The importer of record — the company that brings goods across the U.S. border — pays the tariff to U.S. Customs and Border Protection at entry, and CBP collected about $77 billion in duties in fiscal year 2024, a record driven largely by the Section 301 tariffs on Chinese goods, per CBP's own tally. That is the mechanical answer. The economic answer — which company or consumer ends up poorer — depends on contracts and pricing power downstream.
The confusion is built into the rhetoric. "Make the exporter pay" and "China is paying" describe outcomes that the payment mechanics do not produce: a tariff is a tax on the entry of goods, and the legal debtor is always the importer of record, a U.S.-registered entity in nearly every case.
What happens at the border?
The sequence is fixed and document-driven:
- Goods arrive; the importer of record files an entry summary with CBP declaring the product, its Harmonized Tariff Schedule classification, and its value.
- CBP applies the duty rate attached to that HTS code — the base rate plus any additional layer, such as Section 301 or Section 232 duties.
- The importer pays the duty before the goods are released or posts a bond.
- The importer may later seek reimbursement by claiming the goods qualify for exclusion, refund under a trade-preference program, or by passing a protest.
Every layer has its own docket. The Section 301 list, the Section 232 steel and aluminum proclamations, and newer actions each carry their own rates, effective dates, and product lists in the Federal Register — a single shipment can stack several of them at once.
Who bears the cost after the border?
After the importer pays, the cost moves through three channels, and academic work has measured all of them in the 2018-19 tariff round. Importers absorb some of it in margin. Some passes to U.S. buyers through higher prices — a NBER working paper by Amiti, Redding, and Weinstein (2019) found the 2018 tariffs passed through to U.S. import prices at close to full incidence, meaning U.S. firms and consumers, not Chinese exporters, bore the cost. And some reaches foreign exporters through negotiated price cuts, which the same literature found limited in that episode.
The split is not fixed. It turns on whether alternative suppliers exist, whether contracts allow repricing, and whether the importer's customers can switch. Commodity goods with many suppliers pass less of the tax to consumers; specialized goods with one source pass more.
Do tariffs raise government revenue?
Yes, and the scale is public. CBP reported roughly $77 billion collected in fiscal 2024, and that figure rose further in fiscal 2025 as new tariff layers took effect, per CBP's fiscal-year reporting. But duties are a small share of federal revenue — individual income taxes alone collected over $2.4 trillion in fiscal 2024, per Treasury statements — so tariff receipts offset, rather than replace, other taxes.
What does the data not show?
Receipts show money collected, not welfare. They do not measure the cost of retaliation against U.S. exports, the price of supply-chain rerouting, or the compliance cost of reclassifying products — all of which sit outside the duty line. Studies of the 2018-19 round, including work published through the NBER, put several of those costs at billions of dollars a year; the estimates belong to those institutions, and they differ on magnitude.
What the record establishes: a border tax paid by importers, collected in the tens of billions, with incidence that lands mostly on U.S. firms and buyers according to the peer-reviewed work on the last round. What it cannot establish: what the next round will do. That depends on rates and coverage not yet written.
For more context, read Two agencies decide every US dumping case.