Pet imports by origin: HS 230910 vs HS 4201 tariff map 2026

If you sell pet products into the US, you are running two supply chains that happen to share a shelf, and the 2026 tariff regime treats them in opposite directions. The food you import barely sees a duty. The collars, leashes and harnesses do, and they come disproportionately from the one country the tariff math punishes most. This post maps where US pet imports actually come from by HS code, what each origin pays in 2026, and where the tariff is quietly eating your gross margin while you watch the wrong line item.

Two pet supply chains, not one

Start with the scale. In 2025, US imports of retail dog and cat food under HS 230910 ran $2.295B for consumption, up 8.3% from $2.119B in 2024 and up nearly 59% from $1.446B in 2021. Pet accessories under HS 4201 (the official heading is "saddlery and harness for any animal," which the schedule spells out to include leads, muzzles, dog coats and the like) ran a much smaller $490M. So food is roughly 4.7 times the import value of accessories.

But import value is not import dependence. The US pet-food market is roughly $47B at retail, so $2.3B of imports means the US makes most of its own pet food and buys a thin layer from abroad. Hardgoods are the opposite: a large share of collars, leashes, harnesses, beds and toys are imported, which is why the duty-exposed half of your catalog is the half you cannot easily reshore.

When I talk to founders running a pet brand at $5M to $30M, the first instinct under a tariff headline is to panic about the food line, because food is usually the biggest SKU count and the biggest dollar volume. The data says relax on that and look down the page at hardgoods. That is the inversion that catches most operators off guard.

The food side: $2.3B, two origins, and a 0% duty

US imported pet food is concentrated in two allied, nearshore origins. Thailand supplied $974M in 2025, a 42.4% share, and Canada supplied $389M, 17.0%. Together that is 59.4% of the category from two countries, and no third origin is close: Mexico and Cambodia tie for third at about 5.7% each. China is a minor 5.0%, roughly $115M.

Thailand's lead is not random. Its seafood-processing base feeds the wet and canned cat food and treats segment, which is exactly the high-moisture, shelf-stable product that travels well and that US co-packers do not dominate. Canada is the nearshore dry-food and treats supplier with USMCA preference. Neither origin gives you a China problem.

The duty math makes this even simpler. Retail dog and cat food under HS 2309.10.00.90 carries a column-1-general rate of Free, a 0% MFN base duty. That applies to Thailand, Canada and China alike. So on the food side, origin barely changes the duty bill, and origin-shopping your kibble to dodge tariff is mostly noise. The only live cost layer on food is the across-the-board surcharge, which we get to below, and it hits every origin equally.

The pattern we see again and again is that brands spend weeks negotiating a few cents of FOB on a duty-free food SKU while leaving a genuinely duty-exposed hardgood on autopilot. The food contract is worth optimizing for landed cost and freight. It is not worth optimizing for tariff, because there is almost no tariff to optimize.

The accessories side: where the tariff actually lands

Now flip to HS 4201. The accessories category is the mirror image of food on origin. China is the #1 supplier at $125M, a 25.6% share. Cambodia is second at $99M (20.2%) and Vietnam third at $89M (18.2%), with India fourth at $53M (10.9%). The top four origins are all Asian, and the China-plus-Cambodia-plus-Vietnam bloc is about 64% of the category.

That chart is the whole post in one image. The duty-exposed category is the China-led one, and the duty-free category is the nearshore one. China is 5% of food but 26% of accessories. Thailand is 42% of food but a rounding error in accessories. You are not managing one tariff exposure; you are managing two opposite ones.

And the duty is real here. Unlike food, HS 4201 carries a positive MFN base duty in the range of roughly 2.4% to 11%-plus depending on material (leather versus nylon versus other), and China-origin units carry potential Section 301 exposure on top of that. Add the live surcharge and a China collar stacks the most tariff layers of anything in a typical pet catalog.

The tariff that's live now, and on a clock

The 2026 rate environment is moving, so here is the timeline an operator needs to plan around rather than a single number to memorize. In February 2026, the Supreme Court struck down the IEEPA tariffs. On Feb 24, 2026, a flat 10% Section 122 surcharge took effect across covered origins (some logistics carriers report a step to 15% by mid-2026). A federal court ruled the Section 122 surcharge unlawful on May 7, an appeals court stayed that ruling on May 12, and so CBP keeps collecting it pending a final outcome. The surcharge is scheduled to expire July 24, 2026 if it is not extended or struck down first.

Separately, the heightened reciprocal tariffs on Chinese imports are suspended until Nov 10, 2026 under EO 14358. That is the layer that matters most for your China-origin hardgoods, and the key word is suspended, not repealed. The suspension is a clock, not a clean bill of health.

The honest framing for an operator is this: right now the China penalty on hardgoods is mostly the same 10% surcharge everyone pays, because the heavier Section 301 layer is on pause. The risk you are pricing is not today's bill. It is the Nov 10 date, after which a China-origin collar can get materially more expensive than a Cambodia one with no warning.

It isn't the food bill or the freight

Here is the part that reframes the whole margin conversation. Pet-food and treats CPI was up only about 1.8% year-over-year as of May 2026 (FRED series CUSR0000SS61031), and trans-Pacific ocean freight is in a 2026 buyer's-market downcycle, with Shanghai-to-LA spot rates near $1,200 to $1,800 per FEU against a 2022 peak close to $12,000. Commodity inflation cooled and freight collapsed. Neither is the threat to your hardgoods margin in 2026. The tariff stack is.

So what do you actually do about it. Pet is a high-margin DTC vertical: gross margins typically run 55-65% as a DTC operator composite, with replenishable food and consumables in the mid-50s to low-60s and hardgoods often 60-65%-plus. Public pet companies report a wider band (roughly 30% to 61%), so treat these as directional operator figures rather than a public-comparable; our pet brand financial benchmarks break the public range down line by line. It also has the lowest CAC of almost any DTC category, often in the low $20s on an AOV near $50, which means margin protection compounds because you are not buying the customer back every cycle. When we model pet founders at this size, the hardgoods line is where a few tariff points either get repriced into the customer or quietly eat the contribution that funds the next cohort.

Run the per-unit math before you reroute a single PO. Take a $4 FOB nylon dog collar, assume a representative 6.5% base duty on HS 4201, the 10% Section 122 surcharge, and roughly $0.30 of freight per unit. Today a China-origin and a Cambodia-origin collar land at almost the same number, about $4.96 each, because the Section 301 layer is suspended. But model the China unit with a representative 25% Section 301 layer added back after Nov 10 and it lands near $5.96, a full dollar higher, while the Cambodia unit stays at $4.96. That is a roughly 20% landed-cost swing on the China unit, driven entirely by one date and one paused tariff layer.

The pattern we see again and again with pet brands is that the duty-free food line gets all the sourcing attention and the duty-exposed hardgood gets none. Flip it. Your kibble origin is a freight-and-quality decision. Your collar origin is a tariff decision with a November deadline attached, and that is the one worth a spreadsheet and a backup supplier.

That backup supplier is the actual deliverable. You do not have to move China volume today, because today the penalty is small. You have to qualify a Cambodia or Vietnam alternative now so that if the suspension lapses you can shift volume in weeks instead of quarters. Switching origins on a hardgood is a 3-to-6-month exercise on tooling, samples and QC, which is longer than the runway between a tariff headline and a landed-cost hit. For more on how landed-cost and capital decisions interact at this stage, see our interim CFO services overview, and for sibling category maps see baby products import origins and beauty import origins 2026.

Sources and methodology

The import figures come from the US Census Bureau International Trade imports API, the data behind USA Trade Online. We pulled HS code 230910 (dog and cat food, put up for retail sale) and HS heading 4201 (saddlery and harness for any animal), using CON_VAL_YR, the cumulative imports-for-consumption value in US dollars, at month 12 of each year for the full-year figure. Shares are each country's value divided by the total-all-countries value for that HS code.

HS 230910 full-year import value was $1.446B in 2021, $1.991B in 2022, $1.640B in 2023, $2.119B in 2024 and $2.295B in 2025. HS 4201 totaled $490M in 2025. One caveat on the accessories figure: HS 4201 is the closest single heading for pet leashes, collars, harnesses and dog coats, and its official description explicitly lists leads, muzzles, dog coats and the like, but it also captures some equine and livestock tack, so it slightly overstates pure pet-retail accessories. Pet toys and beds sit under other codes (such as 9503, 3926, 6307 and 9404) that are also heavily China-sourced but do not roll up into one clean pet heading, so the true China-hardgoods exposure for a pet brand is somewhat larger than the HS 4201 line alone.

Tariff status comes from the USITC Harmonized Tariff Schedule and from regulatory research via Perplexity and Parallel.ai. The base MFN rate for retail pet food at 2309.10.00.90 returns "Free" in column-1-general, so WTO and MFN partners including Thailand, Canada and China pay no base duty. HS 4201 carries a positive, material-dependent base rate historically in the 2.4% to 11%-plus range; a brand wanting a single duty number should pull the exact 10-digit sub-line for its dominant material. The Section 122 surcharge of 10% (some logistics sources report 15%) took effect Feb 24, 2026, was ruled unlawful May 7, stayed May 12, and is scheduled to expire July 24, 2026. Section 301 China reciprocal tariffs are suspended until Nov 10, 2026 under EO 14358.

The pet-food CPI series is FRED CUSR0000SS61031 (CPI for All Urban Consumers: Pet Food and Treats, US city average, seasonally adjusted, index Dec 1997=100). May 2026 read 193.229 against 189.760 in May 2025, a year-over-year increase of about 1.8%. The annual averages charted (about 186.5 in 2023, 190.9 in 2024 and 190.6 in 2025) are computed from the monthly series; 2021 and 2022 are left blank because the writer did not pull the full pre-2023 monthly history this run.

Market-size context is from the APPA pet industry stats and from IMARC and Grand View estimates via Perplexity. Freight context is from Freightos and DocShipper 2026 ocean-rate outlooks. The DTC pet benchmarks (gross margin, CAC, AOV) are industry composites for directional modeling, not figures tied to any single brand.

The most important limitation is timing. The live tariff environment is volatile, and two dates (the July 24, 2026 Section 122 expiry and the Nov 10, 2026 Section 301 suspension end) can change the landed-cost math. Re-verify both before making a sourcing decision off this post.

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