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

TL;DR

I forecast 23.7% for July 1, because the June 9 Yale Budget Lab country file gives China a July 1 import-weighted statutory effective tariff rate of 23.73%, and the 10% Section 122 surcharge is still scheduled and legally collectable on that date (Budget Lab daily country CSV; Federal Register Proclamation 11012; AP, June 11, 2026).

Context

The July 1 tariff stack is mainly normal MFN duties, legacy China Section 301 duties, some Section 232 product duties, and the temporary Section 122 import surcharge (Budget Lab release README; Global Trade Alert, June 3, 2026). Proclamation 11012 imposes a 10% ad valorem surcharge on covered imports from February 24, 2026 through 12:01 a.m. EDT on July 24, 2026, with exemptions for listed products and for value already covered by Section 232 tariffs (Federal Register Proclamation 11012).

The legal risk is real but now small for this date. A trade court held the Section 122 tariff unlawful in May, but on June 11 the Federal Circuit let the government keep collecting the 10% worldwide tariff while the appeal proceeds; July 1 is before the July 24 scheduled expiry (AP, June 11, 2026).

Evidence

The historical backbone is the China series itself. The Budget Lab release README says the tracker is a daily statutory-rate series, not a customs-collections series; weighted_etr is the import-weighted effective tariff rate using U.S. Census import weights, country code 5700 is China, and trailing dates after the latest HTS revision are a status-quo projection rather than a political forecast (Budget Lab release README). The June 9 release has publication date June 9, 2026, HTS revision 2026_rev_10, build time June 9 at 16:54 EDT, 730 rows in daily_overall, and 175,200 rows in daily_by_country (Budget Lab manifest). In that file, the China row for July 1, 2026 has weighted_etr = 0.237333, or 23.73%; the same plateau starts June 8 and the scheduled drop to about 19.33% occurs on July 24, after this question’s date (Budget Lab daily country CSV).

This is the full change-point history of China’s Budget Lab weighted_etr series from January 1, 2025 through December 31, 2026; unchanged dates between rows inherit the prior value (Budget Lab daily country CSV).

The cross-checks explain why the source-definition tail is not zero. Penn Wharton’s June 12 customs-data update reports China at 24% in April 2026, using customs duties divided by import value from USITC DataWeb, so it is an observed collections metric rather than a July 1 statutory policy metric (PWBM, June 12, 2026). USAFacts reports China at 29.6% in February 2026 and 30.6% for 2025, but it also says its effective rate is estimated customs duties as a share of goods imports and is only an approximation of actual payments (USAFacts, April 16, 2026). I treat these as lagged checks, not the target, because the resolution asks for the rate in effect on July 1.

The high-side source is Global Trade Alert. Its June 3 model says the current regime is MFN duties plus Section 122 plus Section 232, with IEEPA struck down, and that China stays near 27% under its current-regime and proposed-Section-301 comparison (Global Trade Alert, June 3, 2026). I give this some weight for source-method risk, but less than Yale, because the question names the Budget Lab as a primary source and because the Yale file gives an exact country-day row. A prior Global Trade Alert Section 122 page also described a 15% Section 122 regime, while the operative proclamation says 10%, which is a warning that some high-side summaries blend scenarios with current law (Global Trade Alert, February 21, 2026; Federal Register Proclamation 11012).

The near-term policy thread does not move the July 1 number much. USTR’s forced-labor Section 301 notice proposes 10% or 12.5% duties on products of investigated economies, with China in the 12.5% group, but written comments are due July 6 and hearings begin July 7, after the resolution date (Federal Register Section 301 notice). USTR’s U.S.-China Board of Trade process also has comments due July 10 and rebuttals due July 27, so it is more relevant to late July or August than July 1 (USTR Board of Trade notice).

My distribution puts 55% on the exact Budget Lab July 1 row resolving unchanged, 25% on the same status-quo value with small data or revision noise, 6% on nearby collected-duty or source-revision outcomes around 24% to 25%, 5% on a higher Global-Trade-Alert-style methodology around 27%, 6% on Section 122 being excluded, stopped, or de-escalated before July 1, 2% on a rapid pre-July policy increase, and 1% on an extreme high tail. The median is 23.7%, the modal bucket is 23.6% to 23.8%, and the mean is about 24.0%.

What's non-obvious

The common 29% to 31% read is mostly stale for July 1. It comes from lagged customs collections or from scenario summaries, not from the current statutory stack. The Yale tracker shows a large fall after the February IEEPA ruling, a smaller rise when Section 122 begins, and a July 24 cliff after the target date (Budget Lab daily country CSV; USAFacts, April 16, 2026).

The other trap is the 15% Section 122 narrative. Section 122 allows up to 15%, and some commentary modeled or reported a 15% case, but the operative Federal Register proclamation imposes 10% through July 24 unless changed earlier or extended by Congress (Federal Register Proclamation 11012). That is why I do not center the forecast near 27% to 30%, even though that range is a real source-selection tail.

Limitations

The biggest limitation is definitional. Yale’s tracker is statutory and uses 2024 Census import weights; PWBM and USAFacts are customs-collections ratios with monthly coverage and lagged entry effects (Budget Lab release README; PWBM, June 12, 2026; USAFacts, April 16, 2026). The resolution wording points to a point-in-time trade-weighted rate, so I prefer Yale, but a resolver who takes the median of several statutory and collected-rate sources could land a few points higher.

The Budget Lab file is also a status-quo projection for dates after the latest HTS revision, not an observation from July 1 itself (Budget Lab release README). The two ways it could miss are a fast court or executive action on Section 122, and a faster-than-expected Section 301 or China-specific action before July 1. The Federal Circuit stay and the post-July-1 comment schedules make those tails small, but not zero (AP, June 11, 2026; Federal Register Section 301 notice).