One year into the tariff era, the bill is coming due — and increasingly, consumers are the ones holding it.

KPMG released its 2026 Tariff Survey on March 30, drawing on responses from 300 C-suite leaders at U.S. organizations with more than $1 billion in annual revenue. The results, covered by WWD's Sourcing Journal, Packaging Dive, Manufacturing Dive, and Newsweek, tell a consistent story: the era of quietly absorbing tariff costs is ending.

55% of executives plan to raise prices by up to 15% within the next six months. That's not just a data point — it's a signal that shoppers who felt the first wave of tariff-driven price increases are about to feel another one, in the same stores, on the same shelves.

What Changed in a Year

KPMG has now run this survey three times — May 2025, September 2025, and February-March 2026 — creating a rare longitudinal view of how business strategy has shifted as the tariff environment matured.

The clearest trend: cost pass-through is accelerating sharply.

In May 2025, 13% of businesses reported passing on more than half of their tariff costs to customers. By March 2026, that number has climbed to 34% — more than doubling in less than a year. For retailers specifically, more than 60% of respondents said they've passed up to 50% of tariff costs downstream, while 27% — higher than most other sectors — reported passing along 51% to 100%.

"The burden of tariffs has now moved squarely onto the consumer," said Brian Higgins, KPMG's Industrial Manufacturing Leader.

The business impact isn't limited to pricing. 82% of companies report a decline in foreign sales, and 61% now also see drops in domestic sales — a double squeeze that wasn't nearly as prevalent a year ago. Sourcing costs have risen more than 25% on average.

The Reshoring Calculation

One of the survey's more striking findings involves reshoring: 26% of companies are now in formal planning or active execution stages of moving supply chain operations back to the U.S. — up from 10% just six months ago. Progress, but the numbers put the timeline in perspective: 60% of companies estimate full reshoring will take one to three years.

That means any reshoring investment happening today won't relieve tariff pressure for the current selling cycle — or likely the next two.

On employment, the survey finds some nuance. Hiring freezes and cuts eased compared to prior surveys. The share of companies hiring for specialized roles focused on managing tariff complexity rose to 33% (from 22% in September 2025). But 44% invested in automated systems with "minimal job creation" — a reminder that when companies respond to cost pressure, workers aren't always the primary beneficiary.

The Post-SCOTUS Picture

The survey was conducted in the wake of the Supreme Court's decision to invalidate IEEPA as a basis for tariffs — a ruling that many expected to provide significant relief. The KPMG data suggests relief arrived, but it arrived unevenly.

The share of executives expecting margin improvements in the next 12 months jumped to 44% post-ruling — up from just 7% in September 2025. But half of all leaders still report low confidence in executing their investment plans and strategies, signaling that legal clarity hasn't fully resolved business uncertainty.

The reality is that years of tariff-driven disruption have reshaped the cost structure of U.S. retail in ways that don't simply reverse when a court rules. Supply chain diversification costs money. Reshoring takes time. And price increases, once announced, tend to stick.

What Retailers Should Be Watching

The 55% price hike signal is particularly worth parsing. These are C-suite leaders at organizations large enough to have $1B+ in revenue — so when more than half of them say they're raising prices within six months, the downstream effect hits broadly. This isn't just one category or one channel. Clothing, footwear, home goods, electronics: the repricing is likely to be sector-wide.

SGB Media notes that the KPMG data arrives as consumer confidence is already fragile — Conference Board data from March shows inflation expectations climbing to 3.8%, their largest one-month jump since April 2025. When consumers expect prices to rise, they change behavior before prices actually do: pulling forward purchases in some categories, delaying in others, and trading down across the board.

Supply chain resilience, as KPMG's Scott Rankin put it, is "no longer optional — it's a competitive advantage." But that's cold comfort for consumers watching their grocery receipts and discretionary budgets tighten simultaneously.

The retailers who've done the hard work of diversifying sourcing, building domestic supplier relationships, and building pricing power through loyalty and differentiation will have more options in the months ahead. For those who relied on tariff absorption as a temporary strategy, the window for doing so quietly appears to be closed.