By the Digital Empire Regulatory Research Team (TariffWatch Analysis Team) · Reviewed by Andy Gaber, Founder, Digital Empire Holdings LLC · Published August 24, 2026 · Last updated August 24, 2026
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Start Watchlist — $29/moThe Federal Register 2026-15961 public-comment window closed at 11:59 PM Eastern Time, Thursday August 27, 2026. Nothing on this page is an invitation to file into it. The former $49 comment-filing package and $99 inclusion-rebuttal package are closed and not for sale; those checkout routes return HTTP 410. We do not take payment for a filing we cannot submit, and we have not re-enabled them.
The templates stay free DIY: free DIY comment-letter templates · inclusion rebuttal guide. Drafts you review and submit yourself. We do not POST to regulations.gov as you.
Every USITC HTS Search and World Bank WITS statement on this page is sourced to USITC HTS Search and World Bank WITS's own public material as checked 2026-08-24. Vendors change pricing and packaging without telling us; verify with USITC HTS Search and World Bank WITS before you buy. Where we could not verify a claim from USITC HTS Search and World Bank WITS's own material, we removed it rather than softened it.
One live TariffWatch SKU: Watchlist. $29/mo, up to 20 HTSUS subheadings, weekly Monday digest of BIS Federal Register notices whose titles match those codes. The free Exposure Checker and Duty Impact Calculator stay free.
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Short version: the USITC HTS Search at hts.usitc.gov is the free legal publication of the U.S. tariff schedule. WITS is the World Bank's free multi-country trade-and-tariff research tool. Both are canonical. Both are static lookups. Neither alerts anyone when a Chapter 99 headnote just quietly doubled a landed-cost line. That is the entire reason TariffWatch exists.
The U.S. International Trade Commission maintains hts.usitc.gov as the official free publication of the Harmonized Tariff Schedule of the United States. It publishes the current schedule, historical revisions, Chapter 99 headnotes (where Section 232, 301, and IEEPA rate overlays live), and rules of interpretation. It is the legal reference and it is free. USITC's own guidance is explicit that the search does not classify a specific product for the importer, does not compute an effective duty by origin, and does not send alerts. It is a lookup surface.
The World Integrated Trade Solution at wits.worldbank.org is a free World Bank platform that aggregates tariff and trade-flow data across countries for economists and policy researchers. It is broad, downloadable, and oriented toward cross-country research rather than real-time U.S. importer operations.
TariffWatch reads on top of USITC, the Federal Register, and CBP's Chapter 99 overlays and produces (a) change detection (a diff surface between the schedule this week and the schedule last week, structured per HTS code), (b) plain-language duty stacking ("your effective rate on 8708.99 from China is now X%: base + 301 + 232 derivative"), and (c) watchlist-personalized alerts tied to Federal Register notice 2026-15961 and the 2026-08-27 BIS deadline. Free tier for the exposure check; $29/month for the watchlist.
USITC and WITS publish reference data; TariffWatch interprets that data against a specific importer's HTS exposure and alerts on changes. Neither substitutes for the other — everyTariffWatch exposure output cites the underlying USITC HTS section and Federal Register notice it was computed from.
| Dimension | USITC HTS Search | WITS (World Bank) | TariffWatch |
|---|---|---|---|
| Price | Free | Free | Free checker + $29/mo watchlist |
| Data authority | Legal reference for U.S. schedule | Aggregated multi-country research data | Reads on top of USITC + Federal Register |
| Change detection | None (revisions publish, no diff surface) | Not an alerting product | Yes, per HTS code |
| Effective-rate stacking | Manual (Chapter 99 headnotes) | Not modeled at U.S. Chapter 99 depth | Plain-language stacked rate |
| Personalized alerts | None | None | Per-HTS watchlist alerts |
| Aug 27 2026 BIS deadline workflow | Publishes the notice; no deadline calendar | Not covered | Purpose-built for this deadline |
For any question of legal reference — what does column-1 general say about this HTS heading, what does the Chapter 99 headnote for a 301 subheading state, what is the current text of the statistical suffix on 8708.99 — USITC is authoritative and TariffWatch is not a substitute. Every serious classification decision should be made against USITC as the primary source, with a licensed customs broker as filer of record. That has not changed and will not change.
For cross-country tariff and trade-flow research, comparative policy analysis, and academic work, WITS is a superb free resource. It is not built for real-time U.S. importer operations and does not pretend to be.
For the operational questions — "did anything just change for the codes I import," "what is my effective rate today across all overlays," "what needs a comment letter before the 2026-08-27 close" — a window now shut — TariffWatch was the tool and USITC is not built to answer any of those in a merchant-usable form. The government publishes the schedule; nobody in the government will ever text an importer when line 47 of Chapter 99 quietly doubled a landed-cost line.
The current effective rate on a given HTS code from a given country in the 2025-26 regime is rarely a single number pulled off column-1. It is a stack: base rate, plus any Section 301 tranche (subheadings under 9903.88.xx and similar), plus any Section 232 derivative overlay, plus any IEEPA reciprocal adjustment, plus antidumping/countervailing duties where applicable. Chapter 99 headnotes are the mechanism; the headnotes reference each other in ways that require chaining by hand on the USITC search. TariffWatch's duty-stacking output is a plain-language wrapper around the same underlying USITC data.
This is a hypothetical scenario, not a real customer case. A small automotive-parts importer regularly imports under HTS 8708.99 from Vietnam. During the September 2026 window, BIS publishes an additional derivative-inclusion list that catches part of the 8708.99 statistical suffix range. The USITC search reflects the new headnote language within days; nobody at USITC or the Federal Register emails the importer. The importer discovers the rate change six weeks later when their broker's invoice comes back with an unexpected 232 line. TariffWatch's watchlist would have alerted the day the new headnote published, with a stacked-rate breakdown of the change and the dollar impact estimated against the importer's historical volume on that code.
TariffWatch is a data and workflow tool that estimates Section 232 tariff exposure from publicly available Federal Register, USITC, and CBP data. TariffWatch is NOT a licensed customs broker under 19 CFR 111, NOT a filer of record, and NOT a legal-advice service. This is not customs classification advice. Compliance decisions remain the responsibility of the importer and their customs broker or trade attorney. TariffWatch does not guarantee that any classification, exposure estimate, or comment letter will be accepted by CBP, BIS, or Commerce.
TariffWatch is not affiliated with the U.S. Department of Commerce, the Bureau of Industry and Security (BIS), U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP), or the U.S. International Trade Commission (USITC). References to USITC and to the World Bank/WITS are nominative-fair-use for the sole purpose of comparing a paid software product against free government and multilateral publications.
hts.usitc.gov is the official free publication of the Harmonized Tariff Schedule of the United States, maintained by the U.S. International Trade Commission. It is the legal reference for HTS classification. It publishes the current schedule, historical revisions, and Chapter 99 headnotes where Section 232, 301, and IEEPA rate overlays live. It is authoritative and it is free. The USITC explicitly does not classify individual products, does not compute an importer's effective duty by origin, and does not send alerts when rates change.
The World Integrated Trade Solution (WITS) is a free World Bank tool that aggregates multi-country tariff and trade-flow data for researchers and policy analysts. It is broad, canonical, and oriented toward research rather than real-time U.S. importer operations.
Two reasons: (1) USITC publishes the schedule and the Chapter 99 headnotes but does not diff them, does not alert on changes, and does not personalize to an importer's HTS list — TariffWatch does all three; (2) Chapter 99 stacking (base duty + Section 301 + Section 232 derivative + IEEPA reciprocal + antidumping/countervailing where applicable) requires chaining cross-referenced headnotes by hand. TariffWatch's duty-stack calculator returns the effective rate in plain language for the codes in your watchlist. Neither replaces USITC as legal reference; they read on top of it. The FR 2026-15961 comment deadline itself closed 2026-08-27.
No. USITC is the legal reference and TariffWatch cites USITC as a primary source in every exposure calculation. When there is any disagreement between what TariffWatch shows and what USITC publishes, USITC is right by definition. What TariffWatch adds is change detection, alerts, and personalization on top of the same underlying data.
Neither publishes a per-importer alert. USITC publishes revisions to the schedule; a reader has to notice the revision and diff it against the prior. WITS is a research aggregation platform, not an alerting service.
The Federal Register is the legal publication where new tariff rules appear as proclamations, notices, and interim final rules. It is authoritative, high-volume, and, like USITC, offers no personalized alerting. TariffWatch sends a Monday digest of newly published BIS Federal Register notices whose titles match HTS codes on the customer's watchlist.
No. TariffWatch is a data and workflow tool, not a licensed customs broker, not a filer of record, and not a legal-advice service. This comparison is factual differentiation of a paid software product from free government reference publications.
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