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

TL;DR

I forecast 23.7% for the U.S. trade-weighted average effective tariff rate on imports from China on July 1, 2026. The latest Budget Lab release has an exact China row for July 1 with weighted_etr = 0.2373326712860128, and it is the best match to the resolution wording (Budget Lab raw CSV, manifest) (raw.githubusercontent.com). No scheduled process changes the rate before July 1; the next built-in change is the Section 122 expiration on July 24 (Proclamation 11012) (federalregister.gov).

Context

The July 1 China tariff stack is a mix of normal MFN duties, China-specific Section 301 duties, Section 232 sector duties, and the temporary Section 122 global surcharge. The IEEPA tariff layer was ended on February 20, 2026 by EO 14389, which said IEEPA additional ad valorem duties would no longer be collected while leaving Section 122, Section 232, and Section 301 duties unaffected (EO 14389) (federalregister.gov).

July 1 falls inside the Section 122 window. Proclamation 11012 imposed a 10% ad valorem surcharge effective February 24, 2026 through 12:01 a.m. EDT on July 24, 2026, with exclusions and no stacking on the Section 232-covered portion of an import (Proclamation 11012) (federalregister.gov). The two live USTR processes are later than the target date: forced-labor Section 301 comments are due July 6 and hearings start July 7, while the China managed-trade comments are due July 10 with rebuttals due July 27 (forced-labor Section 301 notice, China managed-trade notice) (federalregister.gov).

Evidence

The historical backbone is that China was already a high-tariff origin before the 2026 legal reset. USAFacts, using estimated customs duties as a share of goods imports, reports China at about 5% on average 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 (USAFacts China tariff page) (usafacts.org). That series is useful context, but it is a customs-collections measure and not a point-in-time statutory rate. Penn Wharton’s June 16 update gives a closer post-reset cross-check: in April 2026, China faced the highest rate among major partners at 24%, with the average U.S. effective tariff rate at 7.0%, computed as customs duties divided by import value using USITC DataWeb (PWBM June 16 update) (budgetmodel.wharton.upenn.edu).

The best direct source is the Budget Lab Tariff Rate Tracker. Its release documentation says the published data are daily statutory rates, not collected duties; weighted_etr is the import-weighted effective tariff rate; rates are decimals; and dates after the most recent HTS revision are status-quo projections under current policy (Budget Lab release README) (github.com). The method page says the tracker assigns daily statutory ETRs to roughly 20,000 HS10 products across 240 partners and weights them by 2024 Census import values (Budget Lab methodology) (budgetlab.yale.edu). The June 9 manifest is the latest public release in the repository and lists daily_by_country_2026-06-09.csv with 175,200 rows and data_as_of.last_revision = 2026_rev_10 (Budget Lab manifest) (raw.githubusercontent.com).

The exact China row for July 1 in that file is country = 5700, country_name = China, n_products_present = 20,329, revision = 2026_rev_10, weighted_etr = 0.2373326712860128, and mean_total_all_pairs = 0.3471567749814885 (Budget Lab raw CSV, manifest) (raw.githubusercontent.com). I use weighted_etr, not mean_total_all_pairs, because the resolution asks for a trade-weighted average. The full China change-point history in the June 9 release is below; this is the full distinct-value history, not every repeated daily row.

The legal risk is real but does not change the base case. The Court of International Trade ruled against Section 122 in May, but the Federal Circuit stayed the injunction on June 11, so the government can keep collecting the 10% worldwide tariff while the appeal proceeds; the AP also reports the Section 122 tariff is set to expire July 24 (AP, June 11) (apnews.com). I treat pre-July-1 removal of Section 122 as a low-probability tail near the Budget Lab post-expiry China value of 19.33%.

There are higher alternative readings, but they are weaker for this resolution. Global Trade Alert’s June 3 note says China stays near 27% under the current regime and proposed forced-labor Section 301 replacement (Global Trade Alert) (globaltradealert.org). I downweight that for July 1 because Budget Lab has a date-specific July 1 country row and because PWBM’s post-reset collected-duty estimate is much closer to Budget Lab.

My distribution puts 75% on the Budget Lab status-quo branch centered at 23.733%, 14% on nearby current-law or later-vintage revisions around 22.6%-24.0%, 4% on a Section 122 removal or exclusion branch around 19.33%, 6.5% on source-definition or collected-duty branches around 27%-30%, and less than 1% on larger policy shocks. This gives a median of 23.7%, a mean of 23.9%, about 84% between 23.0% and 24.8%, about 5% below 22%, and about 3% above 28%.

What's non-obvious

The 10% Section 122 surcharge does not add 10 percentage points to China’s trade-weighted rate. In the Budget Lab China series, the scheduled July 24 step-down is from 23.733% to 19.327%, a 4.4 percentage-point move, because the surcharge has exclusions and does not stack on the Section 232-covered portion of imports (Budget Lab raw CSV, Proclamation 11012) (federalregister.gov).

The obvious 29%-30% answer mixes methods. USAFacts’ 29.6% is a February 2026 customs-collection approximation, Global Trade Alert’s near-27% figure is a different model, and Budget Lab’s 34.7% number in the July 1 row is an unweighted product-line mean, not a trade-weighted average (USAFacts, Global Trade Alert, Budget Lab raw CSV) (usafacts.org). The resolution wording points to the import-weighted statutory July 1 value, so the modal outcome is 23.7%.

Limitations

The Budget Lab figure is statutory and uses 2024 Census import weights, not actual July 2026 customs collections. The tracker documentation also says specific and compound duties are not converted to ad-valorem equivalents and some conditional carve-outs are approximated, which can move a country average at the margin (Budget Lab release README) (github.com).

The source vintage is June 9, and the forecast date is June 21. A new proclamation, a court order, or a fresh Budget Lab release before July 1 could change the correct answer, even though the known USTR comment and hearing dates fall after July 1 (forced-labor Section 301 notice, China managed-trade notice) (federalregister.gov). The resolution could also use a median of multiple credible sources, which is why I keep a visible upper tail around the Global Trade Alert and collected-duty estimates.