Two years ago, the tariff line on a small maker's supply order was mostly theoretical. You bought mica from a supplier in Gujarat or copper blanks from one in Birmingham, the box arrived, and the number you paid was the number on the invoice. A year from now, the makers still in business will be the ones who learned to treat country of origin as a cost input — the same way they already treat weight, minimum order quantity, and lead time.
The month that separated those two worlds was February 2026, when a tariff program worth well over a hundred billion dollars was struck down in court — and almost nobody's material costs went down.
The short version: the Court invalidated one legal authority, not tariffs as such. A Section 122 surcharge replaced the lost duties within four days. A broader Section 301 action arrived five months after that, and the Section 232 duties on metals and lumber were never touched by the ruling at all. And the part of your cost that arrives through a US distributor was never itemized as a tariff in the first place, so it does not come back off when a tariff ends.
The tariffs were struck down. Your input costs stayed put.
On February 20, 2026, the Supreme Court held that the International Emergency Economic Powers Act does not authorize the President to impose tariffs.
6–3. The vote in Learning Resources, Inc. v. Trump, No. 24-1287, decided February 20, 2026. The Court observed that IEEPA "contains no reference to tariffs or duties" and that "until now no President has read IEEPA to confer such power" (slip opinion, Supreme Court of the United States).
This was not a narrow procedural ruling. It invalidated the entire "reciprocal" tariff structure and the country-specific measures tied to declared drug and border emergencies. An executive order signed the same day — Executive Order 14389, Ending Certain Tariff Actions, 91 FR 9437 — terminated nine IEEPA-based tariff orders and directed agencies to stop collecting "as soon as practicable." It did not name a date. Customs and Border Protection supplied that two days later: IEEPA duties would no longer be collected on goods entered for consumption, or withdrawn from warehouse for consumption, on or after 12:00 a.m. eastern time on February 24, 2026 (CBP CSMS #67834313, February 22, 2026).
The sums involved were not small.
$164.7 billion in IEEPA tariffs had been collected as of January 2026, with refunds projected at up to $175 billion (Penn Wharton Budget Model, February 20, 2026).
And yet if you went back to your supplier in March expecting 2024 pricing, you did not get it. Those two reasons are worth taking one at a time, because they call for different responses.
What replaced them
The first reason is that the ruling addressed one statute. It said nothing about the other authorities Congress has given the executive branch to set tariffs, and those authorities were already carrying a substantial share of the load — and were promptly asked to carry more.
A balance-of-payments surcharge under Section 122 of the Trade Act of 1974 covered the gap almost immediately. Proclamation 11012 imposed a 10% ad valorem surcharge effective 12:01 a.m. eastern standard time on February 24, 2026 — the same moment the IEEPA duties stopped — for a period of 150 days, running through 12:01 a.m. eastern daylight time on July 24, 2026 (91 FR 9339).
That expiry was not a policy choice. Section 122 allows only "a temporary import surcharge, not to exceed 15 percent ad valorem," and only "for a period not exceeding 150 days (unless such period is extended by Act of Congress)" (19 U.S.C. § 2132). It was a bridge by construction. Something more durable arrived the day it expired.
10% or 12.5%, on roughly 60 economies, effective 12:01 a.m. eastern daylight time on July 24, 2026 — a Section 301 action following determinations that the covered economies failed to impose or effectively enforce prohibitions on importing goods made with forced labor (Notice of Actions, 91 FR 47318, July 28, 2026).
The split is worth knowing if you buy internationally:
- 10% — a group of seventeen economies including Bangladesh, Cambodia, Canada, India, Indonesia, Malaysia, Mexico, Pakistan, Sri Lanka and the United Kingdom.
- 12.5% — all other investigated economies, China and Vietnam among them.
- Capped at 10% — the EU and Taiwan, where the new duty is set so that existing duties plus the new duty reach 10% rather than adding on top.
- Capped at 12.5% — Japan, Korea and Switzerland, on the same net-of-existing-duty basis (Notice of Actions, 91 FR 47318).
Meanwhile Section 232, which operates product by product rather than country by country, kept doing what it has been doing since 2025.
Table: Tariff authorities in force as of August 2026, by material
| Material | Authority | Rate | Effective | Source |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Steel and aluminum, including derivative articles | Section 232 | 25% | June 8, 2026 – December 31, 2027 | Proclamation 11032, 91 FR 34085 |
| Semi-finished copper products | Section 232 | 50% | August 1, 2025 – present | Proclamation 10962, 90 FR 37727 |
| Softwood timber and lumber | Section 232 | 10% | October 14, 2025 – present | 90 FR 48127 |
| Most other goods from covered economies | Section 301 | 10% or 12.5% | July 24, 2026 – present | 91 FR 47318 |
Two details in that table do real work. The steel and aluminum rate came down — Proclamation 11032 cut it from 50% to 25%, with a reduced 10% rate for derivative articles whose metal content was entirely smelted and cast, or melted and poured, in the United States. Tariff rates move in both directions, which is an argument for checking rather than assuming.
And the authorities do not simply stack. The July Section 301 notice excludes "all articles and parts of articles subject to tariffs under Section 232" (91 FR 47318). If your material already carries a Section 232 duty, it does not also carry the new Section 301 duty. That single sentence is worth more to a metalsmith than any general commentary about trade policy.
Why a legal win didn't reach your shelf
The second reason is structural, and it is the one that is easiest to miss.
There are two doors a tariff can come through, and only one of them is visible.
Door one: you import directly. You are the importer of record. The duty is a line you can see, on paperwork with your name on it. This is the door that changed most dramatically in 2026 — not because of the tariff rates, but because the $800 de minimis exemption that let small commercial shipments enter duty-free is gone (CBP interim final rule, 91 FR 37789), and the fixed costs of a customs entry now land on every order regardless of size. The mechanics of that, and how to fold duty and fees into a real per-unit cost, are covered in depth in the landed cost guide; there is no point repeating them here.
For scale, though, consider what CBP was processing before the change:
1.36 billion de minimis shipments cleared CBP in fiscal year 2024, up from 139 million in 2015 — nearly a tenfold increase (CBP interim final rule, 91 FR 37789, June 24, 2026).
Door two: you buy from a US distributor. For a lot of makers this is how buying actually works, and it is why the Supreme Court ruling felt like nothing happened. Your distributor imported the goods. Your distributor paid the duty. You paid a price that contained it, with no line item naming it, and when the duty changed your distributor's price sheet changed a few months later with a note about "supply chain conditions."
Nothing about door two is deceptive. It is just opaque. And opacity has a specific consequence: when the tariff comes off, the price does not automatically come back down, because the distributor is working through inventory bought at the old cost, renegotiating with their own suppliers, and — reasonably enough — not volunteering a decrease you did not ask about.
Which means the practical skill here is not reading the Federal Register. It is noticing that your own cost per unit moved, and when.
If you imported in 2025, there may be a refund with your name on it
Here is the part that is worth actual money to a small number of readers, and that almost nobody has told them about.
If you were the importer of record on entries between February 2025 and February 2026, and those entries carried IEEPA duties, those duties were collected under a statute the Supreme Court has now held did not authorize them. CBP built a refund process. It has phases, and it has deadlines.
Claims run through a tool called CAPE — Consolidated Administration and Processing of Entries — inside CBP's ACE portal, the online system through which customs entries are filed. Phase 1 opened April 20, 2026, covering entries CBP has not yet finalized (in customs terms, unliquidated) plus those still inside the window where a finalized entry can be reopened; Phase 2 opened June 29, 2026 (BDO, IEEPA tariff refund FAQs, accessed August 2026 — an accounting-firm summary of CBP's instructions).
Three things about that process trip up small importers specifically:
- Only the importer of record — or the broker who filed the entry — can claim. If a courier's brokerage handled your entry, they are the filing party, not you.
- If you need to be paid as a designated party, the paperwork has to come first. Designation on CBP Form 4811 must be in place before the claim is submitted. After submission, it cannot be added.
- There are outside deadlines. For entries that fall outside the CAPE phases and require judicial action, the reported dates are February 4, 2027 for the drug-emergency IEEPA duties and April 5, 2027 for the reciprocal duties (BDO, IEEPA tariff refund FAQs, accessed August 2026 — an accounting-firm summary of CBP's instructions).
Whether this is worth pursuing scales with what you paid. Add up the IEEPA duty lines on your 2025 entries first — if the total is a few hundred dollars, the filing effort may exceed the refund, and the honest answer is to let it go. If it runs into the thousands, it is worth a paid hour with a licensed customs broker, and worth having that conversation in the next few months rather than next year. If you bought everything from US distributors, this section is not about you — your distributor's refund, if any, is theirs.
Mapping your own exposure
Nadia — a composite maker, not a real person, though the arithmetic is ordinary enough — makes enamel jewelry and buys copper blanks direct from a supplier in the UK, roughly $180 at a time, six or seven times a year. She spent most of 2026 assuming her costs were up because "everything is up."
They were up for a specific, findable reason. Semi-finished copper products carry a 50% Section 232 duty. Because that material sits under Section 232, the new 10% UK rate under the July Section 301 action does not additionally apply to it. One authority, one rate, and a materially different answer than she would have gotten by reading a general article about UK tariffs.
Whether any given item lands in that bucket depends on its ten-digit classification, which is the importer's legal responsibility and genuinely not obvious — a copper blank and a finished copper component can classify very differently. The Harmonized Tariff Schedule search tool is the official reference. If you import directly and repeatedly, a licensed customs broker is worth paying once to settle the classification of the three or four things you actually buy; at Nadia's order size that is a one-time cost, not a per-shipment one. If you buy through a US distributor, the classification is already their problem — you only need to know the duty is in your price.
The work worth doing does not require any of that expertise, though. It requires a list.
Write down your top ten materials by annual spend. Next to each one, put the country it actually comes from — not the country your distributor is in, the country it was made in, which is often on the packaging or one email away. Then put the date and size of the last price change you absorbed on it.
When makers run this exercise, the common surprise is that two or three inputs account for nearly all of the increase while the rest of the shelf barely moved — which turns a vague "everything is expensive" into a specific pricing decision on three products instead of a nervous across-the-board raise. If you want somewhere to keep the list, the Vendor and Supplier Contact Organizer has fields for exactly this kind of per-supplier record.
The reason this is hard on a spreadsheet is not the list. It is the ripple. A duty change on copper is not one number; it is a new unit cost that has to reach every design that uses copper, every price tier, and every wholesale line sheet quoting those designs. Ardent Seller was built for that propagation — record what a purchase actually cost, including duty and fees, and the revised unit cost flows into every recipe and product that depends on it, so a rate change shows up as a margin number rather than a vague sense that things are tighter. You can see how the costing side works.
The part that doesn't change
Trade policy in 2026 has been genuinely unstable. A statute was struck down, a bridge measure came and went inside five months, metal rates fell by half, and a new action covering most of the world's economies took effect in July. Anyone who tells you confidently what the rates will be next spring is guessing.
What is stable is the discipline. Nadia's copper did not get cheaper when she found the rate that explained it. What changed is that she stopped attributing the increase to a general mood about the economy and could finally answer the only question that mattered: whether her pendants were still priced above what they now cost to make.
Makers who know the country of origin and the current landed cost of their top ten inputs can respond to a rate change in an afternoon. Makers who know only the invoice total find out six months late, from their margin.
Go pull your last three supply invoices and find out where the materials were actually made. That is the whole first step. Start a free account and put the numbers somewhere they can do some work.
Related reading
- What Is Landed Cost? A Small Business Guide — the companion piece to this one: what belongs in a true material cost once duty, freight, and customs fees are in the box, and how to allocate it per unit.
- Pricing Audit Before Raising Prices — run this before you respond to a supplier increase with an across-the-board raise, so the increase actually reaches your bank account.
- Margin vs Markup — if a rising input cost is eating your margin, this is the math that determines whether your correction is big enough.
Free resources
Free companion downloads if you want to put any of this into practice:
- Vendor and Supplier Contact Organizer — the place to record country of origin, last price change, and lead time per supplier, which is the exposure map this post asks you to build.
- Should I Raise My Prices? — walks the decision once you know which two or three inputs actually moved, instead of raising everything by a nervous 10%.
This article is provided for educational purposes only and does not constitute legal, regulatory, financial, or tax advice. Tariff rates, trade actions, customs procedures, and refund eligibility vary by product classification and country of origin, and change frequently — several of the measures described here have already changed more than once. Consult a qualified accountant, a licensed customs broker, or an attorney before making import, pricing, or refund decisions based on this content.