One federal price index strips the tariff out by design — the pre-duty price a foreign supplier would have to cut to absorb the duty. After four flat years it rose 4.46% through July 2026.

A common argument for tariffs holds that foreign exporters, not American buyers, absorb them — that suppliers abroad quietly cut their invoice prices to keep the sale, eating the duty rather than passing it on. There is a federal price series that bears directly on it, and in the aggregate it points the other way. The Bureau of Labor Statistics collects its import price indexes *before* duties — the transaction price at the foreign dock, tariff excluded. That is not an oversight; it is the design. The indexes feed the Bureau of Economic Analysis's net-export line in GDP, and because BEA strips duties out of net trade, the price series that deflates it must strip them out too. The practical result: if foreign suppliers were broadly absorbing the 2026 tariffs by discounting their pre-duty prices, this is the index where that would show up as downward pressure. It rose. The nonfuel import price index — imports excluding volatile fuel — sat in a narrow band for four years: no calendar year from 2022 through 2025 moved it more than 2.5% top to bottom, and 2025's full-year spread was just 0.77% (129.8 to 130.8). Then it broke out. From 131.7 in January 2026 it climbed to 135.8 in July, up 3.11% over the six months from January to July and 4.46% over the 12 months through July (130.0 a year earlier). The all-imports index, which includes fuel, rose 5.95% over the same 12 months to 149.6. Export prices rose faster than either — 8.25%, to 165.4. And the series carries no October 2025 reading; BLS suppressed it after incomplete survey collection during that autumn's appropriations lapse, the same gap that hit the fall 2025 inflation data.

Read the whole series and one thing is clear in the aggregate: the pre-duty price of imported goods did not decline in 2026 — it accelerated after four flat years. The specific mechanism the "foreigners will pay it" claim requires — foreign suppliers cutting their dock prices to swallow the duty — does not show up in the aggregate index. Whether that means the duty landed on top of prices rather than in place of a discount is an inference the series supports but cannot prove: other forces — the dollar, global prices, demand — can lift a pre-duty index even where some suppliers are absorbing ^sspeculative. This is the value of an index almost no one reads to the footnote. The headline tariff story is measured in duties collected; this series measures the number underneath the duty — the price before the government's cut. Those are different questions, and only the second one can tell you whether the seller blinked. It does not tell you who ultimately pays. A pre-duty price that rose rather than fell cuts against broad exporter absorption; it says nothing about how the importer's higher landed cost splits between margins and the shelf.

The aggregate can hide the cases. An index nets thousands of goods together; some exporters may be cutting prices sharply while others raise them, and the average would still rise. This series cannot rule out real absorption in individual product lines ^sspeculative. These are dollar prices, and the dollar matters. A weaker dollar lifts the U.S.-dollar cost of an import even when the foreign-currency price never moves — so part of the 2026 rise may be currency, not a supplier's pricing decision ^sspeculative. That the export index rose even faster (8.25%) is a caution in the same direction: broad forces — global prices, the dollar, demand — are moving both series, so the import rise is consistent with a tariff effect but does not isolate one ^sspeculative. And the reach is bounded. The import indexes exclude some goods and are not weighted by tariff exposure, so they measure the price of imports broadly, not the price of the specific items the new duties hit hardest. The rising pre-duty number cuts against one claim — that foreign suppliers broadly discounted to eat the tariff — without settling who bears it downstream.