Shipping containers at the Port of Long Beach in California on April 28, 2025. (Eric Thayer/Bloomberg News)
The U.S. collected a record amount of revenue from tariffs in April, helping to limit a further widening of the budget deficit, though President Donald Trump’s search for trade deals with targeted nations may scale back future amounts collected.
The Treasury Department recorded $16 billion in customs-duties revenue for April, marking a $9 billion — or 130% — increase on the same month a year before. That’s the biggest monthly take for customs in at least a decade, according to data compiled by Bloomberg.
The jump reflected tariff hikes imposed by the Trump administration, a Treasury official told reporters. Trump on April 2 unveiled “reciprocal” tariffs on dozens of countries, before putting all of them except China’s on pause a week later. “Liberation Day” also featured a new universal 10% baseline levy.
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The data came out hours after the U.S. reached a tentative deal with China to remove a swath of escalatory tariffs. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent and U.S. Trade Representative Jamieson Greer announced that American levies on Chinese goods would come down to 30% for now, from 145%. Last week, the U.S. reached a trade agreement with the UK.
For the first seven months of the fiscal year, the federal government logged a $1.05 trillion deficit, a 13% increase on the same period a year earlier after accounting for calendar-year differences. Taking out some deferred taxes that had inflated 2024 revenue, the 2025 deficit is 4% wider, a Treasury official said.
Rising interest costs on the public debt, along with steeper outlays on categories including Medicare and Social Security, continue to account for a large share of the added borrowing needs.
Besides customs, another revenue category seeing an increase this fiscal year is excise taxes, which have climbed by $10 billion over the past seven months. That’s largely thanks to a new levy on stock buybacks, a Treasury official said. That tax was enacted as part of the Biden administration’s 2022 renewable energy package, known as the Inflation Reduction Act.
