Market Data

Machinery Imports by the Month: Where $77.90B Sits in the Census Record

An original month-by-month look at the series' live history, peaks, troughs, and the size of the current run, built entirely from the Census record.

At $77.90B, the latest monthly reading of U.S. machinery and mechanical appliances imports, May 2026, per Census International Trade data, sits 7% of the way up the archived range and is up about 47.5% from a year ago, with the committed trend reading rising. Here is the month-by-month record behind that placement.

The archived record: low, high, and the band between

Across the archived window, the series has printed as low as $51.16B in Apr 2025 and as high as $456.40B in Apr 2026, a spread of $405.24B between the softest and heaviest months on record here. That band is the context every fresh print should be read against: a monthly trade flow this large does not move in straight lines, and single-month extremes often trace to episodic forces, tariff deadlines pulling orders forward, a cluster of high-value fab-tool entries, or a port disruption shifting arrivals between months, rather than a step-change in underlying equipment demand.

Level versus trend

Two readings can be pulled from the same chart, and they answer different questions. The level, $77.90B, standing +52.3% above the archived low, tells you how much equipment is flowing right now. The trend, currently rising, with the latest month up about 47.5% from a year ago, tells you which way the flow is leaning. For benchmarking, the percentile placement is the cleanest single number: today's reading sits at the 7th percentile of the archived low-to-high band. Analysts comparing this line against manufacturing industrial production can also separate a genuine equipment cycle from a price or currency artifact, since production is measured in volume terms while the import series is measured in dollars.

Machinery imports per month, May 2026: $77.90B. Ranged from $51.16B in Apr 2025 to $456.40B in Apr 2026 across the archived history.

The run-rate arithmetic

Annualized, the current month implies $934.77B of machinery imports a year, about $2,597 million of equipment a day. For sourcing strategists the practical use is as a denominator: a one-percent shift in the monthly flow is roughly $779 million, so month-to-month wiggles smaller than a few percent are noise at this scale. The moves worth a meeting are the ones that persist across a quarter and show up in the year-over-year comparison, which today reads up about 47.5% from a year ago.

At this scale, a one-percent wiggle is measurement noise. The moves worth a meeting are the ones that survive a quarter.

Import flows this large are tariff-sensitive. Use the tariff impact calculator to see what a duty change does to your own imported-equipment costs. Model the policy scenarios

Published 2026-07-13.