About TariffTax

Why This Matters

In 2025, the effective US tariff rate rose from 2.5% to over 22% — the highest since the Smoot-Hawley Tariff of 1930. The average American household now pays an estimated $3,800+ per year in hidden tariff costs. Low-income families are hit hardest — spending a larger share of their income on tariffed goods like food, clothing, and electronics.

Yet most Americans have no idea how much they're paying. Tariffs are the most opaque tax in America. There's no line item on your grocery receipt, no annual statement from the government. The cost is simply baked into every price tag.

TariffTax exists to change that. We believe that a democracy functions best when citizens understand the taxes they pay — all the taxes they pay.

Mission

TariffTax exists to make the invisible visible. Our mission is to quantify, track, and explain the real cost of US tariff policy using public data, rigorous methodology, and plain language. We believe that informed citizens make better decisions — and that democracy works better when taxes are transparent.

Editorial Stance

TariffTax is a project of TheDataProject.ai. We are transparent about our perspective:

• Data-driven: Every claim on this site is sourced from public data — USITC, Census Bureau, BLS, USDA, CBO, and peer-reviewed economic research. If we cite a number, you can check it.
• Libertarian-leaning: We believe in free people, free markets, and free trade. We are skeptical of government intervention in voluntary economic transactions. We believe tariffs are a regressive, inefficient, and often counterproductive form of taxation.
• Pro-transparency: We believe Americans have a right to know how much they pay in hidden tariff taxes, who benefits from those taxes, and whether the stated goals of tariff policy are being achieved.
• Non-partisan: Tariffs have been imposed by administrations of both parties. We criticize bad policy regardless of who enacts it and acknowledge when tariff policy achieves its stated goals.

What We Are Not

• We are not affiliated with any political party, campaign, or PAC.
• We do not accept funding from companies that benefit from or are harmed by tariff policy.
• We are not opposed to all forms of trade policy — targeted sanctions, anti-dumping measures, and national security restrictions can be legitimate. We are opposed to broad-based tariffs used as general taxation.

Methodology

Our estimates of tariff costs to households, states, and industries are based on:

• Official tariff schedules from the USITC Harmonized Tariff Schedule
• Trade data from the Census Bureau and USITC DataWeb
• Consumer expenditure patterns from the Bureau of Labor Statistics
• Pass-through rates estimated from peer-reviewed academic research (Amiti, Redding, & Weinstein 2019; Fajgelbaum et al. 2020; Cavallo et al. 2021)
• Cross-referenced with estimates from the Tax Foundation, Budget Lab at Yale, Peterson Institute, and other research organizations

We assume a near-complete pass-through of tariffs to consumer prices, consistent with the academic consensus. Multiple studies have found that US tariffs since 2018 have been almost entirely borne by American importers and consumers, not by foreign exporters.

For our full methodology, see the Methodology page.