Rubber Imports by Month: The Full Record, Charted, and Where $2.92B/month Sits

The latest U.S. rubber import customs value is $2.92B/month for Aug 2026, per Census International Trade, a level that sits 46% of the way up the archived low-to-high range, down about 2.8% from a year ago, and the series rose in the latest month. The history shows when the nominal total was high or low; it does not identify what pushed the series between those observations.

The record months, high and low

The floor across the five-year archive is $2.37B, set in Feb 2023; the ceiling is $3.55B, set in May 2021, a spread of $1.18B between the smallest and largest monthly customs values in this archive. Price, quantity, mix, origin and entry timing can all contribute to an extreme. A tariff date, port event or supply shock may be a hypothesis, but the chart does not prove any of them or show physical restocking. Three-month averages can reduce timing noise; attribution still requires classification-level quantity and unit-value data plus an appropriate event comparison.

How to benchmark your own spend against the series

The ranked history can provide national context, but it cannot attribute a plant's variance. A plant's compound spend and the national customs-value basket differ in grades, quantities, origins, freight, contracts and mix. Indexing both to a common base can expose a divergence worth investigating; it cannot assign the gap to supplier margin or prove procurement outperformance. Likewise, the current reading's 46% position in the range neither validates nor retires a supplier's cost claim. Reconcile the supplier's actual index, quantity, freight and contract terms before drawing that conclusion.

U.S. rubber imports per month, Aug 2026: $2.92B/month. Archived record low $2.37B (Feb 2023); record high $3.55B (May 2021).

A public monthly benchmark supplies context. Like-for-like price, quantity and contract evidence supplies attribution.

The annualized number, computed

At the latest pace, the national customs-value total annualizes to $35.04B, twelve times the $2.92B/month monthly reading. Repeating that arithmetic at the archived floor gives $28.50B, and at the ceiling $42.65B; those are historical-dollar scenarios, not a forecast envelope. A plant's annual spend divided by the national total is meaningful only if scope and valuation are aligned. A stable or rising ratio does not identify price, physical usage, procurement performance or an internal cause; use purchase-price-variance analysis on the plant's own records for that decomposition.

Use the purchase price variance calculator to split your own rubber-spend growth into price, quantity, and mix; the national customs-value line cannot supply that decomposition. Attribute your variance