Ceramic Tableware Imports: HS 6911/6912 Tariff Exposure

If you sell dinnerware, mugs, bowls, or serveware online, there's a good chance the single biggest variable in your landed cost in 2026 isn't your factory price or your freight rate. It's the country printed on your commercial invoice. US importers brought in $1.37 billion of ceramic tableware for consumption in 2024 (HS 6911 porcelain plus HS 6912 other ceramic, US Census), and China alone supplied 74.1% of it. That concentration is the whole story, because China is the one origin carrying the full tariff stack, and that stack is now large enough to redraw your margin model. This post maps where the category actually comes from, walks the duty layers that sum on Chinese origin, and lays out what to do before your next purchase order.

$1.37B and 74% from one country: the import map

Start with the concentration, because everything downstream follows from it. In 2024, combined ceramic-tableware imports for consumption were $1.365 billion: $329.0 million in porcelain and china (HS 6911) plus $1,036.1 million in other ceramic (HS 6912). China supplied $1,011.6 million of that, or 74.1%. The next-largest origin, Thailand, was $48.0 million, about 3.5%. France, the UK, Germany, Japan, and Indonesia round out a long, thin tail. No single non-China origin clears 4%.

That is one of the most China-concentrated consumer-goods categories a home brand can sell. For context, when I talk to founders running a $5M to $30M home or kitchen brand, the assumption is usually that "we're diversified" because they buy from three or four factories. Then we pull the import paperwork and every one of those factories is in Guangdong or Fujian. Buying from multiple suppliers in the same country is not diversification when the tariff risk is a country-level risk. The map above is the reality check: at the category level, the US has not meaningfully moved off China, and your catalog probably mirrors it.

The reason this matters more in 2026 than it did three years ago is that the cost of that concentration has changed. The same Chinese factory that was a clear price winner in 2021 is now carrying a duty load that a Thai or Indian factory does not. The concentration itself didn't move; the penalty attached to it did.

Why HS 6911 and HS 6912 aren't the same risk

The category splits into two Harmonized System lines, and they behave very differently. HS 6911 is porcelain and china (the finer, vitrified body). HS 6912 is "other ceramic" (stoneware, earthenware, the everyday body most DTC dinnerware sets are made from). China dominates both, but not equally: it holds 80.4% of HS 6912 versus 54.2% of HS 6911.

The difference is the European bench. Porcelain has a real one: France ($33.3M), Germany ($18.3M), the UK ($17.9M), Italy ($7.0M), and Portugal ($6.8M) all show up in HS 6911. Everyday ceramic doesn't. So your substitution problem is mostly a 6912 problem. If your catalog is porcelain-heavy, you have credible non-China origins you can qualify without leaving the developed-market quality tier. If it's stoneware and earthenware (which most affordable DTC dinnerware is), your realistic alternatives are Thailand, Vietnam, India, and Indonesia, and the bench there is thinner.

The practical takeaway: classify your SKUs at the 10-digit level and know which line each one rides. The duty rate and the realistic set of alternate origins both hang off the 6911-versus-6912 split, so getting it wrong means you're sourcing-planning against the wrong map.

The tariff stack: MFN plus Section 301 plus reciprocal

Here's the part that actually moves your landed cost. The duty on Chinese ceramic tableware is not one rate. It's three layers that sum.

The first layer is the base most-favored-nation (MFN) duty from the Harmonized Tariff Schedule, Chapter 69. It runs roughly 6% to 28% ad valorem depending on the exact 10-digit line (household versus hotelware, and value-per-dozen breakpoints, drive the spread). Every WTO-member origin pays this, China included. The second layer is Section 301, which applies only to Chinese origin: +25% on List 3 lines or +7.5% on List 4A. The third layer is the 2025 reciprocal tariff under Executive Order 14257 (April 2, 2025), which adds a per-country ad valorem rate on top.

This is why the "what's the China rate?" question has no clean answer, and why anyone quoting you a single number is guessing. The legally effective 2026 rate for your specific line is the sum of all three layers, read against the live HTS and the current reciprocal annex on the day your container clears. The reciprocal schedule has changed repeatedly through 2025 and 2026, so any rate you cite has to be date-stamped.

What it means in practice: a non-China origin drops the entire Section 301 layer and usually carries a lower reciprocal rate, so the landed-duty gap between a Chinese unit and a Thai or Indian one can be double-digit percentage points. When we've helped operators rebuild this, the moment that lands is when they see two identical-looking mugs side by side, same factory cost, and the Chinese one lands 15 to 20 points heavier purely on duty. That gap is the entire sourcing argument.

The China+1 shift is real but small, for now

The trade press has been writing about the move off China for years, and the direction is real. The magnitude, in the Census data, is not yet. Combined ceramic-tableware imports are down about 21% from the 2022 peak ($1.72B in 2022 to $1.37B in 2024), which reads as an inventory destock more than a sourcing exodus. And China's share didn't fall through that window so much as wobble: 75.8% in 2022, 71.7% in 2023, back to 74.1% in 2024.

Look at the supposed winners. Thailand is the #1 non-China origin for everyday ceramic (HS 6912) at $37.4M, but that's only 3.6% of the line, and it actually fell from $51.9M in 2022. Behind Thailand the bench is tiny: Vietnam $3.6M, India $5.1M, Indonesia $2.3M for HS 6912. The "China+1" story is directionally correct and strategically right, but the non-China capacity that exists today cannot absorb a meaningful chunk of $1B in Chinese volume on short notice.

The pattern we see again and again is operators treating diversification as a switch rather than a multi-year program. Someone reads that "everyone is moving to Vietnam," asks their sourcing agent to move 40% of volume, and discovers the Vietnamese factories that can hit their quality and MOQ are already booked by larger buyers. The realistic play is to qualify second-tier origins now for the SKUs where they're credible, move the movable volume deliberately, and keep core assortment in China with eyes open about the duty cost. Treat it as a 12-to-24-month rebalance, not a Q3 swap.

What this means for your landed cost (and your next PO)

Five things to do before you cut the next purchase order.

Rebuild landed cost per SKU per origin. Stop costing the catalog on a blended factory price. A single blended number hides which SKUs are underwater once the full duty stack is applied. Build factory cost plus freight plus brokerage plus the stacked duty, per SKU, per origin. This is the one move that changes decisions.

Date-stamp every duty rate. Because the reciprocal annex moves, a landed-cost model built in January can be wrong by April. Note the rate and the date you pulled it, and rebuild when the schedule changes. Don't hard-code a "China rate" into a spreadsheet and trust it for a year.

Segment your assortment by origin. China for broad assortment and price, Thailand for porcelain and hotelware, Vietnam for mid-market stoneware volume, India for decorative and hand-finished lines. Decide which SKUs are genuinely movable and which have no real substitute at your quality tier, then move only the movable ones.

Don't blame freight. The Cass Freight Index (shipments) sat at 1.041 in May 2026, down from 1.193 in 2021. Freight is easing, not spiking. If your landed cost is climbing, the cause is the duty stack, not the ocean leg, so spend your attention where the money is leaking.

Put a change-in-law clause in your supplier contracts. When duty rates move mid-PO, you want a contractual mechanism for who absorbs it. Operators who negotiated this before the 2025 reciprocal regime were in a far better spot than the ones renegotiating under pressure.

Ceramic tableware is a 74%-China category sitting on top of a three-layer duty stack that only Chinese origin pays in full. The freight scare is over; the tariff exposure is not. The brands that win the next two years aren't the ones who exit China overnight, because the capacity to do that doesn't exist. They're the ones who know their landed cost per SKU per origin, date-stamp the duty, and move the movable volume deliberately.

Sources and methodology

The primary import data comes from the US Census Bureau international trade time series (the imports/hs endpoint), pulled via the Census MCP. The variable is CON_VAL_YR (imports for consumption, year-to-date cumulative) read at period 2024-12, which gives the full calendar-year 2024 figure. Per-country rows were pulled for HS 6911 and HS 6912, with the "Total for all countries" row pulled using country code "-". The trend series (2022, 2023, 2024) was read at each year's month-12 for China, Thailand, and the total. CON_VAL was preferred over GEN_VAL because it reflects goods entered for consumption rather than general imports.

Combined-category figures are HS 6911 plus HS 6912 summed. This is the standard "ceramic tableware" pairing (porcelain and china versus other ceramic). It deliberately excludes ceramic statuary and ornamental ware (HS 6913) and other Chapter 69 building and industrial ceramics, because the scope here is tableware.

Tariff rates come from three authorities. Base MFN duty is the General (Column 1) rate in the USITC Harmonized Tariff Schedule, Chapter 69, which spans roughly 6% to 28% ad valorem across the 10-digit lines. Section 301 rates are List 3 (+25%, in effect since 2019) and List 4A (+7.5%, since 2020), with specific 6911 and 6912 lines mapping through the Chapter 99 China-tariff cross-reference. The reciprocal tariff is Executive Order 14257 (April 2, 2025), modified through 2025 and 2026. The exact effective rate per 10-digit line was not codified in public sources at the research date, so this post presents the stack structure and a rate range rather than a single hard China number. That is a deliberate accuracy choice, not vagueness: importers must confirm the live HTS line and current reciprocal annex at the time of entry.

Freight context is the FRED series FRGSHPUSM649NCIS (Cass Freight Index: Shipments), using annual averages for 2021 to 2025 plus the latest monthly reading (May 2026 = 1.041), to show that freight is easing rather than driving the current cost squeeze.

Web and market context was corroborated through Perplexity and Parallel.ai deep research, which confirmed the China-to-Thailand/Vietnam/India direction and the SKU-level landed-cost playbook (price off landed cost, segment assortment by origin, stress-test duty scenarios). Note that vendor market-size figures for US ceramic tableware ($6.2B to $7.8B, all channels including domestic) are not directly comparable to the $1.37B Census import number, which counts imports only. Census CON_VAL_YR figures can be revised; values here are as-pulled 2026-06-12.

For more on managing margin under tariff pressure, see our interim CFO services overview, and our sibling import-origin breakdowns for beauty and supplements.

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