Wirecutter’s Guide to Navigating Tariffs This Holiday Season

All year, American shoppers have feared seemingly inevitable price spikes caused by President Trump’s ever-changing tariff orders.

Early on, companies scrambled to import extra goods and stockpile them stateside to keep prices relatively stable before the extra taxes took effect.

Now, those buttresses have begun to erode — just in time for the holidays.

“We’ve seen a steady march of incremental increases, with a few violent surges in price on the thousands of products we monitor at Wirecutter,” said editor Nathan Burrow.

Nathan leads Wirecutter Deals, a group of seven journalists who track prices on our product recommendations every day of the year. For the past six months, his team has put particular focus on monitoring every single price change on 40 Wirecutter picks with the intention of seeing how tariffs would affect pricing.

During our initial 60-day tracking experiment this spring, nothing much changed on the items we were watching. Some prices, particularly on car seats and mattresses, jumped around a bit. But the manufacturer’s suggested retail prices, or MSRP, were mostly steady, and many items followed their regular on-sale cycle.

As we’ve continued logging these prices, that stability across the 40-product set has pretty much continued to hold true. But beyond those 40 products, price changes are more apparent among individual products than across categories.

“From a manufacturer perspective, it’s just been a wild year. Couldn’t plan the year. Couldn’t forecast the year,” said John T. Shea, head of commerce at the marketing agency PMG. “It’s had huge implications, way more profound than you’d expect.” (While some of PMG’s clients make Wirecutter-recommended products, my conversation with Shea focused on general shopping data and overall sales figures for deal events, rather than the performance of specific brands.)

Similar to how we followed prices on Wirecutter picks, PMG tracked the selling price, year-over-year, of products in various categories, but on a much larger scale — to the tune of a few million products. PMG’s findings were surprisingly similar to ours, as things still haven’t shifted quite as significantly as one might expect.

There are a few reasons. Some companies, like Apple, successfully lobbied for a tariff exemption. Other large companies absorbed cost increases. And others raised their prices but subsequently offset those increases with deals.

So while it might not be true that everything is getting more expensive across the board, price increases are real, and we’ve observed many of them on Wirecutter picks.

Some are relatively modest. The Yoto Player, an audio device for kids that uses proprietary cards to play music and audiobooks, announced an average price increase of less than 10% on many of its products starting June 2. That typically works out to a few dollars.

Other increases are steeper. The Lenovo IdeaPad Flex 5i Chromebook Plus, for example, launched at $500 in October 2023 and stayed that way until around April 2025, when it jumped to $600. The price fluctuated around Amazon’s Prime Big Deal Days sale event, but generally tech gets cheaper as it ages, not more expensive.

If history is an indicator, price increases like these are unlikely to be reversed.

“We can assume that 99% of price hikes that have already occurred will be permanent,” said Nathan. “That doesn’t extend to additional costs in the form of actual tariff bills, but recent history, like the COVID-driven logistical-cost increases, followed by price increases, has shown us that companies rarely ever lower prices again after raising them.”

Many things are simply more expensive than they once were. But they are still potentially less expensive than they will be in the future.

So what’s a savvy shopper to do?

I consulted with Nathan and other Wirecutter experts to help you navigate this tariff-plagued holiday-shopping season. Here’s their advice.