A CPSC rule exempts polyester from flammability testing

If you import polyester t-shirts into the United States, there is a federal flammability test you do not have to run. You still have to name the test on a document, and since 8 July 2026 the contents of that document go to Customs with your entry.

The exemption is real and it is narrow. 16 CFR 1610 is the flammability standard for general wearing apparel. Paragraph 1610.1(d) carves out a list from testing: plain-surface fabrics of 2.6 ounces per square yard or heavier, plus fabrics made wholly of acrylic, modacrylic, nylon, olefin, polyester, or wool. A plain polyester tee is on that list twice over. No lab, no burn test, no invoice from a testing body.

Then 16 CFR 1110.11 arrives and asks for seven things on the certificate of compliance. Element six is the date and place of compliance testing, along with the lab that did it. Paragraph 1110.11(c) handles the case where there was no testing: if you are claiming a statutory or regulatory exclusion, you identify the exclusion in place of the test date and place. CPSC's own sample general certificate of conformity does exactly this. It is a pair of chino pants, and where the test result would be, it cites 1610.1(d).

So the exemption does not remove the rule from your certificate. It changes what you write next to it.

Why this bites harder now

Element two of the same section is the one that reorganises the work. It requires you to state each CPSC rule the product is being certified to, and to identify separately all applicable rules. Separately. A sentence saying the goods comply with all applicable CPSC requirements satisfies nothing. You need the list.

Producing that list used to be a thing you could leave to whoever was doing your testing. 16 CFR 1112.15(a) closes that door: a third party conformity assessment body may only issue test results for purposes that fall within a scope the CPSC has accepted its accreditation for. A lab is accepted for specific scopes, not for compliance in general. Which means you cannot pick the lab until you know the rule list, because the rule list is what tells you which lab is even eligible to test the thing.

And the rules that need no lab at all, like 1610 for a polyester shirt, will never appear on any lab's paperwork. Nobody downstream is going to hand them to you. They only exist if someone sat down and worked out that the product is in scope.

The effective date moved once and is worth checking rather than remembering. The January 2025 final rule at 90 FR 1800 originally carried two effective dates. A technical correction published 24 September 2025, at 90 FR 45917, restated it as a single effective date of 8 July 2026 with separate applicability dates, and said the change had no substantive effect on when products must comply. Goods entered from a foreign trade zone for consumption or warehousing pick it up on 8 January 2027. Anyone quoting the DATES section from the original rule is quoting text the Commission itself superseded.

What it forces

For a clothing importer, the practical shape is this. The polyester tee is general use apparel, so it certifies on a general certificate of conformity, and 1610 goes on it with the exemption cited instead of a test. The same fabric in a child's pyjama is a different rule entirely, 1615 or 1616 for children's sleepwear, and children's apparel under 1610 also crosses into third party testing territory. Same material, three different certificates depending on who wears it and what it is called.

That last part is the piece people get wrong, and it is not a legal subtlety. Whether something counts as a children's product turns on marketing, labelling, and where it is sold, not on the fibre content.

I have been encoding this into CertScope, which matches a product description against 58 CPSC rules read out of eCFR and the Federal Register and tells you which certificate you are on the hook for. The 1610 entry looks like this:

{
  "rule_id": "16 CFR 1610",
  "name": "Flammability of clothing textiles (general wearing apparel)",
  "cert_type": "either",
  "product_categories": [
    "adult clothing and general wearing apparel",
    "children's clothing that is not children's sleepwear"
  ],
  "hts_hints": ["6109", "6110", "6203", "6204"],
  "third_party_testing_required": true,
  "notes": "1610.1(d) exempts from TESTING plain-surface fabrics >= 2.6 oz/sq yd and fabrics wholly of acrylic, modacrylic, nylon, olefin, polyester, or wool ... exempt from testing is NOT exempt from certifying ..."
}

Every determination it returns carries that same line as a caveat, because it is the single thing most likely to leave a rule off a certificate: an exemption reads like a reason to stop, and here it is a reason to keep writing.

The other caveat on every answer is that the importer of record is the certifier under 1110.7(a) and stays responsible for the list. A tool can hand you 1610. It cannot sign for you.

https://certscope.thecompound.tech/dv