Prices for dozens of everyday consumer goods would have fallen without President Donald Trump’s tariffs, according to a new report from the New York Federal Reserve.
Researchers at the central bank’s New York arm found that tariffs imposed in 2025 and early 2026 pushed inflation on a sample of 67 categories of goods up by 2.9 percentage points as of February.
Without those levies in place, the team concluded that prices across the products they studied would have pulled back by almost 1%.
The findings represent some of the clearest evidence yet of how Trump’s tariff agenda has directly affected the wallets of ordinary consumers across the United States.
Economists had widely expected the levies to drive up prices, though the precise scale had been difficult to estimate given the changing nature of the policy and limited transparency around corporate pricing decisions.
For each percentage point increase in the average tariff rate, researchers found that consumer goods prices were higher by roughly a quarter of a percent one year later.
Annual price growth among the tracked goods peaked at the start of 2026, but consumers are still expected to face elevated prices into 2027 as a result of the policy.
Roughly two-thirds of the tariff-related price increase came directly from the levies themselves, with the remaining impact driven by knock-on effects from US-based companies relying 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 argued that companies would absorb the increased costs from tariffs rather than pass them on to shoppers through higher prices, but the New York Fed team found that around 26% of last year’s tariff increases ultimately fed through into higher consumer prices.
The Supreme Court struck down many of Trump’s tariffs in February, resulting in billions of dollars in refunds to retailers across the country.
The White House has since vowed to pursue tariffs through alternative measures, with imported goods from many countries now frequently facing levies of around 10%, often significantly lower than under the earlier round of tariffs.
The White House did not immediately respond to a request for comment on the New York Fed’s report.