China’s rare earth pause has two more months. Plan as if it ends.

On 7 November 2025 China suspended for twelve months the wider export controls it had announced on 9 October. The suspended package added licensing for five more heavy rare earths (holmium, erbium, thulium, europium and ytterbium), controls on magnet-making equipment and battery materials, and a rule reaching foreign-made products that contain Chinese rare earths worth 0.1% or more of their value.

That suspension was due to end on 10 November 2026. On 23 September the US Treasury Secretary said the US–China truce would be extended to 10 January 2027, and on 28 September China’s commerce ministry confirmed its trade arrangements with the US were extended to the same date. The ministry’s statement did not mention rare earths by name. The pause is widely expected to run to January, but as of 9 October Beijing has not published a notice saying so.

Two months is not a solution. Two things are also easy to miss.

The first controls never paused

The April 2025 controls were not part of the suspension. Exports of seven medium and heavy rare earths — samarium, gadolinium, terbium, dysprosium, lutetium, scandium and yttrium — still need an export licence from Beijing. That covers their metals, oxides, alloys, compounds and permanent magnet materials.

Dysprosium and terbium are what keep high-performance magnets working at temperature. They sit in the motors of robots, drones and electric vehicles, in cooling fans and pumps, and in defence systems.

Concentration has not moved

China produced around 69% of the world’s rare earth mine output in 2025, and processes up to 90%. New capacity elsewhere is real but years from scale. A buyer who switches magnet supplier often finds the same Chinese material one tier further back.

What to check before January

• Which of your products contain permanent magnets, and whether those magnets use dysprosium or terbium.
• Who made the magnet and the alloy, not only who sold you the motor.
• What stock and lead time you hold if licences slow down again, and which customers would feel it first.
• What your contracts say about delay caused by export licensing outside your control.

The decision in front of you

If the pause is extended again, the work above still shortens your exposure to the controls that never stopped. If it is not, the wider controls return, including the 0.1% rule that reaches products made outside China. A truce that has already been extended once, by two months, at short notice, is not something to build a supply plan on.

The same truce governs Washington’s suspension of its export-control “affiliates rule”; see our note on that.