Start with aluminum
It’s in your car, your soda cans, your window frames.
In 2025 the government put a tax on aluminum coming into the country. First 25 percent, then 50 percent. The reason given was to get America making more of its own. Aluminum got hit harder than almost anything else, so it’s a fair place to ask whether it worked.
A year and a half later, here’s what the government’s own figures show.
Now the part most people miss. The tax is only charged on metal from abroad. But when foreign metal costs more, American metal goes up to match, because nothing stops it. Same higher price, no tax paid.
To be fair: one company announced it’s restarting part of an idled plant, and a smelter takes years to build. This is also one metal, not the whole economy. But it’s the metal the tax was aimed at hardest, and this is what happened.
The cost, and who carries it
- American importers — See the count
- American households modelled — See the model
- American exporters — See whose jobs
A fourth thing is at stake, and it is not a tax. It is the energy Canada sells the U.S. That one is further down, under The nuclear option.
What you have already paid
Customs writes down the tax on every shipment as it crosses the border. This is those records, added up.
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| Goods | Imported | Duty paid | Rate |
|---|
Modelled estimate — not measured duty
What tariffs cost your household
Everything above is money customs really collected, and only on Canadian goods. This number is different. It is an estimate. It is also bigger, because it counts tariffs on all imports since 2025 — China, Mexico, Europe, Canada, all of them. And it rests on one thing no data can measure. A company pays a tariff. Some of that cost goes on the price tag. Some of it does not. How much? Nobody knows for sure. The number we use, and where it came from, is in Method below.
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| State | Per household | Total |
|---|
Your state
Pick a state to see what the tariffs and the energy trade mean there.
And Canada is taxing you back
Whose jobs are on the line
What Canada is taxing
Canada’s tax hits American exports — the things American workers grow and build. Right now the list is steel and almost nothing else. In September it adds food. Everything on the list is taxed 25% today. September brings in a 50% rate and moves hundreds of American steel and aluminum products up to it.
The nuclear option
Canada has not done this, and nothing here says it will. But next to this, tariffs are small. Flip the switch below. It shows which states buy their energy from Canada, and whether they have anywhere else to buy it.
— of energy the United States bought from Canada in six months
Look it up
Every American product on Canada's list, all — of them. Filter it, or search for something specific.
| Tariff item | Product | Category | Rate | Applies |
|---|
Method
Almost every number on this page was counted, not guessed. Nothing here is a prediction. There are two exceptions. One is What tariffs cost your household. It needs a guess about price tags that no data can give us. The other is the money paid on American-made aluminum in Start with aluminum. We worked that out from a measured price and a measured weight instead of counting it directly. Both are labelled everywhere they show up, and both are explained in full below. Everywhere else, if the only way to answer a question was to guess, we say so and leave the number out.
Six public datasets, all free, all citable:
- Duty actually collected on Canadian goods, and the value it was
charged on — U.S. Census Bureau,
timeseries/intltrade/imports(CAL_DUT_YR,CON_VAL_YR). - U.S. exports to Canada by state and commodity —
U.S. Census Bureau,
exports/statehs. - U.S. exports to Canada by state and industry —
U.S. Census Bureau,
exports/statenaics. - U.S. energy imports from Canada by state —
U.S. Census Bureau,
imports/statehs, HS 2709/2710/2711/2716. - Household count — U.S. Census Bureau, ACS 1-year 2024, table B11001.
- Canada's counter-tariff list — Department of Finance Canada, complete list of U.S. products subject to counter tariffs.
Two taxes, two sets of people paying. Canada’s tax is paid by Canadian importers, and it shows up in Canadian prices. On this side of the border it hurts American exporters. Those are the people who make what is on the list. Washington’s tax on Canadian goods is paid at the American border by American importers. That is the money counted in What you have already paid. Two different taxes, two different payers. Do not add them together.
What this page does not tell you, because the data cannot:
- How much of the tax on Canadian goods ends up on a price tag. It has a name — pass-through — and every company decides it for itself. The Canada numbers above assume nothing about it. They are tax collected at the border, full stop. The one estimate on this page does use a pass-through rate. But that is for tariffs on all imports, not just Canada’s. See below.
- What a tariff will do to any price later on, at the pump or anywhere else.
- How many jobs are at risk. Turning export dollars into a number of jobs needs a model we do not have.
- How much of any industry’s exports get taxed. The tariff list and the industry data are filed under two different coding systems. Matching them up takes a lookup table we do not have. Guessing at one would invent a number.
Counting lines on the list tells you how wide it is. It does not tell you how much money is on it. One line can carry a billion dollars of trade, or almost none. That is why the dollar figures come from trade data instead of from the list.
Every assumption behind the aluminum figures, with sources
The aluminum section
Everything in Start with aluminum is counted except one figure: the money paid on American-made metal, which no customs record contains. What follows is printed by the code that did the work, so this text cannot drift away from what actually ran.
What it does not capture:
Every assumption behind the household estimate, with sources
The one modelled number: what tariffs cost your household
The section itself says what this covers and what the one guess is. Below is the full list, printed by the code that did the work, so this text cannot drift away from what actually ran.
What the model does not capture: