What's the Tariff on Cement?

Cement tariffs strike at the foundation — literally — of American infrastructure. The 25% IEEPA tariff on imported cement primarily targets Mexico, which supplies over 30% of US cement imports through border-adjacent plants owned by CEMEX, the world's second-largest cement producer. Turkey and Canada are secondary sources. Cement is uniquely unsuited to tariff protection because it's extraordinarily heavy relative to its value — a ton of cement costs 30 but weighs 2,000 pounds, making long-distance transportation prohibitively expensive. This means imports naturally serve only border regions where Mexican or Canadian plants are closer than domestic ones. The tariff doesn't incentivize new US cement production (building a cement plant takes 3-5 years and 00M+); it simply raises construction costs in border states. The timing is particularly problematic: the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act is driving record cement demand for highways, bridges, and ports — demand that domestic capacity cannot meet.