Tariffs Have Pushed Up Inflation, And There Are More Price Hikes To Come, Economists Say

U.S. consumers are footing much of the bill for tariffs, and are likely to pick up an increasing share of the import taxes in the coming months, several separate economic analyses said this week. 

President Donald Trump and White House officials have denied that his import taxes are pushing up prices. But for many economists, the question is not whether companies are passing the cost of import taxes on to U.S. consumers, but how much. So far, U.S. companies have footed some of the bill, but are passing an increasing share of the cost along to their customers, several analyses have indicated.

Inflation has accelerated since April when Trump announced a sharp increase in tariff rates. The Consumer Price Index is expected to have risen 3.1% over the year in September, its highest since May 2024.

Tariffs are a major reason behind the inflation uptick, according to several recent analyses.

Trump’s sprawling import taxes, which affect products from most countries in the world, are on track to cost companies $1.2 trillion this year so far, S&P Global said in a white paper this week, in what senior research analyst Drew Bowers called a “conservative” estimate. Of that, $592 billion is being passed on to consumers via higher prices, Bowers calculated.

Economists at Goldman Sachs reached similar conclusions in a new analysis this week. They estimate that customers are paying 55% of the tariffs. They expect consumers’ share of the costs could grow to as much as 70% next year.

In a separate analysis, economists at the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis estimated that the annual inflation rate, as measured by “core” Personal Consumption Expenditures excluding food and energy, was about 0.4 percentage points higher in August because of the tariffs. Core PCE inflation was 2.9% in August, but would have been 2.5% with no tariffs in place, they said.