When Eileen Nusselt and Gio Cox got married earlier this year, they skipped the traditional registry and asked their guests to donate to a home renovation fund. Yet as tariffs have pushed up the price of materials like lumber and paint, that money isn’t going as far as they expected.
“We’re having to cut off projects that we really want to do,” said Cox, who lives with his wife in Charleston, South Carolina.
Many of the Trump administration’s signature tariffs were struck down earlier this year, but the couple doesn’t expect prices to fall anytime soon. “What incentive do any of these big companies have to lower their prices?” Nusselt asked. Especially, she added, “if they’re getting money back” from the government in the form of tariff refunds.
After the Supreme Court ruled in February that the Trump administration lacked the authority under emergency economic powers to levy many of its tariffs, the Court of International Trade ordered the federal government to process refunds — plus interest — to the more than 330,000 companies that have paid roughly $166 billion in tariffs now considered illegal. Since then, more than 2,000 companies have filed suit against the federal government to demand their refunds.
American consumers, however, will likely not be compensated for the tariff costs they bore, passed on through higher prices. Indeed, as taxpayers, they may be responsible for the interest that accrues each day the government does not process refunds.
But the cost of tariffs largely fell on shoppers, not companies.
Transferring Tariff Costs
According to analysis from the Budget Lab at Yale, prices of consumer goods (excluding more volatile food and energy) rose more than 2% throughout 2025 and into January 2026, reversing recent declines and adding to evidence that the costs of tariffs are being passed on to consumers.
Tariffs accounted for an estimated 86% of the rise in prices for imported household goods through January, with the passthrough even more pronounced for long-lasting durable goods like cars, appliances and furniture, the Yale researchers found.
Some company leaders have spoken publicly about incorporating tariffs into their pricing. In a call with investors last May, Walmart CEO Doug McMillion said the retail behemoth would “do our best to keep our prices as low as possible,” but also that “higher tariffs will result in higher prices.” In an August 2025 earnings call, Home Depot Executive Vice President of Merchandising Billy Bastek spoke of “some modest price movement” due to tariffs.
Amazon CEO Andy Jassy told CNBC in January that the company stocked up on items before the tariffs were instituted to keep prices low, but that supply ran out last fall. “You start to see some of the tariffs creep into some of the prices,” he said.
An analysis by congressional Democrats on the Joint Economic Committee found that American consumers paid more than $231 billion in total tariff costs between February 2025 and January 2026, amounting to roughly $1,745 per household.
“Tariffs are regressive in nature, and they impact low- and middle-income families more than wealthy individuals,” said Ryan Mulholland, a senior fellow focused on international economic policy at the liberal think tank Center for American Progress. Lower-income people not only spend a greater share of their income, they’re also more likely to buy cheaper, imported items — the kind likely subject to tariffs. At the same time, tariffs may contribute to inflation more broadly, which also disproportionately affects households with less financial flexibility.
“As budgets get tighter, tariff pressures bite more,” said Mulholland. Indeed, researchers at the Budget Lab at Yale found that, as a share of income, tariffs may burden the poorest households more than three times as much as the wealthiest.
Currently, only “importers of record” are entitled to refunds per U.S. trade law, and companies don’t have a legal obligation to pass any of that money on to the consumers who paid higher prices.
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