US FTA Duty-Free Eligibility: A Checklist Across All 14 Trade Agreements

Last updated October 13, 2026·Data: USITC HTS export 2026-10-09; FTA roster audited against primary sources 2026-10-13

What the Special column is actually offering

The Harmonized Tariff Schedule prints three rate columns on every line: General, Special, and Column 2. The Special subcolumn is where trade programs live — reciprocal free trade agreements plus unilateral preference programs such as GSP. We parsed all 23,193 administrative lines in our October 2026 extract of the schedule and found 14,689 carrying a populated Special cell. Each of those cells reads Free followed by a parenthesized list of program symbols.

The counterintuitive part, and the reason this page exists: not one of those 14,689 preferential lines has a Free general rate. The Special column never redundantly repeats what the schedule already grants. Among the lines it does populate, 12,112 charge a plain ad valorem percentage in the general column (the median is 6.0%, the mean about 9.1%), 2,283 charge specific or compound duties mixing dollars-per-unit with percentages, and 294 carry quota-rate or other textual provisions.

Practical translation: if your product's line shows a Special cell and your origin's symbol is inside the parentheses, the discount equals the entire general rate. On the median dutiable line that is 6% of customs value; on apparel-type lines it can be 32%; on tobacco leaf it reaches 350%. The symbol list is the difference between quoting a customer a landed price and guessing one.

The roster: 14 agreements, 20 partner economies

Our agreement roster was rebuilt and audited line-by-line against primary sources — each record's USTR agreement page fetched live, cross-checked against CBP's implementation-and-expiration table, with Federal Register Proclamation 8332 and CRS report RS21846 used where USTR pages are silent. The audit corrected four date errors inherited from secondary sources, including Oman's entry-into-force year (2006 → 2009) and Israel's effective date (September 1, not August 19). Eight of the fourteen records are anchored to directly fetched government primaries on every date field; the remaining six are verified-partial because congress.gov treaty documents reject automated access, leaving signature dates corroborated only by CRS or rendered search copies.

What the signature-to-effect gap teaches buyers

Sort the gaps and a pattern emerges: the median agreement took 576 days from signature to entry into force, the fastest (Israel, 1985) needed only 132, and the slowest (Colombia, signed November 2006) waited 2,001 days — five and a half years — before its first duty-free entry could be claimed. Panama took 1,952 days and KORUS 1,720, the latter inflated by renegotiation in 2018. For a sourcing manager the lesson is concrete: an FTA announced in the news is a planning signal, not a rate. Budget roughly a year and a half between headline and usable preference, and treat anything faster as unusually quick.

Coverage differences that change sourcing decisions

Coverage is nearly universal but not identical, and the exceptions cluster where it hurts. Counting lines whose Special cell contains each agreement's symbol:

• Oman (OM): 14,689 lines — every preferential line in the schedule.
• Peru (PE): 14,686 · Korea (KR): 14,678 · Colombia (CO): 14,675.
• Singapore/Bahrain/Morocco: 14,658 each · Chile: 14,653 · Panama: 14,652.
• CAFTA-DR (P): 14,600 · USMCA (S): 14,507 · Jordan (JO): 14,478.
• Israel (IL): 14,459 · Australia (AU): 14,425 — the narrowest FTA footprint.

Because none of these lines is otherwise duty-free, each count doubles as “lines where this agreement saves real money.” And the overlap is overwhelming in the other direction too: 14,112 lines carry all fourteen FTA symbols at once, while just 577 lines extend preference to some agreements but not others. Those 577 exclusions are where origin strategy gets interesting — a supplier switch from, say, Korea to Australia is free of tariff consequence on 96.1% of the preferential schedule, but the residual 3.9% is concentrated in sensitive categories where the choice of origin changes the bill outright.

Worked examples: what the claim is worth

Knit tops to the US under USMCA. Line 6110.30.30.59 (women's or girls' knit pullovers, 25%+ cotton by weight, statistical suffix 59) carries a general rate of 32% and prints the S symbol. A $100,000 customs-value shipment lands with a $32,000 duty bill at the general rate; with a valid USMCA claim and the required certificate of origin, the base-schedule duty is $0. Even after paying a broker to assemble the origin package, the margin speaks for itself.

T-shirts under the Australia agreement. Women's cotton T-shirts, line 6109.90.10.65, also sit at 32% general with AU in the Special cell — the same arithmetic applies. Note that Australia runs the smallest FTA footprint (14,425 lines), so Australian shippers should verify the specific line rather than assume blanket coverage.

An honest small case: Korean auto parts. The highest-rate line in heading 8708 reachable with a KR claim is 8708.99.81.80 at just 2.5%. The claim works, but it is worth pennies per hundred dollars — a reminder that FTA eligibility is a necessary condition, not a windfall. Screen your specific code before celebrating.

The four gates between you and the zero

1. Origin. Goods must qualify as originating under the specific agreement's rule of origin — tariff-shift, tariff-change or regional-value tests vary by program and by chapter.
2. Documentation. Certifications or declarations per the program's format; USMCA requires a set of nine data elements even on the simplified template.
3. Shipment path. Several statutes require direct consignment or non-entry into commerce en route.
4. The claim itself. The special-program indicator must be transmitted on the entry. CBP does not refund silently — an unclaimed preference is simply paid duty.

Even a perfect claim clears only the base schedule. Chapter 99 measures — safeguards, Section 232/301-type actions, reciprocity provisions — layer on top regardless of preferential origin, and entry fees continue to accrue; see our guide to MPF and HMF entry fees. The symbol decoder in our Special-column explainer covers every letter including the unilateral programs.

A five-minute pre-order workflow

1. Resolve the product to a ten-digit code — start from the chapter index if you only know the product name.
2. Read the Special cell. Symbol absent for your origin? The general rate is your floor; price accordingly.
3. Symbol present? Run the FTA eligibility checker, then confirm the rule of origin with your supplier before the goods ship.
4. Recompute landed cost with the duty and landed-cost calculator, Chapter 99 layers included.
5. For multi-SKU catalogs, batch-screen the whole book of codes with the free ExportSonar account and let monitoring flag when a line's symbols change.

Methodology and data freshness

Tariff-line statistics come from the USITC HTS REST export captured 2026-10-09T17:43Z (23,193 records). A line counts toward an agreement's coverage if its Special cell contains that agreement's symbol token; the general-rate classification (ad valorem / specific-compound / other) follows the leading token of the general string. Agreement dates come from our roster dataset, whose second-pass audit on 2026-10-13 re-fetched all fourteen source URLs live (14/14 HTTP 200), re-adjudicated the CBP implementation table, and fixed zero new discrepancies beyond the four corrected in the first pass. Nothing here is legal advice; for binding determinations consult your broker or counsel.

Frequently asked questions