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

TL;DR

My forecast is 23.8% for the effective trade-weighted average U.S. tariff rate on imports from China on July 1, 2026. The direct Budget Lab daily country file published on June 9 gives China a July 1 weighted ETR of 0.2373326713, and the Section 122 surcharge remains scheduled to run through July 24 (Budget Lab daily country CSV; Budget Lab manifest; Federal Register). I put the median at 23.8%, the mean at 24.3%, and the 10–90% range at 23.4–26.4% because the main risk is source selection, not a scheduled policy change.

Context

The current U.S. tariff stack on China combines MFN base duties, legacy Section 301 China duties, the 2024–2026 strategic-sector Section 301 increases, Section 232 sector duties, and the temporary Section 122 import surcharge. Budget Lab’s methodology describes February 2026 as the point when IEEPA was invalidated and Section 122 became the post-IEEPA blanket authority; Proclamation 11012 imposed a 10% temporary surcharge effective February 24 through 12:01 a.m. EDT on July 24, 2026, with exemptions and non-stacking against Section 232-covered value (Budget Lab methodology; Federal Register).

The date is close enough that this is mostly a measurement question. The Federal Circuit stayed the trade-court injunction against Section 122 on June 11, allowing collection to continue while the appeal proceeds, and the two visible USTR tracks that could change China tariffs have comment or hearing dates after July 1 (JURIST; USTR forced-labor Section 301 notice; USTR China Board of Trade notice).

Evidence

The historical backbone is that China entered 2026 with a much higher tariff rate than the pre-2018 norm. PIIE’s trade-war chart puts the pre-trade-war U.S. tariff on Chinese imports near 3%, the February 2020 post-Phase-One level at 19.3%, the January 2025 level at 20.7%, the early-May 2025 peak at 127.2%, the May 14, 2025 post-Geneva level at 51.8%, and the November 14, 2025 level at 47.5% before the February 2026 IEEPA reset (PIIE). Realized customs-duty measures were also high before the reset: USAFacts reports China at 29.6% in February 2026 and 30.6% for 2025, while PWBM reports China at 33.9% in January 2026; these are duties collected as a share of imports, not the July 1 statutory schedule (USAFacts; PWBM).

The best direct source is the Budget Lab Tariff Rate Tracker. It builds statutory rates at the HTS-10 × country level from USITC HTS revisions, publishes daily aggregates by country, treats rates as statutory rather than collected, and defines weighted_etr as the import-weighted effective tariff rate using Census import weights (Budget Lab tracker page; Budget Lab release README; Budget Lab data sources). Its June 9 release is current through HTS 2026_rev_10, was published at 17:59:46 Eastern on June 9, has 730 daily rows and 175,200 country-day rows, and includes daily_by_country_2026-06-09.csv as the country file (Budget Lab manifest). In that file, China is Census country code 5700 and the July 1 row gives weighted_etr = 0.2373326712860128, or 23.7333% (Budget Lab daily country CSV).

This is the full 2026 China change-point history in the June 9 Budget Lab country file; daily values are flat inside each interval, and the source for all row values is the same country CSV and manifest (Budget Lab daily country CSV; Budget Lab manifest).

The legal and administrative timing supports the June 9 Budget Lab row. Proclamation 11012 says the Section 122 surcharge continues through July 24 unless suspended, modified, terminated, or extended by Congress, and the Federal Circuit stay means the government is still collecting it as of mid-June (Federal Register; JURIST). USTR’s forced-labor Section 301 proposal has written comments due July 6 and hearings beginning July 7, while the China Board of Trade process has comments due July 10 and rebuttals due July 27, so both are post-July-1 on their published schedules (USTR forced-labor Section 301 notice; USTR China Board of Trade notice).

The main conflicting source is Global Trade Alert. Its June 3 model puts the current overall U.S. trade-weighted tariff at 11.2%, says the current regime is MFN plus Section 122 plus Section 232 with IEEPA struck down, and says China stays near 27% because it is already heavily tariffed through existing Section 301 and Section 232 duties (Global Trade Alert). I treat that as real resolution risk, but not as the central estimate, because Budget Lab is named in the resolution criteria and provides a direct July 1 China row.

My probability model assigns 74% to the Budget Lab current-law value centered at 23.7333%, 7% to lower cases around 19–22% from early Section 122 removal or narrow relief, 14% to source-choice outcomes around 25–27% if the resolver blends Budget Lab with Global Trade Alert, 3% to customs-collection or stale-source outcomes near 30%, and 2% to surprise late-June policy shocks. That mixture gives a mean of 24.3%, a median of 23.8%, and about a 0.4% chance above 40%.

What's non-obvious

The 10% Section 122 surcharge is not a clean 10 percentage-point addition to China’s country average. The proclamation exempts broad categories and does not stack Section 122 on top of Section 232-covered value; the Budget Lab series shows China falling only from 23.7333% to 19.3270% when Section 122 expires on July 24, a 4.4 percentage-point drop (Federal Register; Budget Lab daily country CSV).

The “China is around 30%” read is using a different measure. USAFacts and PWBM are customs-collection measures through February and January 2026, while Budget Lab is a statutory schedule measure in force on July 1; in the Budget Lab July 1 China row, the simple exposed-product mean is much higher than the trade-weighted rate, but the question asks for the trade-weighted average (USAFacts; PWBM; Budget Lab daily country CSV).

Limitations

The strongest input is a June 9 vintage, not a July 1 after-the-fact publication. Budget Lab explicitly says days after the latest HTS revision assume current policy continues unchanged to the series horizon, so a new HTS revision, court order, or emergency proclamation between June 19 and July 1 would not be in that file (Budget Lab release README; Budget Lab manifest).

The biggest remaining uncertainty is the resolver’s source hierarchy. If the final resolution uses Budget Lab alone, the answer should be 23.7%; if it treats Global Trade Alert’s near-27% current-regime estimate as equally close to July 1, the resolution could land in the mid-20s; if it uses customs collections, it could be higher, but that would answer a different question and use older data (Global Trade Alert; USAFacts). Budget Lab also flags caveats: specific and compound duties are not converted to ad-valorem equivalents, and some conditional carve-outs are approximated, which can blur product-level rates even when the country aggregate is the best available statutory estimate (Budget Lab release README).