A home builder's tariff bill: $10,900 a house, and sawmill jobs at a decade low

Framing lumber moves through three ledgers before it becomes a wall stud.▸ Commerce sets a duty rate. A builder pays a marked-up price for the board. And somewhere upstream, a sawmill either keeps its saws running or doesn't. Fourteen months of tariff and labor data now cover all three.

Canada supplies roughly a quarter of the softwood lumber the U.S. builds with, and it arrives carrying two layers of duty.▸ The first is antidumping and countervailing duty (AD/CVD), which the U.S. Department of Commerce reviews annually under a case that dates to 2017. The current cash-deposit rate — what importers actually pay at the border right now — is a combined 35.16% (20.53% antidumping plus 14.63% countervailing, the "all-others" rate). On top of that sits a second, separate charge: a 10% global tariff on softwood timber and lumber imposed under Section 232 of the Trade Expansion Act, which Global Affairs Canada's own tracking of the dispute confirms took effect at 12:01am EST on October 14, 2025. Stacked together, that's a 45.16% tax on the price of Canadian lumber crossing the border today.

On April 9, 2026, Commerce released the preliminary results of its seventh administrative review, covering lumber imported in calendar year 2024, and it points lower: a combined AD/CVD rate of 24.83% (10.66% antidumping, 14.17% countervailing).▸ Added to the unchanged 10% Section 232 tariff, that would bring the total to 34.83%. NAHB's own trade-policy desk confirms the change but flags the catch: preliminary results aren't final. Commerce has up to 120 days — into late August 2026, or October if extended — before the lower rate actually replaces the 35.16% cash deposit builders are paying against today.

That rate doesn't stay at the border.▸ It shows up in what a builder pays for lumber, and builders have been asked directly what that costs. In its April 2025 Housing Market Index release, produced jointly with Wells Fargo, the National Association of Home Builders reported that 60% of surveyed builders said suppliers had already raised or announced increases to material prices because of tariffs — an average increase of 6.3% — and that builders put the typical added cost from recent tariff actions at $10,900 per home. That figure covers the full tariff slate builders were facing that spring, not softwood lumber alone, but lumber framing is one of the largest single material lines in a stick-built house and one of the few tariff lines that has stayed elevated continuously since 2017.

The other side of the ledger is who cuts the board.▸ BLS Current Employment Statistics tracks U.S. payroll employment in sawmills and wood preservation (NAICS 3211) every month, seasonally adjusted. Pulled directly from BLS's public data API, the series shows employment holding in the low-90,000s through the pandemic recovery and into 2024 — then sliding after the Section 232 lumber tariff took effect in October 2025, to a May 2026 reading of 81,800 jobs, preliminary. That's below even the 84,400-job trough of April 2020, when sawmill output was hit by pandemic shutdowns — making it the lowest reading anywhere in this series back to at least January 2017.

The tariffs were pitched, in part, as protection for the same domestic mills the duties are meant to shield from underpriced Canadian lumber.▸ The employment series doesn't show that protection showing up as jobs. It shows a mill workforce smaller than it has been at any point BLS has on record for this window — including the pandemic floor.

The $10,900 figure is a builder-surveyed estimate covering all 2025 tariff actions, not softwood lumber duties in isolation; the employment decline correlates with, but this piece does not claim is proven to be caused solely by, the Section 232 lumber tariff — mill employment is also affected by housing starts, mechanization, and wildfire-driven timber supply, among other factors.