The US Trade Ledger — every US container gateway, every partner
country, every month — and what each one actually paid at the border.
What America actually pays at the border
Everyone argues about what the tariff rules say. Every month, US Census publishes
the duty dollars collected on every product from every origin. Divide by the value of the goods
and you get the rate that really happened — through every exclusion, exemption, court order and
reroute. Six pictures; every claim links to the record; any code can be looked up at the end.
Latest month: 2026-06.
1 · The rulebook cannot be added up
The statutory rate on an upholstered chair from China
(HS 9401.61) is Free. On top of it sit the trade-war overlays in force — several at
100% each — and no honest arithmetic turns that stack into a number. The receipts do:
41.1% of dutiable value, 2026-06.
Exclusions, effective dates and scope are the entire difference between the rulebook and the
bill, and only the receipt knows them.
Modification: China's Acts, Policies and Practices Related to Technology Transfer, Intellectual Property an… measure 9903.91.03 · Federal Register citation+100%
Modification: China's Acts, Policies and Practices Related to Technology Transfer, Intellectual Property an… measure 9903.91.08 · Federal Register citation+100%
Modification and Proposed Modification of Section 301 Action: China's Targeting of the Maritime, Logistics,… measure 9903.91.14 · Federal Register citation+100%
Modification: China's Acts, Policies and Practices Related to Technology Transfer, Intellectual Property an… measure 9903.91.02 · Federal Register citation+50%
Modification: China's Acts, Policies and Practices Related to Technology Transfer, Intellectual Property an… measure 9903.91.05 · Federal Register citation+50%
Modification: China's Acts, Policies and Practices Related to Technology Transfer, Intellectual Property an… measure 9903.91.07 · Federal Register citation+50%
Except for goods loaded onto a vessel at the port of loading and in transit on the final mode of transit be… measure 9903.01.64 · from the current schedule+35%
Implementation of Additional Duties on Products of the People's Republic of China Pursuant to the President… measure 9903.01.63 · Federal Register citation+34%
Action Pursuant to Section 301: China's Acts, Policies, and Practices Related to Technology Transfer, Intel… measure 9903.88.02 · Federal Register citation+25%
What was actually collected on the chair41.1%
Measures in force for Chinese-origin goods, by add-on rate — they do not sum, and
which apply to this exact code is defined in Chapter 99 notes (several annexes are PDFs we
disclose as unmapped). The accent number is the measured composite. Look up any code with
tariff_lookup.
2 · The staircase
Chinese goods paid 2.71% of their value at
the border in June 2017. Nine years later the line has three landings and one cliff:
7.37% by December 2018, a long plateau,
47.92% in 2025-05, and 21.69% today.
Duty collected as % of ALL Chinese goods' value, monthly. Peak 47.92% in 2025-05; 21.69% in 2026-06. Convention: includes de-minimis code 999995; excluding it raises recent figures ~1.2 points.
3 · It was never only the rate — it was the coverage
In 2017, more than half of every dollar of Chinese goods
entered duty-free. By mid-2025, seven cents did. The 2025 wave raised the rate — and it also
ended the exemptions. The second half of that sentence is missing from most accounts.
Share of Chinese import value that was dutiable at all: 41.8% (2017-06) → 92.6% (2025-06) → 80.9% (2026-06).
4 · The wall was always there — it pointed at the poor
Before a single trade-war tariff, Cambodia's goods paid
13.7% at the US border. Germany's paid 1.5%. The old schedule taxed
apparel-and-footwear origins at roughly ten times the rate it taxed machinery-and-car origins —
and the trade war is the first thing in decades to narrow that gap, by raising the top.
The ruled study →
Cambodia13.6% → 21%
Vietnam7.4% → 6.4%
China2.7% → 21.7%
India2.3% → 9.1%
Japan1.7% → 9.9%
Germany1.5% → 8.9%
Thailand1.3% → 5.4%
Canada0.1% → 2.9%
Mexico0.1% → 3.4%
Effective burden by origin, June 2017 → 2026-06, sorted by 2017. The
ranking partially inverts at the top.
5 · The rerouting prize, priced
In June 2017 Chinese goods paid 4.7
points less at the border than Vietnamese goods. By June 2025
they paid 31 points more. That swing is what a Vietnamese label became worth —
the price tag on the diversion this ledger has measured in tonnes.
China, burden on all goods.Vietnam, same measure, same scale question — the gap between these two charts is the prize for rerouting. See the cargo side: /atlas/list3-tariff-diversion, and the label question ruled at /asked/vietnamese-labels.
6 · The national bill, and the retreat
$2.8B a month in
2017-01. $29.7B at the 2025-10
peak. $21.3B in 2026-06 — the bill has fallen a
quarter from its top, and the fall is the least-reported part of the whole episode. Why the
retreat sorted by legal authority: the ruled study →
Regular duties collected on all US imports, monthly. Excludes AD/CVD and fees; assessed at entry, refunds not netted.
7 · The rate, chapter by chapter
Tariffs are set on products, so the honest map is by
HS chapter. Duty collected in the latest month, and the burden now against June 2017 —
click any chapter for its full story.
Top chapters by duty collected, 2026-06. Burden = duty as % of all import
value for the chapter, all origins. Every chapter is queryable:
tariff_burden(commodity: "62").
How this is checked
Summed against the US Treasury's own monthly customs
receipts across all 114 months: yearly agreement 0.89–1.03, with the two divergences both
explainable and disclosed (2025 payment timing; 2026 court-ordered IEEPA refunds, which
Treasury nets and we — measuring assessment at entry — do not). Twelve statutory spot
checks passed, including German and Japanese cars at exactly their 2.5% MFN rate (one HS
line — Germany's overall burden is higher because not everything is a car). Internal
reconciliation against Census world-total rows: 0.000% worst deviation, 114/114 months.
Honest limits
Duty figures are regular tariffs as calculated at entry (US Census); they EXCLUDE anti-dumping/countervailing duties and processing fees, and do not reflect later refunds (e.g. the 2026 court-ordered IEEPA refunds).
Two different rates: rate_on_dutiable = duty / dutiable value (the rate actually charged on the portion that paid); burden_pct = duty / total consumption value (what the origin’s goods paid overall). Duty-free entries have dutiable value 0.
Sub-$800 de minimis shipments filed no entries and are invisible before the 2025 rule change for China — a bookkeeping regime break, not a trade event.
HS codes were revised in 2022; long within-code series can break at the boundary.
Scope: imports for consumption, all modes, national level — a different (broader) base than the containerised port-level series elsewhere on this site. The two are never divided into each other.
De minimis convention: special code 999995 (low-value e-commerce entries, duty recorded as zero here because it is collected outside this series) is INCLUDED in burden figures; excluding it raises recent China figures by roughly 1.2 points. State the convention when quoting.
Look up any code
With the ledger connected to your AI:
hs_search("your product") finds the code;
tariff_lookup(hs, origin) returns the rulebook,
the measures with citations, and the collected rate side by side;
tariff_burden gives the paid-rate history behind
beats 2, 4 and 6; and rulings_search finds how
CBP has actually classified a product like yours — the case law behind the code. Raw:
/api/tariff ·
/api/hs-search ·
the daily paper trail. Series with CSVs:
tt010.china.burden ·
tt010.national.duty. Not customs or legal advice.
In print: “What America actually pays at the border” — Trimtab US
Trade Ledger (TT-010 Duty receipts), from US Census imports-for-consumption records,
cross-checked against US Treasury receipts — trimtabist.com/tariffs