Research Highlights Featured Chart

October 1, 2026

The gap between statutory and actual tariff rates

US tariffs collected in 2025 were less than half of the announced rates.

Tyler Smith

Source: MAGNIFIER

In 2025, the United States raised tariffs to levels not seen in over a century. The trade-weighted statutory rate peaked at 32.8 percent in April and stood at 25.7 percent in December, far above the roughly 4 percent rate that prevailed after the tariff increases of 2018–2019. 

In a paper in the Journal of Economic Perspectives, authors Gita Gopinath and Brent Neiman explore the consequences of this surge of tariffs and the implications for prices. They find that the impacts of the tariffs were softened because the actual tariff rates were lower than the rates that had been announced, helping to explain why price increases fell short of some forecasts.

Figure 1 plots statutory and actual tariff measures month by month throughout 2025.

Figure 1 from Gopinath and Neiman (2026)

The solid red line shows the statutory rate, which the authors constructed from US Census data on roughly 19,000 ten-digit product categories by taking, for each product and exporter, the highest ratio of tariff revenue to import value in a month. This methodology is based on the assumption that the highest tariff rate that is actually paid on imports of a given commodity reveals the statutory rate. These maximum rates were then averaged with weights according to their share of total imports in 2024.

The solid blue line shows the actual rate, calculated by dividing the total tariff revenue collected by the US government on imports for an exporter by the value of those imports. The actual rates were aggregated using the same fixed trade weights from 2024 as were used for the statutory rates.

The dashed lines plot versions of the statutory and actual trade-weighted tariff rates using weights that update each month.

The chart shows that the statutory rate jumped in April, partially reversed after the United States and China reduced their bilateral rates, and then stabilized around 26 percent. The actual rate rose slowly and steadily, reaching 12.4 percent in December. The dashed lines show that importers shifted spending away from the most heavily tariffed goods.

The authors highlight four factors that account for the gap between the statutory and actual rates. First, shipments are tariffed at the rate in effect when they leave port, so goods on long ocean routes arrive months after a new rate takes effect. Second, some products and companies are given special exemptions. For example, semiconductors face a statutory rate of 22 percent but an actual rate of 9 percent, a difference that drives the gap between Taiwan's 27 percent statutory and 9 percent actual rates. Third, utilization of the US–Mexico–Canada Agreement for imports from Canada and Mexico rose from below 50 percent in 2024 to nearly 90 percent by December 2025. Finally, evasion and uneven enforcement widen the gap.

The researchers go on to estimate that 92 percent of the 2025 tariffs were passed on to US producers and consumers in the form of higher prices, compared with 81 percent for the 2018–2019 tariffs.