What will the US tariff rate on China be on July 1?

TL;DR

My forecast is 23.7%, because the best exact-date source is the Budget Lab at Yale June 9 statutory tariff tracker, whose China row for July 1, 2026 is 23.733%.

Context

The live issue is measurement, not whether China faces high U.S. tariffs. The broad 2025 IEEPA tariff stack was removed after the February 20, 2026 Supreme Court decision in Learning Resources, Inc. v. Trump, and the administration replaced much of that broad layer with a temporary 10% Section 122 surcharge effective February 24, 2026 through July 24, 2026 under Proclamation 11012 and CBP CSMS #67844987. A federal appeals court allowed the government to keep collecting that 10% worldwide tariff on June 11, 2026 while litigation continues, and the tariff is still scheduled to expire July 24, 2026, after the July 1 resolution date, according to AP.

The July 1 rate also includes the older China Section 301 and product-specific Section 232 layers. I do not expect the pending June USTR processes to affect July 1, because the forced-labor Section 301 process has written comments due July 6, 2026 and hearings after that under USTR's June 2 notice, while the U.S.-China Board of Trade process has comments due July 10, 2026 and rebuttals due July 27, 2026 under USTR's China mechanism notice.

Evidence

The historical backbone says a high answer is plausible. USAFacts, using U.S. Census/USITC-style customs duties as a share of goods imports, reports China at about 5% over 2002-2024, 10.9% in 2024, 30.6% in 2025, 30.7% over the first two months of 2026, and 29.6% in February 2026 in its April 16, 2026 update. Penn Wharton reported China at 33.9% in January 2026 in its March 16, 2026 update, then 25.0% in March 2026 in its May 12, 2026 update. These are useful checks, but they are collected-duty ratios, not the statutory rate in force on July 1.

The best direct source is the Budget Lab tariff-rate tracker. Its methodology says it assigns daily statutory tariff rates to almost 20,000 HS10 products across 240 trading partners, excludes behavioral substitution, and weights averages by 2024 Census import values in the tracker documentation. Its release notes define weighted_etr as the import-weighted effective tariff rate, say rates are decimals where 0.25 means 25%, and say dates after the latest HTS revision assume current policy continues in the public release README. The June 9 release was published at 17:59 Eastern on June 9, 2026, is current through HTS 2026_rev_10, and contains 175,200 country-day rows in the manifest; the USITC page says 2026 HTS Revision 10 was published on June 8, 2026.

The China row for July 1, 2026 in daily_by_country_2026-06-09.csv has weighted_etr = 0.237333, so the direct statutory estimate is 23.733%. The distinct China change-points I use from the Budget Lab daily by-country CSV are:

That path fits the independent Budget Lab April 8 report: China is 23.9% at end-2026 if Section 122 is extended and 19.4% if Section 122 expires, according to Table 2 of the April 8 Budget Lab report. July 1 is on the pre-expiry plateau, not the post-July-24 level.

My distribution puts 80% on a Budget-Lab-style statutory resolution centered near 23.7%, 4% on Section 122 ending before July 1 and pulling the rate toward 19.3%, 2% on a lower alternate-source interpretation near 21.6%, 7% on a customs-data or PWBM-style resolution near 25.2%, 4% on a high-source or methodology outcome near 29.2%, 2% on a modest late tariff increase near 27.0%, and 1% on a major surprise escalation. This gives a median of about 23.8%, a mean of about 24.0%, and a central 90% interval of about 21.6% to 27.8%.

What's non-obvious

The common 25-30% answer mixes two objects. USAFacts and Penn Wharton measure customs duties divided by import value, and those series still reflect entry timing, product mix, and the earlier IEEPA regime in the USAFacts China page and Penn Wharton May update. The resolution asks for the rate in effect on a date. The Budget Lab daily statutory tracker is a cleaner match because it computes the tariff schedule that applies on entry on that date in the tracker methodology.

The other trap is the 10% versus 15% Section 122 issue. Section 122 permits a surcharge up to 15%, but Proclamation 11012 imposed 10% in the proclamation text, and CBP implemented 10% under heading 9903.03.01 in CSMS #67844987. The July 24 expiry is also after the target date, so it should not be pulled into a July 1 answer unless a court or the administration stops the surcharge early.

Limitations

The Budget Lab value is statutory, not collected. That is the right fit for in effect on July 1, but it differs from later customs-revenue ratios that may be published by USAFacts, USITC, or Penn Wharton using July 2026 entries in USAFacts or Penn Wharton. The Budget Lab release also flags caveats: specific and compound duties are not fully converted to ad-valorem equivalents, and some conditional carve-outs are approximated or unmodeled in the release README.

The remaining uncertainty is legal and definitional. A new court order before July 1 could remove Section 122 despite the June 11 appeals-court stay reported by AP. A fast executive action could add or cut tariffs before July 1, though the visible USTR comment calendars point later in July in the forced-labor Section 301 notice and the China Board of Trade notice. A resolver that treats realized customs collections as the primary source would probably land several points higher than 23.7%, but I read the resolution wording and source hierarchy as pointing to the Budget Lab statutory series.