing else.
The time lost waiting for containers costs far more than the freight itself. FrateZone enables real-time freight predictability across 200+ ocean carriers, turning your operational visibility into strategic program control. Learn more at https://www.fratezone.com/pricing.html.