90% Of US Citizens Paid For Trump’s Tariffs In 2025

Catenaa, Saturday, February 14, 2026- US citizens are paying for President Trump’s tariffs, as the Fed Survey shows nearly 90% of citizens paid for tariffs in 2025.

A Federal Reserve Bank of New York report released Thursday, using data from the US Census Bureau and Foreign Trade Statistics through November 2025, found Americans paid for nearly 90% of the tariffs in 2025, including 94% of the levies from January to August of last year, 92% from September to October, and 86% in November.

“Our results show that the bulk of the tariff incidence continues to fall on US firms and consumers,” the economists wrote. Americans “continue to bear the bulk of the economic burden of the high tariffs imposed in 2025.”

The report authors, Mary Amiti, Chris Flanagan, Sebastian Heise, and David E. Weinstein, explained in their report that over the course of 2025, average tariff rates quintupled from 2.6% to 13%.

If foreign firms were the ones paying for the levies, it would be reflected in those companies having to lower prices in order for them to remain the same on American soil once the taxes were applied.

Instead, their data reflects that companies exporting to the US have only modestly decreased their prices, leaving it to domestic companies to absorb the increased costs or pass them down to consumers.

Trump has repeatedly asserted that other countries looking to export goods to the US are the ones paying for the tariffs. 

In a Wall Street Journal op-ed last month, Trump said: “The data shows that the burden, or ‘incidence,’ of the tariffs has fallen overwhelmingly on foreign producers and middlemen, including large corporations that are not from the US.”

The New York Fed report this week similarly mirrors data from myriad sources, including from the Harvard Business School’s Tariff Tracker, which found that through October 2025, the levies added 0.76% to the Consumer Price Index, or U.S. inflation. 

The Kiel Institute likewise found foreign exports were absorbing only 4% of the tariff burden, leaving 96% to be eaten by US buyers.