Market Data

Plastics Imports Run at a $73.32B Annual Pace: The Months That Moved the Trend

A ranked walk through the plastics-import history, converting the $6.11B monthly figure into an annualized run rate and flagging the largest month-over-month swings and what drove each.

At $6.11B a month as of May 2026, U.S. plastics imports are running at roughly a $73.32B annualized pace, according to Census International Trade data, a number that puts the category among the larger recurring material bills in American manufacturing. Across the archived history, the steepest monthly increases have coincided with jumps in resin PPI and a weaker dollar, the two forces that raise the recorded dollar value of the same physical flow.

The range, and what lives at each end

The archived window runs from $5.01B in Feb 2026 at the low end to $34.86B in Apr 2026 at the high, a span of $29.85B between the weakest and strongest months on record here. The latest reading sits 4% of the way up that low-to-high range. The pattern behind the extremes is consistent: the softest months cluster where destocking, cheap feedstocks and a firm dollar align, compressing both volume and unit values at once, while the strongest months stack a resin price rally on top of physical restocking. That double-count is worth remembering whenever a single month looks dramatic, a dollar-denominated trade series can move sharply on price alone, and the biggest single-month swings in this history owe as much to polymer markets and currency as to containers landed.

Reading month-over-month swings like an analyst

Three drivers explain nearly every large move. Price: resin PPI feeds directly into import unit values, so a feedstock shock shows up here within a month or two. Currency: plastics trade invoices in dollars, and a weaker dollar mechanically raises the recorded value of the same tonnage. Policy: announced tariff dates pull volume forward into the months before the deadline and hollow out the months after, producing a spike-and-trough signature that has nothing to do with end demand. An analyst sizing import exposure should decompose any swing into those three parts before assuming customers are buying more plastic. The current reading is up about 7.6% from a year ago, with the trend rising, the chart above shows whether that arrived as a grind or a jump, which is itself informative: grinds are usually volume, jumps are usually price or policy.

Annualized pace of U.S. plastics imports (latest month × 12): $73.32B. Built on the $6.11B reading for May 2026; the monthly series has ranged from $5.01B (Feb 2026) to $34.86B (Apr 2026).

A dollar-denominated trade series can move sharply on price alone. Decompose the swing before concluding anyone bought more plastic.

Turning the run rate into your exposure number

The run-rate arithmetic is the useful part for a CFO. Twelve times the latest month gives $73.32B a year at the current pace, the denominator for any import-exposure ratio you want to build. A company whose plastic inputs are, say, 0.01% of national plastics imports is carrying roughly $0.01B a year of import-linked material spend at today's pace; scale the fraction to your own bill of materials to size yours. The same multiplication updates automatically as the series moves, which is the point of anchoring exposure to the live number instead of a budget assumption: when the monthly print shifts, your annualized exposure shifts with it, and the variance against plan is visible the month it starts rather than at year-end review.

Use the landed cost calculator to turn a unit price, freight, and duty into the true landed cost of imported plastic material or parts. Price a landed container

Published 2026-07-13.