Trump tariffs will cost Utahns. Here’s what the data shows on state’s imports.

It was an announcement that stunned the world.

On Wednesday, President Donald Trump announced tariffs on the vast majority of goods imported to the United States. Presented as a new revenue generator for the federal government and a fiscal incentive for manufacturers to bring their production stateside, the move also scared most economists.

Why? Tariffs aren’t free money. Taxes accrued on these products generally get passed on to consumers in the form of higher prices for the items they buy.

Much has been written on how this will impact the U.S. economy — but what about Utah’s specifically?

Luckily, we have very good data on how much the state of Utah imports. The U.S. Census Bureau keeps track of U.S.-bound imports on a state by state level through its USA Trade platform.

We also know exactly what tariffs Trump’s administration added on Wednesday. In general, most countries saw a blanket 10% tariff added. Some countries, though, saw tariffs jump 11% to 50%. Note that any tariffs added were in addition to what was already in place.

By my calculations, Utah’s 2024 imports from China would have cost an additional $868 million, an extra $451 million from Taiwan and additional $420 million from Vietnam.

Here’s the full list of the country tariffs added Wednesday, how much Utah imported from each country in 2024, and how much those tariffs would add up to.

In all, Utah imported $21.9 billion in 2024, of which, by my calculations, about $11.7 billion would have been subject to these tariffs. In all, the tariffs would have added about $3.1 billion in cost to those products.

That is a lot of money. It significantly outweighs, for example, the income tax cuts state legislators implemented in this year’s session; those were worth about $97 million. Another carveout allowing more Utahns to access Utah’s Social Security tax break added about $24 million to the cuts, but that’s it.

The tariffs the administration added this week were about 25 times greater than that total.

The exact tariff numbers were decided by taking the United States’ trade deficit with any country, dividing it by the country’s exports to the U.S., and dividing by two. It’s a formula that ends up punishing the countries that couldn’t afford to import much from the U.S. the most: Lesotho and Cambodia have among the highest tariff rates, while the U.K.’s stands at just 10%.

Exemptions were limited. From a geographic point of view, Canada, Mexico, Russia, and North Korea were exempted from these particular tariffs, though they continue to face others. Steel, aluminum, copper, pharmaceuticals, lumber, automobiles, and a few tiny categories were also exempted — because they were already generally subject to a 25% tariff Trump added in February.

The exemptions added for Mexico and Canada are significant to Utahns, it’s worth noting. Those two countries are the largest exporters to Utah (at about $4.7 billion a piece), and those countries will not be immediately tariffed on items produced in those countries, other than the steel, aluminum, copper, pharmaceuticals, lumber, and automobile tariffs already added.

Those tariffs were expensive: They’d be about $525 million to Utah alone on 2024 imports, by my estimates.

What remains to be seen is how these tariffs actually impact trade itself to and from our state — if people choose to import less as a result, the tariff cost would decrease somewhat. The Census Bureau is actually quite quick about reporting these trade figures; the most recent month that we have trade data for is February of 2025.

As a result, we’ll learn by June what kind of impact this decision is having on Utah’s trade in general. If it stays similar to 2024 figures, though — or even close — these tariffs will be significantly costly to Utah businesses and residents alike.