US president Donald Trump has unveiled new tariffs on timber and wood furniture, as he escalated his trade war in the name of US national security and boosting domestic manufacturing.
The US will apply levies of 10 per cent on softwood timber and lumber and 25 per cent on kitchen cabinets and upholstered wood furniture, beginning on October 14, according to a presidential notice released by the White House late on Monday.
The duties are set to escalate from January next year, with furniture tariffs rising to 30 per cent and those on cabinets to 50 per cent, unless countries strike a deal with the US to lower them.
Some countries that have reached trade deals with the US in recent months will avoid the full force of the latest measures. Affected goods from the UK will not face the extra tariffs and will be capped at 10 per cent duties, while the EU and Japan will be capped at 15 per cent.
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The tariffs were applied under a law, known as section 232, that allows the US president to impose duties to counter a national security threat.
The Trump administration has launched several similar probes to apply sectoral tariffs to imports including steel and aluminium, automobiles and copper.
The White House statement said that the commerce department, which carried out the investigation, found that “wood products are being imported ... in such quantities and under such circumstances as to threaten to impair the national security” of the US.
The notice said that wood products were essential to the “national defence, critical infrastructure, economic stability, and industrial resilience” of the US. A reliance on imports, however, has “weakened domestic manufacturing capacity”, the statement said, which in turn endangered “national security and economic stability”.
Wood products are used in “critical functions of the Department of War”, the text read, using the administration’s preferred name for the defence department, including in munitions and thermal-protection systems for nuclear re-entry vehicles.
The statement said the tariffs would “bolster industrial resilience, create high-quality jobs, and increase domestic capacity” as well as encourage investment in US industry.
The tariff announcement is set to have a significant impact on Canada’s $63 billion forestry industry, which was already struggling as a result of hefty US anti-dumping duties. Last year, about 90 per cent of Canada’s softwood exports went to the US, according to government data, much of it serving the homebuilding sector.
David Elstone, who runs Vancouver-based Spar Tree Group consultancy, said a 10 per cent tariff on top of existing US softwood lumber duties raised the combined rate to 45.16 per cent.
“It puts the Canadian lumber sector in a difficult position,” he said. “I would expect Canadian sawmill curtailments to start being announced if markets don’t improve.”
In March, Trump ordered a probe into alleged dumping of Canadian lumber on national security grounds. At the same time, he issued an executive order to expand US timber production and reduce reliance on imports.
Zoltan van Heyningen, executive director of the US Lumber Coalition, welcomed the measures, which he said confronted “harmful trade practices of Canadian softwood lumber producers”.
“The United States is the main outlet for Canada’s excess capacity,” he said. “This behaviour is extremely harmful to US producers and workers.”
The tariffs outlined in Monday’s executive order will be introduced more gradually than Trump had threatened last week, when he said he would hit kitchen and bathroom cabinets with 50 per cent tariffs from Wednesday, and upholstered furniture with 30 per cent levies on the same date.
Trump also said that the US would impose tariffs of 100 per cent on branded pharmaceutical drugs by October 1. However, the administration has not taken any steps to apply those levies, which the president announced on social media. – Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2025
