Anti-Dumping Duty Meaning, Definition and Worked Examples

Last updated October 29, 2026·Data as-of: HTS 2026-10-19 / Section 301 2026-10-16 / AD-CVD 2026-10-16

Anti-dumping duty meaning: a duty set by margin, not by schedule

Every other tariff you look up is a rate printed against a code. An anti-dumping duty is different in kind: it is the product of an investigation that compares a foreign producer's home-market price with its export price, and the resulting margin becomes the duty rate for that producer and that product. Two sellers of the same goods from the same country can therefore pay different rates, and the same code can carry a different rate this year than last.

That structural difference explains why “what is the antibumping duty on my product” has no single answer, and why an imported product's true rate cannot be read off the schedule alone. It has to be looked up per case.

Anti-dumping duty definition in operational terms

Operationally, an anti-dumping case binds four things together: a country, a product scope, a producer (or an “all-others” rate), and a margin. If any of the four is absent, the duty does not apply — which is why the first compliance question is not “is this product dumped” but “is this specific scope from this specific country covered by an order with this specific case number”. Our case table carries 552 case numbers with the product scope text and the six-digit HS candidates each one touches.

How the duty is calculated, with real margins

The mechanics are a single multiplication once the margin is known: duty = customs value × margin. The work is in finding the margin, because the table stores a rate per case document (dumping findings, administrative reviews, amended finals). 892 of our 2,738 lifecycle records carry a numeric rate; the table below applies three of them to a USD 100,000 entry so the arithmetic is visible.

Source: Three case rows sampled from data/adcvd-orders.json; duty recomputed at generation time — https://www.federalregister.gov/documents/2020/03/23/2020-06054/lightweight-thermal-paper-from-the-peoples-republic-of-china-final-results-of-expedited-second (fetched 2026-10-16).

Two of the three margins exceed the general rate on the goods by an order of magnitude. That asymmetry is the point of the program: the duty is designed to neutralise the price advantage the investigation measured, so it is not capped by anything resembling a normal tariff ceiling. Our published AD/CVD case browser lists the same records with their Federal Register citations.

Anti-dumping duty example: light thermal paper from China

Case A-570-920 covers Lightweight Thermal Paper From the People's Republic of China: Final… from China. The record carries a margin of 115.29%, published 2020-03-23 in Federal Register document 2020-06054. On a USD 100,000 shipment that margin alone adds $115,290 — before the general rate, before Section 301, and before any countervailing case on the same goods.

This is what an “example” is worth when it comes from the source document rather than from a blog: the case number, the date, the rate and the arithmetic all point back to a citable record, and the same lookup can be repeated for any code.

Anti-dumping duty HS code: 447 codes carry candidates

The case table resolves to 447 distinct six-digit HS codes, and 151 of those appear in both an anti-dumping and a countervailing case. The concentration is extreme: the busiest codes are steel, solar and battery products, and the top ten codes account for a large share of all records.

Source: Per-code counts recomputed from data/adcvd-orders.json hs_candidates — https://www.federalregister.gov/documents/2020/03/23/2020-06054/lightweight-thermal-paper-from-the-peoples-republic-of-china-final-results-of-expedited-second (fetched 2026-10-16).

If your code is on this list, the schedule rate is close to irrelevant to landed cost — the case margin dominates. If it is not, that is not yet a clean answer: absence from our table means absence from the slice of Federal Register documents we extracted, 2,738 lifecycle records from 4,592 listed documents.

Countervailing duty vs anti dumping duty: two margins, one order

The two programs ask different questions about the same trade. Anti-dumping measures a price gap; countervailing measures a subsidy. Both can be found for the same product in the same investigation, which is why the Federal Register produces orders typed as AD, CVD or combined. Our table reflects that mixture: 1,792 records under AD, 581 under CVD and 365 under both programs.

Source: Order-type counts recomputed from data/adcvd-orders.json; meta.counts_by_order_type — https://www.federalregister.gov/documents/2020/03/23/2020-06054/lightweight-thermal-paper-from-the-peoples-republic-of-china-final-results-of-expedited-second (fetched 2026-10-16).

For an importer the practical difference is documentation: a CVD order may attach to the country generally while an AD order can attach to named producers, so the same HS code and country pair can produce two different rates depending on who made the goods.

Anti-dumping duty applicability: when it applies and when it does not

Applicability is a four-part test, and all four parts are recorded in the data: country, product scope, producer identity and effective date. A code being on the list is not enough — the product must fall inside the scope text, and the entry date must be inside the order's life. That is why our case records carry publication and effective dates spanning 2020-01-02 to 2026-10-15: an order from 2020 tells you nothing about a shipment entered after a later review amended the rate.^*

Anti-dumping duty list 2025: what changed that year

230 case numbers in our table have a 2025 publication or effective date, across 35 countries. The five most frequent origin countries in the whole table are China (1,107), India (312), Korea (294), Mexico (101), Taiwan (91).

A year-filtered list is the wrong first cut for a compliance decision, though: an order published in 2020 that survived its review still governs a 2026 entry. Use the year filter to see what is new, and the case number to see what is live.

Stacking: anti-dumping on top of Section 301 and UFLPA

Additional duties are additive. A Chinese steel article can carry a 25% Section 301 heading, an anti-dumping margin in the tens or hundreds of percent, and a countervailing rate, all on one entry; the section 301 enumeration in our snapshot covers 91.5% of eight-digit lines, so the overlap is the common case rather than the exception. UFLPA sits outside the arithmetic: it is an admissibility rule with 188 listed entities, and its cost appears as a held shipment rather than a rate.

The practical method is to compute the stack, not the rate: general rate + Section 301 + AD/CVD margin, each from its own lookup. Our AD/CVD stack tool does exactly that for a code and origin.^*

Trade remedy meaning: the umbrella term

Anti-dumping is one of three trade remedies; the others are countervailing duties and safeguard measures. “Trade remedy meaning” questions usually want that taxonomy plus the practical difference between them: dumping and subsidies are country-and-producer specific, safeguards apply to a product regardless of origin, and all three are temporary by design, which is why case dates matter as much as rates.