While many American businesses reliant on foreign imports and inputs saw their costs skyrocket in 2025, they are now starting to receive some relief from the tariff burden they incurred.
In February, the Supreme Court invalidated the Trump administration’s International Emergency Economic Powers Act (IEEPA) tariffs, and in April, Customs and Border Protection unveiled its web-based tariff refund request portal, soliciting a flood of demands from among the 330,000 importers that paid IEEPA tariffs on 53 million entries worth around $166 billion.
But according to Liberty Street Economics, which publishes official research and commentary from the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, companies still aren’t done raising prices on customers as a result of the tariffs.
In fact, the organization wrote in a memo on Wednesday, “nearly half of firms that have paid tariffs still plan additional price increases to offset these costs, with some expecting to raise prices six months or more in the future.”
A survey of regional businesses in the United States showed that around 30 percent of service providers and 20 percent of manufacturers “fully passed through” the cost of the administration’s duties to their customers in the form of price hikes. By contrast, another 20 percent of service firms and 30 percent of manufacturers have said they’re done raising prices to offset the tariffs they have paid to the federal government.
While these groups represent a little over half of the tariff-paying businesses surveyed by Liberty Street, a not-insubstantial 47 percent of service firms and 44 percent of manufacturers indicated they still have tariff-driven price increases in the works, even though the tariffs are no longer being collected—and some may have solicited refunds.
Around 30 percent of the service firms surveyed plan to up prices within the next six months, along with 40 percent of manufacturers that paid tariffs. And some are even planning increases further into the future; 16 percent of service firms and 7 percent of manufacturers said they intend to raise prices more than six months from today.
The results paint a picture of a commerce base that remains impacted by tariffs over a year after they were introduced, and months after they were deemed unlawful, triggering the most expansive tariff refund process the country has ever seen.
“It is not clear whether firms are responding to a single round of tariffs or to the sequence of increases that has unfolded over the past year or more,” analysts wrote. “What is clear is that the adjustment has been gradual, in line with a growing of research showing that tariffs pass through to consumer prices incrementally, building over the better part of a year rather than all at once.”
Liberty Street’s survey solicited insights from the companies on their reasoning for pushing out price increases even though the duties are now moot.
Some businesses reported that they have been operating under long-term contracts with fixed selling prices, and that they’re unable to up prices to contend with the heightened cost of doing business until those contracts expire.
Others said they were enacting a “trickle up” strategy to raising prices, upping them over a period of time instead of shocking customers with significant increases all at once. This approach has proven favorable with firms that feel uncertain about the future of U.S. tariff policy, including new duties from the Trump administration or retaliatory tariffs from other countries.
Whatever the reasoning, analysts wrote that pricing pressures could persist moving forward.
“While economists and policymakers often expect that price increases due to tariffs will constitute a one-time price-level adjustment, what ‘one-time’ means in practice may be a drawn-out affair, especially when the tariffs change frequently,” they wrote. As a result, inflation-driven pricing may prove to be a future, as well as present, problem.
