A rule change that took effect in the spring is still shaping how much American businesses and households pay for imported metal goods. Since early April, tariffs on steel, aluminum and copper products haven’t been calculated off the value of the metal inside a product anymore. They’re calculated off the entire declared value of the finished item, which changes the math on everything from appliances to vehicle parts, and the rule is still in force today.
From Metal Content to Full Customs Value
The shift came from a proclamation signed on April 2, 2026, titled “Strengthening Actions Taken To Adjust Imports of Aluminum, Steel, and Copper Into the United States.” It modified the Section 232 tariff regimes already in place for aluminum, steel and copper so that the additional duty applies to a covered product’s full customs value, not just the value of the metal content within it. That change took effect for goods entered for consumption starting April 6, 2026.
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Why “Full Value” Changes the Bill
That rule is still the operating standard as of this week, confirmed directly against the proclamation’s text as posted on whitehouse.gov. Under the old approach, a metal filing cabinet or a stainless refrigerator door might only owe extra duty on the estimated cost of the steel or aluminum used to make it. Under the current rule, the duty applies to the whole product’s customs value, including labor, other materials, packaging and profit margin baked into the import price. For a finished appliance or vehicle component where metal is only part of the total cost, that’s a meaningfully bigger tariff bill than a metal-content calculation would produce, even in cases where the headline percentage rate on paper hasn’t necessarily gone up at all. A component that once cleared customs owing duty on, say, a third of its value now owes duty on the full invoice price.
Reduced Rates for Verified Domestic Metal Content
The same proclamation, and the amendment that followed it, build in a lower rate for products that can show their metal came from American smelters and mills. A June 1, 2026 follow-up proclamation, effective June 8, 2026, lowered the bar for that reduced rate: a product now needs to show at least 85 percent of its aluminum, steel or copper content was smelted, cast or melted and poured in the United States, down from a 95 percent threshold set in April. That’s a meaningful loosening, since very few supply chains can document 95 percent domestic sourcing but considerably more can clear an 85 percent bar.
The June Adjustment Widened Some Carve-Outs
The June proclamation didn’t just touch the domestic-content threshold. It also expanded the category of goods eligible for a temporarily reduced rate to include agricultural equipment and certain residential heating, ventilation and air conditioning systems and components, after the Commerce Department found those industries were being squeezed by treating ordinary equipment as if it were mostly raw metal. It separately added aluminum lithographic plates and steel racks, two product types that weren’t previously covered, to close what the proclamation describes as a gap that let some derivative products avoid the tariff altogether. None of these changes reversed the underlying full-customs-value approach set in April; they narrowed or adjusted who pays what within it.
Where Households Are Most Likely to Feel It
The product categories named directly in the two proclamations, vehicles, major appliances, tools, HVAC systems, agricultural and construction equipment, are all things ordinary households buy, finance or have installed in a home. Because the duty is assessed on the full price of the finished product rather than a fraction tied to its metal content, price increases connected to this tariff structure are more likely to show up as a noticeable jump on a sticker price than as a small line-item adjustment. Exactly how much of that cost gets passed through to a specific product depends on the manufacturer, its supply chain, and how much of its metal content can be documented as domestically sourced under the current 85 percent test, a figure that was not disclosed for any single consumer product in either proclamation. Neither proclamation requires a retailer to disclose how much of a sticker price is tariff-driven, so a shopper comparing two similar appliances has no reliable way to tell from the price tag alone which one absorbed a bigger share of the new duty.
A Rate Structure With a Built-In Reset Date
The June proclamation’s adjustments for the newly added equipment categories aren’t indefinite. Its own text, mirrored in the Federal Register filing of the underlying April proclamation, sets those specific rates to run only until the end of 2027, after which the applicable duty for the products it names reverts to the rate structure set out in the original April proclamation. That reset date applies to the equipment categories the June proclamation specifically adjusted, not to the full-customs-value mechanism itself, which the April proclamation put in place with no stated expiration date.
This article was produced with AI assistance and reviewed by a human editor. Figures are linked to their primary sources; where a claim could not be verified from the public record, we say so.
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