Prices on a wide range of consumer goods would have actually fallen without President Donald Trump’s tariff policy, according to a new New York Federal Reserve report.
Researchers at the central bank’s New York arm tracked 67 categories of goods and found prices were 2.9 percentage points higher as of February due to tariffs imposed in 2025 and early 2026.
Without those levies in place, the team determined that prices for the studied products would have pulled back by nearly 1%.
The findings represent some of the clearest evidence to date of how Trump’s tariffs have directly affected household budgets across the United States.
Economists had broadly anticipated that the tariffs would push prices higher, though the precise scale of the impact had proven difficult to measure given the policy’s shifting nature.
For each percentage point increase in the average tariff rate, consumer goods prices rose by roughly a quarter of a percent approximately one year later, the researchers found.
Annual price growth across the tracked goods peaked at the start of 2026, but consumers are still expected to face elevated prices into 2027 as a direct consequence of the tariff policy.
Roughly two-thirds of the tariff-related price increase came directly from the levies themselves, with the remainder stemming from knock-on effects involving U.S. companies that rely on imported parts and materials.
“Tariffs have a larger and more drawn-out impact on consumer prices than the direct effect alone would suggest,” wrote the study’s three authors, Mary Amiti, Sebastian Heise, and David Weinstein.
Trump had previously argued that companies would absorb the added costs from tariffs rather than pass them on to consumers through higher prices, a position the New York Fed’s findings largely contradict.
The researchers found that around 26% of last year’s tariff increases ultimately filtered through into higher prices paid by shoppers at the retail level.
The Supreme Court struck down many of Trump’s tariffs in February, triggering billions of dollars in refunds to retailers following the ruling.
The White House has since vowed to pursue tariffs through alternative legal channels, and goods imported from many countries now frequently face tariff rates of around 10%.
In many cases, that current rate is significantly lower than the levels imposed under the earlier round of tariffs that drove the price increases documented in the New York Fed study.
