Anti-Dumping Duty Notification: How to Read the Notice That Sets Your Rate

A notification is not a notice that a duty exists somewhere in the abstract; it is the instrument that switches a rate on for entries made on a stated date. Our own copy of the Federal Register carries 300 notices published between 2026-09-01 and 2026-10-28, of which 211 mention anti-dumping or countervailing duty in the title or abstract. 208 of the whole window were filed by the Department of Commerce, 82 by the International Trade Commission. Every figure on this page is recomputed from that mirror and from our AD/CVD determination slice at generation time.

What an anti-dumping duty notification actually is

Two agencies put anti-dumping machinery into the Federal Register, and they publish different things. Commerce (through the International Trade Administration) publishes the investigation and review results: the dumping margin it calculated, the cash-deposit rate that follows from it, the all-others rate for exporters that were not individually examined. The ITC publishes the injury side: whether a domestic industry is materially injured, and the five-year sunset reviews that decide whether an order survives. A notification from one agency can be read on its own, but the rate you pay is only complete once both halves have landed, because Commerce cannot order collection until the ITC has found injury.

Practically this means the same case number appears several times across a year, and each appearance is a separate notification with its own document number and its own effective date. Importers who search for “the” notification for their product usually find an older one and take a superseded rate to their broker. The date on the notice, not the date of your search, decides which one applies to an entry.

The five fields that decide what you pay

Read in this order: scope first, rate second. A rate quoted from a notice whose scope does not reach your product is a misreading, not a discount.

Source: Notice field layout, checked against the AD/CVD documents mirrored in data/adcv_cases.json — https://www.federalregister.gov/api/v1/documents.json (fetched 2026-11-04).

What the current window of notices looks like

These are the most recent anti-dumping and countervailing notices in the mirror, newest first. The document number is what you paste into the Federal Register search box; the agencies column tells you which half of the process the document belongs to.

Latest eight AD/CVD notices in our mirror, sorted by publication date.

Source: Federal Register API v1 documents endpoint, mirrored into data/fr-notices.jsonl — https://www.federalregister.gov/api/v1/documents.json (fetched 2026-10-16).

Four notice types that move a rate

Not every notification changes what you pay. Some announce that something has started, some that a number has changed, and some that the case is over. Our AD/CVD slice of 251 determinations covering 2026-08-06 through 2026-11-03 breaks down by action type as follows — the same vocabulary a notification uses in its own title.

Determinations by action type, recomputed from data/adcv_cases.json.

Source: Federal Register AD/CVD determinations, parsed into data/adcv_cases.json — https://www.federalregister.gov/api/v1/documents.json (fetched 2026-11-04).

A preliminary result sets a provisional rate and starts cash-deposit collection in most reviews; a final result usually replaces it, and the difference is collected or refunded at liquidation. A final order is the instrument that makes the case permanent, and an amended order corrects a rate, a scope line or a company name inside an order that already exists. A sunset review decides whether the order continues for another five years, and a revocation ends it — the only notice type that removes a rate entirely.

Reading the rate: 62 of 251 determinations carry a single number

Of the determinations in the slice, only 62 state one unambiguous percentage, because a review that covers five exporters publishes five rates and cannot be collapsed into one figure without inventing one. Across those 62, the median rate is 23.50% and the range runs from 0.00% to 541.75%. 35 of them are stated as cash-deposit rates and 27 as dumping margins — a distinction worth watching, because a margin is the finding and a cash-deposit rate is what actually gets collected at the border, and the two can differ after corrections.

Find your notification in sixty seconds

Start from the case number if you have one: our AD/CVD case browser indexes orders by case number, country and product scope, so a case page links to the notices that created and amended it. If you do not have a case number, go the other way: classify the product first with the HS code search (six digits is enough to narrow the candidate cases), then read the case scope lines that match, then check the Federal Register notice feed for the latest document on that case. Finally, put the whole stack — MFN rate plus anti-dumping plus any Section 301 action — through the duty calculator so the number you carry to your broker is a total, not a component.

Two shortcuts that save the most time in practice. First, search the document number, not the product name: product names in notices are written in tariff language (“certain cold-rolled steel flat products”) and will not match the words on a commercial invoice. Second, when a notice names both a producer and an exporter, read the rate table by the exporter that appears on your commercial documents, because the producer's rate does not travel with the goods.

What an anti-dumping duty notification is not

It is not a classification ruling: nothing in it tells you which HTS code your product takes, and a scope that names products by description still requires you to classify. It is not retroactive beyond the period it states — entries made before the effective date are governed by whatever was in force then. It is not a substitute for the order itself when you need the full scope history, since amendments rewrite parts of the scope without restating it. And it is not a customs decision you can rely on for future entries: the rate in a preliminary result can move by hundreds of percentage points at the final result, which is why brokers re-read the notice before every entry window rather than keeping last quarter's number.