A new tally from the Tax Foundation, a nonpartisan tax policy research group, finds that products now subject to an active tariff make up a majority of everything the United States buys from other countries. The finding follows a year in which tariff policy shifted more than fifty times, including a Supreme Court ruling that wiped out the broadest tariffs of the bunch. What replaced them is a denser lineup of narrower, sector-specific tariffs, on steel beams, pickup trucks, prescription drugs and dozens of other categories, that together still touch most of what crosses the border. Which household purchases fall inside that lineup, and which stay outside it, matters far more than any single headline tariff rate.
Steel, Trucks, Drugs and Countertops: Where the New Tariffs Actually Land
According to the Tax Foundation’s tariff tracker, updated September 10, 2026, tariffs enacted since 2025 now cover an estimated 54 percent of U.S. goods imports for the year, measured by import value before any behavioral shifts. That share is not the product of one broad tariff; it is the sum of about a dozen separate authorities layered on top of each other. The largest single piece covers roughly 954 billion dollars in annual imports through a Section 301 action targeting forced-labor practices across 60 trading partners, including the European Union, at rates of 10 or 12.5 percent.
Section 232 tariffs on steel, aluminum and copper carry a 50 percent rate on roughly 320 billion dollars of imports, with lower rates for some derivative products and trade-deal partners. A separate Section 232 tariff covers autos, heavy trucks, buses and parts at 25 percent for autos and heavy trucks and 10 percent for buses, touching about 407 billion dollars in imports. Furniture and lumber carry their own Section 232 tariffs of 25 and 10 percent, and pharmaceuticals face a 100 percent tariff on patented drugs unless a company has a pricing or onshoring agreement in place. Smaller, newer additions include a 15 percent tariff on polysilicon, a Section 301 tariff of 25 percent on goods from Brazil, a Section 338 tariff of 50 percent on Canadian goods, and a multi-year tariff schedule on imported quartz countertops. None of these existed before 2025.
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How a Supreme Court Ruling Reset the Baseline
Until this year, the broadest tariffs were the ones imposed under the International Emergency Economic Powers Act, covering nearly all trading partners at rates from 10 to 50 percent and an estimated 1.2 trillion dollars in annual imports. On February 20, 2026, the Supreme Court ruled 6-3 in Learning Resources, Inc. v. Trump that the emergency-powers law does not authorize tariffs at all, and those duties ended by executive order at midnight four days later. A stop-gap tariff under a different statute, Section 122, briefly applied a flat 10 percent to nearly all trading partners, but that authority is capped by law and expired on July 24, 2026.
What replaced the broad tariffs is the sector-by-sector list above, steel, autos, pharmaceuticals, forced-labor-linked imports, Canadian goods and the rest, built or expanded mostly since midsummer 2026. The 54 percent coverage figure and the tariff rates cited here already account for that replacement; they are not a leftover estimate of the tariffs the Court struck down. The Tax Foundation has revised its tracker more than a dozen times in 2026 alone as sector tariffs were added, delayed or modified, including a Canadian tariff pushed back twice before taking its current form on September 15, and a polysilicon tariff that does not start until December 4. The count is best read as the current snapshot of a still-moving target, not a fixed number.
What Stays Untouched, and Who Actually Pays the Tariff
By definition, the remaining share of import value, a bit under half, currently falls outside all of these tariff authorities, either because a product category was never targeted or because a trade agreement lowered its rate to something closer to pre-2025 levels. Earlier rounds of tariffs carved out specific goods entirely; a November 2025 exemption, for instance, removed roughly 51.5 billion dollars worth of food and agricultural imports from tariffs that were later struck down. Coverage has shifted enough times that a category exempt one quarter is not guaranteed to stay that way the next.
Tariffs themselves are legally owed by the U.S. company that imports the goods, paid to Customs and Border Protection at the border, not by the foreign manufacturer and not automatically by the eventual retail customer. In 2025, those collections totaled 264 billion dollars on 3.4 trillion dollars of goods imports, the highest effective rate since 1947. Because the Supreme Court’s ruling applies to duties collected under the now-invalid emergency-powers tariffs, a portion of that 2025 total is expected to be refunded to the importers who paid it, not to shoppers who may have seen a higher price at some point along the way. How much of any given tariff shows up in a shelf price depends on the product, the importer’s margins and how much competition exists at each link in the supply chain; the Tax Foundation’s own modeling puts the average household tax increase from tariffs at 820 dollars in 2026, down from an estimated 1,000 dollars in 2025, reflecting exactly that uneven and shifting pass-through rather than a rate anyone can read directly off a receipt.
Import Costs Climb While State Aid Sits Unclaimed
Tariff coverage can change by the month, but a household’s own eligibility for public benefits rarely gets tracked with the same attention. Many programs that could offset a tighter grocery or utility budget go unused simply because the rules live across a dozen different agencies with their own forms and income cutoffs. Nothing about a rising import tariff automatically flags any of that assistance for the household it could help.
The Benefits Checklist gathers 11 benefit programs into a single 69-page guide, built around the 2026 income limits so nobody has to guess which rules apply this year.
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AI-assisted research and drafting; reviewed by an editor.
