The US Tariff on Indian Textiles Has a Published Number Again: 10 Percent From 24 July 2026

What was published, and when

For most of 2026 the honest answer to "what is the US tariff on Indian textiles" was that there was a framework commitment and no published rate notice. That changed on 28 July 2026, when the Office of the United States Trade Representative published its notice of actions in sixty Section 301 investigations into economies that had failed to impose and enforce a prohibition on importing goods made with forced labour. The duties apply to goods entered for consumption on or after 24 July 2026, with a narrow exception for goods already loaded and in transit before that moment and entered before 28 July.

The notice sets two rates. An economy that has a forced labour import prohibition in place, or has committed to one through an Agreement on Reciprocal Trade, is set at 10 percent. Every other investigated economy is set at 12.5 percent. India is in the lower group, and the notice says why in the determination for India: the finding takes into account India's adoption of a forced labour import prohibition after the proposed action was published on 5 June 2026. So the number for Indian goods is 10 percent.

The Indian instrument behind that finding is worth naming, because the notice does not name it and most coverage does not either. It is DGFT Notification 23/2026-27 of 13 July 2026, which inserted Para 2.20B into the Foreign Trade Policy 2023 prohibiting the import of goods produced wholly or in part through forced labour, with Para 11.64 adopting the ILO Forced Labour Convention, 1930, No. 29 definition. We have written up what that instrument and the EU's parallel regime ask of a fabric mill separately, because the evidence question outlives the duty rate.

That 10 percent is not the whole customs picture and should not be read as one. It is the duty this particular action introduced, sitting alongside whatever else applies to your tariff line. The notice also carries product exemptions, set out in its Annex I and Annex II, Part A, at tariff subheading level. Those annexes run to hundreds of pages of tables, so the only safe way to know your own position is to have your customs broker check your specific HS lines against them rather than assume the headline rate applies to everything you ship.

The part that is specifically about textiles

Buried in the same notice is a textile mechanism, and it is the piece an Indian mill should read twice. The Trade Representative has determined to establish tariff rate quotas, when feasible and for an initial duration of three years, for Bangladesh, Cambodia, Indonesia and Malaysia. The quotas are sized on each of those economies' purchases of United States cotton and United States textile goods, and they let a certain volume of specific textiles and apparel from those four enter the United States free of the Section 301 duty.

India is not on that list. Neither is any other South Asian supplier apart from Bangladesh. Read plainly, this is a structural sourcing incentive: a US buyer placing a covered garment line in Dhaka may eventually have a zero-duty channel that the same line placed in India does not have, and the channel is earned by that country buying American cotton and American cloth.

Two honest qualifications belong next to that. The quotas do not exist yet. The notice says the Trade Representative will establish them as soon as it is feasible and will publish a further Federal Register notice with the effective dates, and that until then the same 10 percent applies to those four economies on the lines the quotas will eventually cover. So the disadvantage is prospective rather than something on an invoice today. The second qualification is that the mechanism is written around apparel and textile volumes, so where it bites hardest is a garment programme, not a roll of cloth sold into a domestic Indian stitching unit.

What replaced what, in order

The reason this landed on 24 July rather than any other date is worth understanding, because it explains why the number moved twice in six months and why it is unlikely to sit still. A rate that resolves through a statutory 150-day ceiling and then reappears under a different statute is not a settled rate. It is a moving one, and the discipline it asks for is the same one a quote validity window exists for.

• 6 August 2025: a reciprocal tariff of 25 percent applied to Indian goods, with a further 25 percent added from 27 August 2025, taking the headline to 50 percent
• 7 February 2026: the added 25 percent was removed by executive order, and a framework named 18 percent for textiles and apparel as a commitment rather than a published rate, which is what our August post described
• 24 February 2026: a temporary import surcharge of 10 percent ad valorem took effect under Section 122 of the Trade Act of 1974, imposed by presidential proclamation published 25 February 2026, which that statute caps at 150 days unless Congress extends it
• 24 July 2026: exactly 150 days later, the Section 301 forced labour action took effect, at 10 percent for India
• 30 September 2026: on the Indian side, RoDTEP runs out. DGFT Notification 74/2025-26 of 31 March 2026 continued the scheme for six months only, to 30 September 2026, at the rates and value caps in force on 1 March 2026. No extension has been notified

Who else is in which band, and which way the gap runs

The two-tier rule above is the part of this notice with the most direct bearing on a quote, and it is worth reading with the country list attached rather than in the abstract. The notice sets 10 percent on goods of a named group of seventeen economies: Argentina, Bangladesh, Cambodia, Canada, Ecuador, El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras, India, Indonesia, Jordan, Malaysia, Mexico, Pakistan, Sri Lanka, Trinidad and Tobago and the United Kingdom. Economies outside that group sit at 12.5 percent, and the notice's own determination for Vietnam, at item 60, is 12.5 percent on products of Vietnam. Products of the European Union and Taiwan are handled differently again, at 10 or 12.5 percent net of the MFN rate, so that the Section 301 tariff and the MFN tariff together reach the band figure.

For an Indian mill and its US buyer that is an unfamiliar direction. The comparison a buyer usually arrives with is the one we set out in the weak rupee and tariffs post, where Indian goods face a higher average tariff than Vietnamese goods into other markets and the currency advantage gets eaten. On this measure, at the United States border, the Section 301 component runs the other way: Indian cloth carries 2.5 percentage points less of it than Vietnamese cloth. Both readings are true, and the useful conclusion is that there is no single answer to whether Indian fabric is tariff-advantaged. It is a question per destination, and it has to be re-asked per destination.

The reason India is in the lower band is stated in the determination itself, at item 24: the finding took account of India's adoption of a forced labour import prohibition after the notice of 5 June 2026. That prohibition is DGFT Notification 23/2026-27, the same instrument that puts a declaration obligation on Indian exporters. So the paperwork burden that landed on our side of the transaction and the lower band that landed on the buyer's side come from one document. The contrast in the notice is explicit: Pakistan is at 10 percent but its determination records that it failed to effectively enforce its own prohibition, and Bangladesh's records an obligation under its arrangement rather than an adopted prohibition.

One limit to state plainly before the band list below, because the figures circulating in trade commentary go further than the document does. Every figure here is the Section 301 component only. It is not a landed duty and it is not the total a US importer pays, which also carries the MFN rate for the tariff line and any other component in force. Stacked effective percentages for Indian and Vietnamese textiles and clothing are in circulation and we are not repeating them here, because the only carriers we could find are tariff aggregator sites and no primary document we could read supports the arithmetic. The band figures above are in the notice. The stack is not.

• India, 10 percent. Item 24, which took account of India's adoption of a forced labour import prohibition after the 5 June 2026 notice.
• Vietnam, 12.5 percent. Item 60, with no prohibition credited.
• Bangladesh, 10 percent. Item 7, which considered its obligation under its arrangement on prohibiting forced labour goods.
• Pakistan, 10 percent. Item 41, in the lower band, but the determination records a failure to effectively enforce its own prohibition.
• European Union and Taiwan, 10 or 12.5 percent net of MFN, with the Section 301 tariff set so that the sum with the MFN rate reaches the band figure.

What this actually changes for a fabric supplier

Very little about the cloth, and quite a lot about the paperwork around it. A fabric mill selling to an Indian garment exporter is one step removed from the US duty, but the exporter's viability decides whether the fabric booking happens at all, and the sampling for it runs months ahead of the shipment.

The concrete work is unglamorous. Confirm which rate your quote assumes and write the date next to it, because a quote that silently assumes a rate is a quote that has taken a position on trade policy without saying so. Settle the Incoterm before the price, since who bears the import duty is decided there and not in any tariff schedule. If you supply exporters, ask them to reconcile their own HS lines against the annexes rather than working off a headline number in a trade paper.

And keep the comparison in proportion. A US buyer weighing India against Bangladesh on a covered line has more than one variable moving, including Bangladesh's LDC graduation and its own tariff treatment after it. The United States is also not the only route that changed this year: the India and UK agreement has been in force since 15 July 2026, and the India and EU agreement is heading for signature. An exporter who reorganises the whole book around one market's notice is taking a concentration risk that no tariff caused.