Federal customs revenues hit another new record in August, driven by sweeping tariffs on imports, one of the Trump administration’s signature economic policies.
Customs duties — which are mostly tariff revenues — hit $30 billion in August, which is up almost 300 percent since last year, the Treasury Department reported Thursday.
The August numbers are up from $28 billion in July, $27 billion in June, and $23 billion in May. Numbers for all those months are about three times greater than they were prior to the Trump tariffs.
The White House has levied new tariffs on dozens of countries and canceled duty exemptions for small packages from all over the world. The overall U.S. tariff rate, which is an unofficial measure compiled by various financial and academic groups, is now at its highest level in decades and is especially high for U.S. trading partner China.
Fitch ratings put the effective tariff at 16 percent this week. Penn Wharton put it at 9.14 percent in June, and the Yale Budget Lab placed it at 18.6 percent in August.
Senior administration officials said last month closing the worldwide small package exemption, which had already been in place for China, would bring roughly an additional $10 billion annually.
The Congressional Budget Office projected last month that President Trump’s tariffs will reduce total deficits by $4.0 trillion, including debt service adjustment, through the next decade, if they are left in place.
After Trump’s new “reciprocal” tariff rates were locked in last month, ranging from about 10 to 41 percent, policy groups said they were set to reshape the federal budget.
“Tariffs are generating meaningful new revenue,” the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget said in an August policy brief, forecasting $1.3 trillion of new revenue through the end of Trump’s term and $2.8 trillion through 2034, before accounting for economic effects.
The monthly federal budget statement from the Treasury Department also showed a record level of interest expense for the month of August at $111 billion, or $1.1 trillion fiscal year to date, though it was not an all-time record. Total U.S. debt stock is now at $36 trillion, though a significant portion of that is money the government effectively owes itself.
Fiscal year to date, the government ran an almost $2 trillion deficit in August, which still needs to include September as the fiscal year ends at the end of this month. The annual deficit for fiscal 2024 was $1.83 trillion.
Gross corporate tax receipts fell by 56 percent in August compared with last year, dropping to $4 billion from $10 billion.
August was the first month following the passage of Republicans’ One Big Beautiful Bill Act, which extended the 2017 tax cuts centered on the reduction of the corporate tax rate. Treasury Department officials did not specifically attribute the drop in corporate tax receipts to the passage of the bill for August, which they said can be a slow month for corporate taxes.
