Introducing the Tariff Rate Tracker: An Open-Source Tool for Daily Effective Tariff Rates

The ETR started the year at under 3 percent and reached over 22 percent after Liberation Day one year ago, before falling again, driven by a roller coaster of announced policy changes, trade deals, and legal challenges to the 2025 tariff regime. As each of these changes is incorporated into the HTS (or other similar legal documents), we update the tracker accordingly, including the projection of future rates according to current law.

The tracker decomposes the ETR for each product into contributions from each tariff authority, applying the stacking rules that govern how these authorities interact. Figure 2 shows these contributions over time.

Users can decompose rates at any level—overall, by country, by product, or by product-country pair—and the tool handles the complex interactions automatically. For example, Section 232 and IEEPA reciprocal tariffs do not stack on the metal content of products, while fentanyl surcharges stack at full value. These rules are specified in YAML configuration files that are editable so users can specify different rules and rule interactions.

The tools capabilities are evident when looking at ETRs by country and by sector, as we do below. We can see that China has the highest ETR of any country, due to layered Section 301, IEEPA, fentanyl, and Section 232 duties, and that most other countries face significantly lower average tariff rates.

We can also show how tariffs vary across different sectors by aggregating the underlying data, as shown below in Figure 4. The product-level variation in tariff rates stems both from country-specific tariffs that happen to fall especially hard on a specific sector, and product-specific tariffs (or exemptions from tariffs) that have emerged over the last year. Capturing these rates also requires correctly evaluating complexities that emerge at the individual-product level. For example, we track a product’s metal content for Section 232 tariffs using BEA input-output tables.

Building an ETR series requires modeling choices where the statute is ambiguous or data is incomplete. Our goal with this project is to make every assumption explicit and configurable. Figure 5 shows two alternative assumptions.

First, in our main model, we utilize BEA input-output tables to estimate the metal content of derivative products (goods that contain metal but aren’t simply imports of that metal). The metal content share is subject to the Section 232 tariff rates, and the remainder is subject to IEEPA or S122 tariffs instead. However, we also have the capacity to assume that some fixed percent of the products’ value is metal content, and to determine how that changes the overall ETR. In the scenario below, we assume that 100 percent of the derivate products value is metal content, which raises the ETR (1.8 percentage points as of December 31, 2025) during the IEEPA era.

Second, we incorporate certain legal responses of firms to the new tariffs into our baseline ETR estimates. The most significant of these is accounting for firms increasing their United States-Mexico-Canada Agreement (USMCA) exemption-claiming rate, which increased from between 30-40 percent in the first half of the year to over 80 percent by the end of the summer. However, researchers might be interested in ETRs without any behavioral change. We therefore plot ETRs using pre-tariff (2024) USMCA utilization rates, which raises the overall ETR by 0.5 percentage points at the end of 2025.

This project is set up so that users can modify, test, and alter these assumptions: for example, you can swap stacking rules, metal content methods, USMCA assumptions, or zero out any authority via configuration.

The Tariff Rate Tracker is available now, and we welcome comments, questions, and suggestions! Our goal with this tracker is to provide an up-to-date, consistent, and transparent source of information on the complex world of tariff rates, and we recognize that such an effort will be the result of collaboration with the community of researchers, policymakers, and others who are engaged with this effort. We would like to thank the researchers at the Tax Policy Center for sharing snapshots of their data to help us evaluate early versions of this project.

The tracker uses HTS data, combined with other government sources and assumptions about economic behavior and legal rules, to assign daily tariff effective tariff rates (ETRs) to almost 20,000 HS10 products across 240 trading partners. These rates capture the statutory tariff rate in effect on a given day — meaning the rate that is legally applied to imports, as opposed to tariffs that have been announced but remain unimplemented. The ETR here explicitly excludes changes in real economic behavior in response to these tariffs, hence why we use 2024 trade weights in the construction of the daily ETR plot below. However, we include certain forms of legal response that more accurately reflect the true rates paid on a given commodity. For example, we update our estimate of the utilization of United States-Mexico-Canada Agreement (USMCA) exemptions to account for rapid uptake following the new tariff regime. We can combine these rates, weighted by 2024 Census import values, to get the average ETR by day.  Figure 1 plots the daily series from January 2025 through the scheduled Section 122 expiry in July 2026 and beyond. The code and data to create the figures in this report are available on GitHub.