Trimtabist

What America actually pays at the border

Everyone argues about what the tariff rules say; almost nobody checks the bill. Every month, US Census publishes the duty dollars actually collected on every product from every origin. Divide by the value of the goods and you get the rate that really happened — after every exclusion, exemption, court order and reroute. Below: how to read a tariff, the story in three charts, and a clickable map of what every chapter of the schedule and every origin actually pays. Latest month: 2026-06.

1 · One chair, and the two numbers on it

Last month somebody in America imported an upholstered chair from China, and the rulebook said the tariff on it was zero.

Every shipment entering the United States is filed under a ten-digit number. The chair’s is 9401.61 — chapters 1 through 97 of the tariff schedule describe real things, animals and chemicals and furniture, and the rate printed beside this one is zero.

Chapter 99 describes nothing at all. It is where the trade war keeps its stickers. A code beginning 9903 is not a product; it is an instruction to add a percentage on top of some list of ordinary codes. So the customs entry for that chair carries two numbers — the chair’s, and the sticker’s — and the second one is where the money is. Three of the stickers pointed at Chinese goods last month:

Three stickers, and they do not add to 159%. Some apply to this exact chair and some do not; some had exclusions that expired; scope and start dates differ. Nothing in the schedule tells you which — only the entry does, and 41.1% is what the entries say. Read it as: of the chair’s value that was taxed at all, 41.1% went to the government.

Each sticker exists because a document created it — a presidential proclamation, a trade-representative notice, a customs rule — printed in the Federal Register, the government’s daily gazette of what it has decided. That document is the only place the sticker’s scope and start date are written down, which is why the citation is the proof rather than a footnote. We mirror each one here, because the official site makes readers prove they are human before it will show them a page.

Section 301 is the China-practices case opened in 2018. Section 232 is the national-security authority behind steel, aluminium and cars. IEEPA is the emergency-powers act behind the 2025 wave and most of the 2026 retreat. 319 measures are in force in all — the daily paper trail lists every one · to see which land on your own product, use the lookup at the foot of this page · why no arithmetic on the schedule reproduces the receipts: the ruled study →

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.

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. The ruled study →

4 · 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.

The ruled studies

The arguments behind these charts are pre-registered studies in the Event Atlas — each with its registration, its falsification test, and its verdict:

Every chapter — what it actually pays

Tariffs are charged on products, not on countries, so this is the honest map: what each chapter of the schedule paid in the latest month, against what it paid in June 2017. Click any chapter for its full story — its rate history, who pays it, and the measures in force.

Top chapters by duty collected, 2026-06. The percentage is duty collected divided by the value of everything imported in that chapter, from everywhere.

Every origin — what it actually pays

The same ledger, cut the other way — what each origin’s goods paid on average across everything it shipped. In June 2017 Chinese goods paid 4.7 points less at this border than Vietnamese goods; by June 2025 they paid 31 points more. That swing is what a Vietnamese label became worth — the cargo side of that story is ruled →

Top origins by duty collected, 2026-06 — what each origin’s goods actually paid on average, June 2017 → now. Click any origin for its full story: the rate history, what it pays it on, and the stickers that name it.

Look up any code

Type what you sell, or the code if you know it, and this returns the rulebook rate, the stickers in force for that origin, and what was actually collected — side by side. Not customs or legal advice.

For AI agents via /connect: hs_search finds the code, tariff_lookup(hs, origin) returns rulebook and receipt together, tariff_burden gives the paid-rate history, rulings_search 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.

How this is checked

Every month of this series was summed against the US Treasury’s own customs receipts: yearly agreement 0.89–1.03, and both divergences are explained and disclosed. Twelve statutory spot checks passed, including German and Japanese cars landing at exactly the 2.5% standard rate — what any ordinary trading partner pays. The long version, with the reconciliation table, is in how the numbers are made.

Honest limits