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Most tariff coverage follows two storylines: prices at the checkout and the figures big corporations report to Wall Street. The companies paying a large share of the actual import duties get far less attention.
About 97% of all U.S. importers are small businesses, according to the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, which counted 236,045 small importers among 242,515 total. They account for roughly a third of U.S. imports by dollar, but they stand at the front of the line when duties come due.
The bill rose about $306,000 per small importer in a year
New analysis from the Center for American Progress found the average small-business importer paid roughly $306,000 more in tariffs from March 2025 through February 2026 than in the prior 12 months, about $25,000 a month. Costs rose in all 50 states and Washington, D.C.
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The same direction shows up among larger companies. Tariffs paid by midsize U.S. firms tripled over the course of last year, according to the JPMorganChase Institute, whose sample of businesses together employs about 48 million people. The American Action Forum estimates direct tariff costs on U.S. small businesses at roughly $85 billion a year.
Those are large figures. A dollar amount only tells the story once it's clear who absorbs it.
Small firms can't hand off the cost the way big ones can
Small businesses are less able to pass tariff costs through to customers than large firms, the American Action Forum reported, citing the Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta. Small firms in that research expected sales to drop nearly 9%, compared with 3.5% for large firms.
The gap is built into how small importers operate. Most rely on a single supplier and bring in about two products, leaving little room to reroute orders when a duty hits. Finding a replacement is slow: The average importer needs up to three years to line up a new supplier. Financing is harder, too. Only 27% of small importers hold a credit score high enough to be offered new lines of credit, versus 70% of larger importers. A company negotiating a million-unit order can lean on a factory for a discount. A shop buying a thousand units cannot.
So one question remains. If a small importer can't out-negotiate the duty or fully pass it along, what is left to control?
The purchase order is the lever small importers still hold
The answer is landed cost. The tariff rate is set in Washington, but the true per-unit cost of a product, duties included, is a number an operator can see and act on. It decides which supplier wins an order and when to reorder.
That is the shift many small importers are making, treating purchasing as a decision backed by real figures rather than a routine. Inventory and purchasing systems built for this, like Fishbowl's purchasing platform, calculate landed cost per unit and manage vendors in the same place, so a business can rank suppliers on total cost after duties and move orders when the math changes. It won't remove the tariff. It turns a moving target into a managed line item.
Why a purchasing story is really a jobs story
The effect reaches past any one storefront. Small businesses account for about 46% of U.S. employment, per Small Business Administration data cited in the same American Action Forum analysis, so pressure on importers' margins is a labor-market question as much as a trade one. And the rate keeps moving. For most of 2025, the average effective tariff rate was 14.3%, the highest since 1939, according to the Yale Budget Lab; after the Supreme Court struck down the IEEPA tariffs in February, the lab put the rate at 10.5% under a temporary surcharge. Purchasing discipline built during a tariff spike tends to stay in place after the rate eases, which is why the systems small importers adopt now may outlast the policy that prompted them.
