Market Data

Rubber Imports by Month: The Full Record, Charted, and Where $2.88B Sits

An original ranked look at the Census rubber-imports history, the biggest months, the steepest climbs, and where today's $2.88B sits against every prior peak.

The latest U.S. rubber import reading is $2.88B for May 2026, per Census International Trade, a level that sits 3% of the way up the archived low-to-high range, down about 5.7% from a year ago, and the series did not rise in the latest month. Ranked against its own history, the number is less interesting than the shape around it: where the extremes fell, and what pushed the series between them.

The record months, high and low

The archived window's floor is $2.39B, set in Feb 2026; the ceiling is $17.14B, set in Apr 2026, a spread of $14.75B between the weakest and strongest months on record here. Extremes in a dollar-denominated trade series almost always have compound causes: the biggest months stack a natural-rubber price rally (often a Southeast Asian supply scare) on top of physical restocking by tire and molded-goods makers, while the smallest months pair destocking with soft crude, which deflates the synthetic side's unit values simultaneously. Single-month outliers also happen for mundane reasons, port timing, a tariff deadline pulling shipments forward, or a large one-time industrial order, which is why analysts benchmark against three-month averages before declaring a new level. The chart above shows the full sequence; the eye finds the step-changes faster than any table.

How to benchmark your own spend against the series

The practical use of the ranked history is variance attribution. If your rubber spend rose faster than the national import line over the same window, the gap is yours to explain, mix shift, supplier margin, or contract timing, not the market's. If it rose slower, your procurement is beating the tape and the number belongs in the team's review. The mechanics: index your monthly compound spend to the same base month as the series, then compare cumulative growth. National context also sets negotiating posture. A supplier citing "unprecedented import costs" can be checked against this chart in seconds: the current reading's position in the range, 3% of the way up, either supports the claim or retires it. That is the quiet value of a public, monthly, dollar-denominated benchmark: it converts pricing conversations from anecdote to arithmetic.

U.S. rubber imports per month, May 2026: $2.88B. Archived record low $2.39B (Feb 2026); record high $17.14B (Apr 2026).

A public monthly benchmark converts pricing conversations from anecdote to arithmetic.

The annualized number, computed

At the latest pace, the national bill annualizes to $34.56B, twelve times the $2.88B monthly reading. The range does the same trick: at the archived floor the annualized pace would be $28.67B, and at the ceiling $205.71B, which brackets the realistic envelope for any exposure model built on this series. For a plant manager benchmarking a rubber budget, the ratio worth computing is your annual spend divided by the national annualized figure, a stable share means you are moving with the market; a rising share means your costs are outrunning it and the cause is internal. Recompute quarterly; the numerator is your ERP, the denominator updates on this page automatically.

Use the purchase price variance calculator to split your rubber-spend growth into price, volume, and mix, the same decomposition this article applies to the national line. Attribute your variance

Published 2026-07-13.