Market Data

What Machinery Imports Measure: Inside the $77.90B-a-Month Census Series

A plain-English guide to the largest capital-goods line in U.S. trade data, what HS Chapter 84 covers, how Census counts it, and what pushes the number up or down.

Machinery and Mechanical Appliances Imports track the customs value of U.S. imports under Harmonized System Chapter 84, engines, pumps, machine tools, industrial and computing equipment, and currently run $77.90B per month as of May 2026, per Census International Trade data, up about 47.5% from a year ago. It is the single largest capital-goods line in the U.S. trade accounts, and right now the trend reads as rising.

What Chapter 84 actually covers

Chapter 84 is the tariff schedule's catch-all for things that do mechanical work. It spans engines and turbines, pumps and compressors, air-handling and refrigeration equipment, machine tools for cutting and forming metal, semiconductor-fabrication equipment, construction and agricultural machinery, industrial ovens, and, less intuitively, computers, which the schedule classifies as automatic data processing machines. What it does not include matters just as much: electric motors, transformers, switchgear, and semiconductors themselves sit in Chapter 85; vehicles are in Chapter 87; and precision instruments live in Chapter 90. When a procurement lead reads that machinery imports hit $77.90B in a month, the figure is the mechanical-equipment slice of the import bill, not the whole capital-goods story.

How Census counts it

The series is a customs value: the price of the goods themselves as appraised at the border, before international freight, insurance, and duty are added. That makes it a clean read on underlying equipment demand, but it also means the number understates what buyers actually pay to land a machine on the plant floor, ocean freight, duty, inland haulage, and rigging all stack on top. Census compiles the figure monthly from customs filings covering every entry, so it is a full census of trade rather than a survey estimate, published with roughly a five-week lag.

U.S. machinery imports per month, May 2026: $77.90B. The archived history ranges from $51.16B in Apr 2025 to $456.40B in Apr 2026.

What pushes the number up or down

Three forces dominate. First, the capital-spending cycle: when manufacturers, data-center builders, and chipmakers commit to new capacity, the equipment arrives through this line months before it produces anything. Second, prices: the series is measured in dollars, so machinery inflation can lift the number even when unit volumes are flat, comparing it against the producer price index for machinery separates price from volume. Third, trade policy: announced tariffs reliably pull orders forward as buyers race the effective date, producing surges that later unwind. A single month is noisy for all three reasons; the direction over several months, currently rising, is the signal worth reading.

The trade line is a customs value, by the time a machine reaches your dock, freight, duty, and rigging have already made the real bill bigger.

The scale, annualized

At the current pace, a month of Chapter 84 arrivals annualizes to $934.77B of imported machinery a year, roughly $2,597 million of equipment crossing the border every day. Even a one-percent move in the monthly figure shifts about $779 million of trade flow, which is why the series moves markets for machine-tool builders, freight forwarders, and the ports that handle it.

The customs value is only the start. Put purchase price, freight, duty, and handling into the landed cost calculator to see what an imported machine really costs at your dock. Price the whole landed cost

Published 2026-07-13.