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Trump places a 10% tariff on lumber and a 25% tariff on furniture and cabinets

<i>Mario Tama/Getty Images via CNN Newsource</i><br/>A customer shops in the lumber section of a Home Depot store in Los Angeles

By CNN Newsource

Published September 29, 2025 9:15 pm

By David Goldman, CNN

(CNN) — President Donald Trump on Monday ordered significant new tariffs on wood and various wooden products, including imported lumber, timber, kitchen cabinets and upholstered furniture – potentially adding costs to homebuilding and furnishing, which have surged in price in recent months.

In a proclamation, Trump said the United States would begin charging a 10% tariff on foreign softwood lumber and timber, used in a wide variety of building materials. He also announced a 25% tariff on kitchen cabinets, vanities and upholstered wooden furniture.

Those rates are set to go into effect October 14. On January 1, Trump will boost the tariff on cabinets to 30% and upholstered furniture to 50%. He first announced those new tariffs in a Truth Social post on Thursday.

In the proclamation, Trump said that the wood tariffs were necessary to shore up America’s local industries and support national security.

“In my judgment, the actions in this proclamation will, among other things, strengthen supply chains, bolster industrial resilience, create high-quality jobs, and increase domestic capacity utilization for wood products such that the United States can fully satisfy domestic consumption while also creating economic benefits through increased exports,” Trump wrote.

The White House in March ordered the Commerce Department to investigate the potential national security threats posed by imported lumber – the majority of which comes from Canada. Trump for months has been criticizing America’s northern neighbor for its significant lumber exports to the United States.

Trump routinely claims that the United States has enough trees to support its own lumber needs, and he has lambasted Canadian tariffs on US lumber, claiming America can do without Canadian lumber. In his March executive order that set the investigation in motion, Trump said the United States has an “abundance of timber resources that are more than adequate to meet our domestic timber production needs.”

It’s not quite that simple, industry experts argue: They warn tariffs could end up increasing lumber and building costs — and even push up housing prices for consumers.

The United States has 300 billion trees, but economists and homebuilders caution that America does not currently have the industrial capacity to meet demand and that placing a significant tariff on Canadian lumber imports could further exacerbate the ongoing housing affordability crisis.

Lumber is a critical ingredient in the US homebuilding industry, and the United States sources about 30% of the softwood lumber it uses annually from Canada. Lumber imports from Canada are already subject to countervailing and anti-dumping duties of 14.5%.

Rising costs

Various tariffs that Trump has imposed have already boosted furniture prices considerably over the past year. Overall, furniture last month cost 4.7% more than in August 2024, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. Living room and dining room furniture in particular has grown more expensive – rising 9.5% over the past 12 months, the BLS reported.

Furniture prices have surged as Trump hiked tariffs on China and Vietnam, the top two sources of imported furniture. Both countries exported $12 billion worth of furniture and fixtures to the United States last year, according to US Commerce Department data.

Furniture prices had largely fallen for the past two and a half years prior to Trump’s tariffs. But Trump said Thursday that foreign manufacturers have oversupplied the US market and the tariffs were necessary to regain US manufacturing prowess.

Shares of Wayfair (W), RH (RH) and Williams-Sonoma (WSM) have tumbled in recent days as Trump threatened the tariffs. But Trump has said that US-based furniture makers have struggled in the face of foreign imports. For example, he singled out North Carolina’s fading furniture-making industry in a series of social media posts last Thursday.

“The reason for this is the large scale ‘FLOODING’ of these products into the United States by other outside Countries,” Trump said in a Truth Social post last week. “It is a very unfair practice, but we must protect, for National Security and other reasons, our Manufacturing process.”