WASHINGTON, D.C. — President Donald Trump announced tariffs on many countries on April 2, 2025, in a move he called "Liberation Day." The tariffs included steep levies on major trading partners such as China and the European Union.

In the year since the announcement, U.S. trade policy has shifted frequently. Many of the original tariffs have been rolled back, and a February Supreme Court decision struck down some of them. Following that ruling, the administration announced a 10% global tariff that could last 150 days.

The average effective tariff rate, as tracked by the Penn Wharton Budget Model, jumped in April 2025 and rose monthly before reaching 11% in August 2025, when reciprocal tariffs went fully into effect. The rate peaked in October 2025 and has since cooled, though it remains higher than before the second presidential term began.

Retailers including Walmart and Target raised prices to compensate for the tariffs, and some consumers received tariff bills in the mail after online shopping. Analysts Gabriel Agostini and Atsi Sheth pointed to individual countries' exchange rates and firms' pricing strategies as factors in how much tariffs affected the prices of various goods. In the year before the April 2 announcement, the prices of core goods excluding food and energy had been pulling down broader inflation. The overall price of core goods has remained relatively stable over the past year.

Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell said that tariff policy had shaped interest rate decisions over the past year and that levies represented a one-time shock to the economy unlikely to have a multi-year impact. He said high oil prices due to the Iran war were a much bigger factor in the current inflation story.

He said the Federal Open Market Committee expected price growth to cool off. "Not as much as we had hoped, but some progress on inflation," he said. "It should come as we start to see in the middle of the year progress on tariffs going through once, and then tariff inflation coming down."

White House spokesperson Kush Desai defended the tariff policy. "In the one year since Liberation Day, President Trump has fundamentally transformed the global trading system and ended decades of foreign free-riding off the backs of hardworking Americans. President Trump has powerfully used tariffs to renegotiate trade deals, secure trillions in manufacturing investments, and lower drug prices," Desai said.