Finished Canadian Saunas Miss the 50% Tariff List; Their Cedar Cladding Doesn't

The 50% tariff that hit $20 billion of Canadian goods at 12:01 a.m. Eastern on August 22 does not appear to reach a finished Canadian sauna. It reaches the cedar that sauna is made of, and U.S. Customs and Border Protection has already put that in writing.

The list is six pages long. CBP published it the day before the tariffs went live, and 9406.10.00, the classification for a prefabricated building of wood, is not on it. 4409.10.90 is. That is the subheading for continuously shaped coniferous wood, its ten-digit breakout is named Western red cedar, and it is exactly where CBP told a Canadian sauna importer its tongue-and-groove planks belonged in a 2012 internal advice ruling.

So two shipments a buyer would describe with the same three words, "a Canadian sauna," can now differ by 50 percentage points of duty depending on how complete the thing was when it crossed.

What is and is not on the 50% list

Not on it: 9406.10.00, prefabricated buildings of wood (2.6% general rate, free under USMCA)

Not on it: 8516.29.00, the subheading CBP uses for an electric sauna heater

Not on it: heading 7321, wood-burning stoves

On it: 4409.10.90, shaped coniferous wood, including the Western red cedar statistical line

On it: 4410.19.00 particleboard and OSB, 4411.13 and 4411.14 MDF, most of heading 4412 plywood

On it: 4418.21.80 and 4418.29.80, wooden doors and their frames and thresholds

On it: 9401.69.60 and 9401.91.90, wooden-framed seats and wooden seat parts

On it: 9403.60.80, other wooden furniture

On it: 8516.80 electric heating resistors, 9032.10.00 thermostats, 8537.10.91 control panels

Effective: 12:01 a.m. ET, August 22, 2026. USMCA origin does not exempt a covered good.

What Washington actually did

Three proclamations issued July 20 invoked Section 338 of the Tariff Act of 1930, a provision nobody had used to impose a tariff in the 96 years it has been on the books. It allows duties of up to 50% on imports from a country found to be discriminating against U.S. commerce. The administration cited Canada's dairy supply management, provincial liquor board restrictions on American product, and auto measures. USTR put the covered trade at nearly $20 billion a year.

The duties were set for August 19, postponed three days while negotiations ran, then took effect when the talks collapsed. Prime Minister Mark Carney called them a miscalculation, said Canada had been attacked, and announced dollar-for-dollar retaliation beginning September 8.

Two mechanics matter more than the headline number. A valid USMCA certificate does not get you out of Section 338, so goods that would otherwise cross duty-free still pay the 50% if their classification is listed. And the proclamations carve out merchandise already covered by the Section 232 wood, steel, aluminum, copper and auto provisions, which sit at a 0% additional rate under 9903.03.15 and 9903.03.16. An entry pays one regime or the other. Anyone quoting you "50% on top of the lumber tariff" stopped reading early.

RBC Economics sized it on August 22: the targeted goods are about 5% of Canadian exports to the U.S., enough to lift Canada's average effective U.S. tariff rate from roughly 3% to roughly 6%, with more than 80% of Canadian exports still crossing duty-free under CUSMA. Wood products and furniture are among the sectors RBC flags as most affected. For most of the Canadian economy this is a glancing blow. For a company that mills cedar into sauna cladding, it is not.

CBP already answered this question, three times

The sauna classification file at CBP is small and unusually clear, and all three of the rulings that matter now involve Canadian merchandise or a prefabricated room.

In HQ H179957, issued September 20, 2012 out of the Port of Detroit, an importer disputed CBP's position on a "Deluxe DIY Cedar Sauna Kit" from Canada: roughly 192 pieces of tongue-and-groove Western red cedar plus a duckboard floor, door and frame, hardware and foil vapor barrier, for a sauna built into an existing room. CBP held that "the cedar wood pieces are properly classified under heading 4409, HTSUS, specifically under subheading 4409.10.90." The electric heater went to 8516.29.00 separately. The duty rate CBP quoted for the cedar in 2012 was free. As of August 22, that same subheading carries an additional 50%.

N290059, from October 2017, went the same way for another Canadian kit, this one in Western red cedar or Canadian hemlock, with no heater and no metal hardware at import, built into an existing structure rather than freestanding. CBP split it between 4407.10.01, dimensional lumber, and 4409.10, the shaped components, and warned that the lumber may be subject to the antidumping and countervailing duty orders on Canadian softwood.

N304393, from June 2019, is the other outcome. A prefabricated sauna shipped to the U.S. in assembled condition, built from cross-laminated timber, freestanding, weatherproof, standing on adjustable metal legs with lifting hooks in the roof, classified under 9406.10.0000 as a prefabricated building.

Line those three up and the rule is not subtle. Freestanding and assembled is a building. Cut-to-size cedar for a room you frame into a basement is shaped wood, and shaped wood is now the expensive answer.

Cladding, benching and heater are three separate tariff questions the moment a sauna stops crossing the border as one building. Photo: Leisurecraft.

The cedar line, and the older fight underneath it

Heading 4409 covers wood continuously shaped along an edge, end or face. Tongued, grooved, chamfered, V-jointed, beaded. That is a plain-language description of sauna cladding, and the way the list splits it will look arbitrary to anyone who buys the stuff.

Wood siding under 4409.10.10, which has its own Western red cedar statistical lines, is not on the 50% list. Wood flooring under 4409.10.20 is not on it. But 4409.10.90, the residual basket where profiled cedar that is neither siding nor flooring nor molding nor dowel ends up, is on it, along with 4409.10.40 and 4409.10.50 for moldings and 4409.29.91 for the nonconiferous equivalent, which is where a lot of thermally modified hardwood lands.

Cedar that has not been shaped yet is a separate and much older fight. Canadian softwood lumber under 4407.11 through 4407.19 is carrying a combined antidumping and countervailing cash deposit rate of 35.16%, plus the 10% Section 232 duty on softwood timber and lumber that took effect October 14, 2025. Commerce's seventh administrative review would cut the AD/CVD portion to roughly 25% based on its June 30 post-preliminary analysis, but those are not the rates anyone is depositing at today and the final results are not out. Until they land, raw Canadian softwood is arriving at about 45 points of duty before Section 338 enters the conversation at all.

Where a Canadian sauna's parts sit as of August 23, 2026

What crosses the border | Classification | Where it lands
Complete prefabricated sauna, assembled and freestanding | 9406.10.00 | Not on the Section 338 list; free under USMCA
Profiled cedar cladding, "other" | 4409.10.90 | On the list, +50%
Plywood and veneered panels | most of 4412 | On the list, +50%
MDF, particleboard, OSB | 4411.13, 4411.14, 4410.19 | On the list, +50%
Wooden sauna door and frame | 4418.29.80 | On the list, +50%
Wooden bench and bench parts | 9401.69.60, 9401.91.90 | On the list, +50%
Dimensional softwood lumber | 4407.11 to 4407.19 | Section 232 and AD/CVD instead, about 45%
Electric sauna heater | 8516.29.00 | Not on the list
Replacement heating element | 8516.80 | On the list, +50%
Thermostat or control panel | 9032.10.00, 8537.10.91 | On the list, +50%

The counterintuitive consequence is worth saying plainly: under this tariff, the more finished a Canadian sauna is when it crosses, the better it does. A barrel that arrives as one banded product and a panelized room that arrives as one building are in a different category from a flat-packed kit of cladding, a door and bench components. Two saunas at the same retail price can now have completely different landed cost. None of that is a determination about any particular shipment, which is the point. Get the ten-digit numbers off your supplier's last three entries instead of reasoning from a product photo.

Heaters mostly walk. Elements and thermostats do not.

Heading 8516.29, where CBP put the sauna heater in H179957, is not on the Section 338 list. Neither is 7321, where wood-burning stoves live. Homecraft, which has built stainless sauna heaters in Surrey, British Columbia since 1988 and is the largest Canadian name in the category, is selling into the U.S. this week on last week's duty terms.

Its spare parts are a different matter. 8516.80, electric heating resistors, is on the list. So is 9032.10.00, thermostats, and 8537.10.91, the residual line for control boards and panels rated under 1,000 volts. A Canadian-built heater is fine. A replacement element, a bare thermostat or a controller shipped on its own is a 50% item. Warranty stock and service parts are where this shows up, and it will show up on a freight invoice three weeks from now rather than in anybody's press release today.

Canada has almost nowhere else to sell these

UN Comtrade data explains why this lands harder in Ontario than the 5%-of-exports headline suggests. Canada exported $124.3 million of prefabricated wooden buildings in 2025, and $121.4 million of it, 97.6%, went to the United States. The 2024 figure was 96.4% and 2023 was 96.8%. This is not a diversified export category. It is a category with one customer.

Run it the other way and the dependency reverses. The U.S. imported $271.2 million of prefabricated wooden buildings in 2025. Canada supplied 42.7% of that, which is a lot, but China at 16.4%, Mexico at 8.9% and Estonia at 7.4% are all real alternatives with real capacity. It is the same asymmetry RBC found across the whole targeted basket: Canada is 3.7% of U.S. imports of these goods, while the U.S. takes 81% of Canada's exports of them.

U.S. imports of prefabricated wooden buildings (HS 9406.10), by origin. Source: UN Comtrade

Origin | 2024 | 2025 | 2025 share
Canada | $95.0M | $115.7M | 42.7%
China | $36.3M | $44.6M | 16.4%
Mexico | $31.1M | $24.3M | 8.9%
Estonia | $13.0M | $20.2M | 7.4%
Poland | $22.3M | $7.1M | 2.6%
Latvia | $1.6M | $1.8M | 0.7%
Finland | $1.6M | $1.2M | 0.5%
All origins | $249.0M | $271.2M | 100%

Read the Estonia row twice. It grew 55% year over year while Poland fell 68%, and it did that before any of this happened. The heading covers every prefabricated wooden building, sheds and cabins included, so nobody should call this a sauna import statistic. As a directional read on where American buyers were already sourcing rooms, it is the best public number there is.

Seven in ten Leisurecraft dealers are American

Leisurecraft, the Melancthon, Ontario manufacturer behind the Dundalk barrels, the Canadian Timber cabins and the Pure Cube line, is the most exposed name in this story, and it publishes enough to size that exposure. Its Find a Retailer page claims 100 or more retailers across the USA, 75 or more across Canada, and 45 or more across Europe.

The live feed behind that locator, at the company's own dealermap.ca, is more specific. Pulled on August 23, it returns 416 rows covering 400 unique named locations. 280 of them, 70.0%, are in the United States. 120, 30.0%, are in Canada.

Dealer count is a footprint, not revenue, and one Toronto retailer can outsell three in Ohio. But 70% is not a rounding error, and it matches what the company says about itself. Leisurecraft's whole position is Canadian manufacturing sold mostly to Americans, which was a marketing asset in 2025 and is a problem to be managed in 2026. It has been shipping the glass-fronted CT Element to U.S. buyers since June.

It is not alone up there. Nootka Saunas builds Western red cedar cube and barrel saunas in Squamish, British Columbia, and sells into the U.S. True North Saunas has been building cedar saunas in Owen Sound, Ontario, and shipping to both countries. Northern Lights Cedar sends Western red cedar barrels and tubs south from Manitoba. All of them face the same question, and for all of them the answer depends on how a kit is entered rather than on where it was built.

The math that moves buyers to Europe and West Virginia

Here is the comparison that decides 2027 order books.

Under the EU trade framework that took effect July 1, most EU-origin goods entering the United States face a 15% all-inclusive ceiling, with no stacking on the MFN rate, and the ceiling was written to hold for lumber regardless of how the Section 232 wood investigations land. Estonia and Latvia are in the EU. The Baltic sauna room that competes head to head with a Canadian one now has a known, capped number. Its Canadian competitor has a number that depends on how a Customs officer reads a packing list.

That is the entire argument for SaunaLife, whose rooms the company says are hand-crafted in Northern Europe and which reaches American buyers through Bathing Brands in Wheeling, Illinois. It is the argument for Auroom, registered as AUROOM OÜ with its factory at Tõrvandi, Estonia and a barrel plant at Madona, Latvia. It is the argument for Thermory, the Estonian thermowood producer whose cladding has been going into North American sauna projects for years. None of them are cheap. All of them can quote a landed cost a dealer can defend to a customer without a disclaimer, which in this market is a different and better kind of advantage than being cheap. We have written about how a country of 1.3 million became this industry's contract manufacturer. This is the tariff environment that trend was waiting for.

The American case is stronger than it was and less purely American than the marketing implies. Almost Heaven has built saunas in West Virginia's Greenbrier Valley since 1977 and is the obvious beneficiary of a tariff on Canadian components. It has also been owned by Harvia since 2019, and every unit ships with a Harvia heater, so the most visible American-made sauna brand is a subsidiary of a Finnish public company. Its about page says the lumber is "responsibly sourced" and does not say from where. For a buyer choosing on tariff exposure that is the question to put in writing, because Western red cedar is a Pacific Northwest and British Columbia species and a West Virginia assembly line does not by itself tell you which side of the border the boards came from.

Our earlier read on which sauna brands carry the most tariff exposure treated European kits as the pressured ones. Twelve months and one Supreme Court ruling later, a 15% capped European room is the predictable option on the board.

September 8 is the other half of this

Canada's retaliation takes effect the Tuesday after Labor Day. Carney has named steel, dairy, appliances, agricultural equipment, pulp and paper, and electronics as target sectors. Ottawa had not published the tariff lines as of August 23.

Electronics is the word that should hold a sauna executive's attention, because that is where controllers, contactors and electrical panels live, and because American heater and control brands sell into Canada. Anyone telling you today that a specific U.S. heater or controller will be hit on September 8 is guessing. Have the HS codes for your Canada-bound SKUs ready so you can read the schedule the hour it publishes instead of the week after.

Before your next purchase order

Get the ten-digit HTS numbers your Canadian supplier used on its last three U.S. entries. Not the product name. The numbers.

Ask whether the shipment enters as one 9406 building or as separately classified components, and get the answer in writing.

Find out who is importer of record. Duty is assessed on customs value and paid by the importer, so a 50% tariff is not a 50% increase in retail price unless somebody decides it is.

Price service parts separately. Elements, thermostats and control boards from Canada are 50% items even when the heater is not.

Ask any brand claiming domestic manufacture where the wood comes from. Assembly country and lumber origin are two different facts.

Have your Canada-bound HS codes ready before Ottawa publishes its list.

The reflex this week is to say Canadian saunas just got 50% more expensive. The list says otherwise, and the list is what gets read at the border. What actually changed is that the cost of a Canadian sauna now turns on paperwork in a way it never has, and that the one supply chain in this business with a hard capped number happens to sit in the Baltics.