Current tariff rates, why nearly every major brand's supply chain touches Mexico, and why a clean USA/Mexico/Asia percentage split is harder to pin down than it sounds.
As of mid-2026, Section 301 tariffs apply broadly to HVAC equipment and components: a 10% duty on imports from countries that comply with US forced-labor import prohibitions (a group that includes Canada, Mexico, and the UK), and a steeper 12.5% duty on imports from countries that don't (a group that includes China, the EU, and Japan). There's an important carve-out, though: goods already covered by separate Section 232 tariffs on raw steel, aluminum, and copper are exempt from these newer duties — meaning a meaningful share of the sector's imports aren't newly affected by this specific round, regardless of which country they came from.
China remains a significant source for specific components even when final assembly happens elsewhere — compressors, motors, and control boards in particular — so a system that's "assembled in the USA" can still carry tariff-affected Chinese-made parts inside it.
The honest answer is more tangled than a clean percentage split by country, because of how integrated Mexico is with US manufacturing specifically. Every one of the seven largest HVAC brands sold in the US — Carrier/Bryant, Trane/American Standard, Lennox, Goodman/Daikin, Rheem/Ruud, York, and Nordyne — operates manufacturing facilities in both the US and Mexico, and by one industry estimate, roughly 90% of HVAC units shipped in the US come from companies that manufacture in Mexico as part of their production footprint — not that 90% of units are Mexican-made, but that the "domestic" brands you'd assume are 100% US-made almost all have Mexico in their supply chain somewhere, often for specific components or SKUs rather than the whole product line.
A common industry-watcher's estimate is something like: Asia-origin equipment under 10% of the residential market, Mexico-origin over 40%, leaving less than half genuinely "Made in USA." We can't independently verify precise numbers at that level of granularity — no publicly available dataset breaks down final country-of-origin share for residential HVAC equipment specifically, as opposed to components. The directional claim is plausible given how thoroughly Mexico is integrated into every major brand's supply chain, but treat the specific percentages as an informed estimate, not a sourced fact, until better data surfaces.
A single system can have a US-assembled cabinet, a Mexican-made coil, and a Chinese-made compressor and control board — all legitimately, and all before you get to where the raw copper or steel in any of those parts was smelted. "Made in USA" claims for HVAC equipment usually mean final assembly, not that every component and every ounce of metal originated domestically. That's not unique to HVAC, but it's worth knowing before you weigh a "domestic brand" premium against an import.
Tariffs are a real, ongoing input cost pressure across essentially every major brand, not something you can dodge by picking a specific "American" name off a spec sheet — the supply chains are more shared than brand marketing suggests. If a contractor tells you a specific price increase is "because of tariffs," that's plausible and worth taking at face value rather than assuming it's a markup — but it's also fair to ask which specific component or model is affected, since not everything in the tariff exemption list is actually hit by the newest round.
HVAC Referee checks your actual quote against equipment, installation, and pricing standards — including which refrigerant and efficiency tier you're being quoted.