Tariffs increased in 2025; why did U.S. imports grow?
The U.S. average tariff rate increased from 2.9 percent in January 2025 to 14.8 percent in December, a rise of almost 12 percentage points. The surge—the largest such U.S. jump since the Smoot-Hawley tariffs at the onset of the Great Depression in 1930—led to a sharp increase in the tariff-inclusive prices that U.S. importers paid.
Spending on U.S. imports had been widely expected to decline sharply. It didn’t. Rather, U.S. imports grew by 4.5 percent in 2025 over 2024 levels
We examine two phenomena that may explain why U.S. imports did not decline as expected. First, there was front-running—an anticipatory rush to import— especially from countries such as Ireland and Switzerland, aiming to beat tariff imposition in the early months of 2025. It is unlikely that all the front-running unwound by the end of the year.
Second, the boom in artificial intelligence (AI) equipment investment, much of which was imported, helped increase imports. Adjusting 2025 imports for front-running and heightened AI-related activity—assuming imports involving those two activities were unchanged from 2024 levels—would likely make U.S. import growth negative.
Despite the global nature of rising tariffs, the increases differed across source countries, which contributed to a reshuffling of the U.S.’s most important trading partners. We leverage this variation in tariff increases across countries, as well as variation across products, and estimate that absent other forces, U.S. imports would have fallen 12 percent owing to the tariffs.
Front-running anticipated tariffs
While the exact details of the tariff increases were not known in advance, rising tariffs were generally anticipated following U.S. national elections in November 2024, when the levies were a topic of debate. This led to front-running—countries rushing to export goods to the U.S., and U.S. importers hurriedly buying them—before tariff increases took effect.
This was especially true for non-perishable and storable goods, including, for example, many pharmaceuticals and articles made of gold. As a result, for the first three months of 2025, U.S. imports were 26.5 percent higher than in January–March 2024.
In the ensuing months, import growth declined and by the final three months of 2025 the value of imports contracted relative to the final three months of 2024 (Chart 2). The import decline toward year-end likely reflects both the direct effects of tariffs and a slowdown that followed forward-pushed sales in early 2025.
