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Why Furniture Costs More in 2026 — And How to Beat the Price Hike
If you have been shopping for a sofa, an outdoor lounge set, or really anything for your home in the past few months and walked away with a vague sense that prices were higher than you expected, you are not imagining it.
Furniture prices in the United States rose 4.6 percent year over year by the end of 2025, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, outpacing overall inflation which came in at 2.7 percent during the same period. That gap matters. It means furniture is getting more expensive faster than almost everything else you buy, and there are specific, structural reasons for it that most retailers are not advertising.
This piece breaks down exactly what is driving the increases, which furniture categories are affected, and what it actually means for people who are trying to buy well without overpaying in 2026.
The Tariff Story Nobody Is Explaining Clearly
In October 2025, the White House imposed a 25 percent tariff on imported upholstered furniture — sofas, sectionals, chairs, ottomans — along with kitchen cabinets and vanities. The tariffs were framed as a national security measure under Section 232, targeting imports from Vietnam and China, which together account for the vast majority of upholstered furniture sold in the United States.
To put numbers to that: the US imported $6.4 billion worth of upholstered furniture in 2024 alone. Vietnam supplied about $3.1 billion of it, China around $1.75 billion. These are not niche supply chains. This is where most of the sofas sold in American living rooms come from, including the ones sold under premium brand names at showroom prices.
The original plan was to escalate those tariffs further. Upholstered furniture was set to go from 25 to 30 percent on January 1, 2026. Kitchen cabinets were set to double to 50 percent. In the final days of December 2025, the White House delayed those increases until at least January 2027, keeping everything at the current 25 percent while trade negotiations continue.
That delay was widely reported as good news. And in a narrow sense it is — things could have gotten worse, and they did not. But here is what the headlines glossed over: the 25 percent tariff is already in place, it is already being passed to consumers, and furniture prices are already meaningfully higher than they were a year ago.
The delay just means the next wave has been postponed. The current wave is already here.
Who Actually Pays for Tariffs
There is a persistent misconception that tariffs are paid by foreign exporters or importing companies and that American consumers are somehow insulated. They are not.
When a retailer imports a container of sofas from Vietnam and pays 25 percent duty on arrival, that cost lands on their balance sheet. To maintain margin, they raise retail prices. It is not complicated. The tariff functions as a cost that travels through the supply chain and arrives, eventually, at the price tag you see in the showroom or on the website.
Research published in 2025 found that prices for imported goods rose approximately 5.4 percent between March and September of that year, almost entirely attributable to tariff effects. And within furniture specifically, the impact was not evenly distributed. The cheapest product categories — the sofas and chairs that lower and middle income households buy — saw the highest percentage increases. Roughly 5 percent on average, about double the rate for premium products.
This is one of the more uncomfortable facts about import tariffs: they are regressive. A family buying a $400 sofa from a mass retailer feels the price increase more acutely than a family buying a $2,000 sofa from a boutique. The dollar amount is smaller but the percentage hit is larger, and for people managing tight budgets, it is not abstract.
Major retailers have already adjusted. Lazy Boy, Wayfair, Lovesac, Arhaus, and RH's parent company have all had to rethink sourcing and pricing in response to the initial tariffs. Some have diversified away from Vietnam and China. Some have raised prices. Most have done both.
What Is Actually Affected in 2026
Not all furniture carries the same tariff exposure, and this is worth understanding before you start shopping.
Upholstered wooden furniture — the category that covers most sofas, sectionals, and upholstered chairs — carries the 25 percent tariff. This is the broadest and most consumer-visible category.
Solid wood furniture, including dining tables, bed frames, coffee tables, bookshelves, and desks, is generally not included in the current 25 percent duty structure, though it may still be affected by broader supply chain cost pressures including lumber tariffs that came into effect at 10 percent in October 2025.
Outdoor furniture including rattan sets, aluminium frames, and garden loungers sits in a different classification and faces different or lower duties depending on country of origin and material composition. This is relevant for anyone considering outdoor pieces as part of a home refresh.
Lighting and decorative accessories are largely outside the scope of the current tariff structure.
The practical upshot: if you are buying an upholstered sofa or sectional from a major retailer that sources from Vietnam or China, you are almost certainly paying more than you would have in 2024. If you are buying a solid wood dining table, a rattan outdoor set, or lighting, the picture is more nuanced.
Why Showrooms Pass the Full Cost and Direct Brands Can Absorb More
This is the part of the story that gets the least attention, and it is where the practical money is for buyers.
A traditional furniture retailer operates through a supply chain with multiple intermediary layers. The manufacturer produces the piece. It is sold to an importer or wholesaler. The wholesaler sells to a regional distributor. The distributor supplies the retailer. The retailer marks up for showroom costs including lease, staff, display, and marketing, and then sells to you.
Each layer adds margin. Each layer also passes tariff costs forward, and often amplifies them, because the duty is applied early in the chain and each subsequent margin calculation builds on top of it.
A direct-to-consumer brand with fewer layers between the source and the buyer has structurally more room to absorb cost increases without raising retail prices proportionally. The supply chain is leaner. The showroom does not exist. The markup layers are compressed. When a 25 percent tariff hits the cost of a sofa, the absolute dollar impact is the same, but the percentage it represents of the retail price is lower, because the retail price starts lower.
This is not a minor difference in the current environment. It is the difference between a sofa that costs $699 in 2025 and the same quality sofa that costs $899 at a showroom in 2026, where the retailer has passed through the tariff and maintained their original margin on top.
The Showroom Markup Was Always There — The Tariff Just Made It More Visible
Here is something that has always been true and that the current pricing environment is making harder to ignore: a significant portion of what you pay at a furniture showroom has nothing to do with the furniture.
You are paying for the building lease in a high-traffic retail zone. You are paying for the staff who greet you and follow you through the floor. You are paying for the display models that cannot be purchased. You are paying for the catalogues, the lifestyle photography, the brand advertising. You are paying for the regional distribution network that gets product from the port to the warehouse to the truck to the delivery crew.
None of that makes the sofa better. It makes the retail experience possible, and there is a market for that experience. But for buyers who are primarily focused on what sits in their living room rather than the environment in which it was purchased, those costs represent money spent on something they neither need nor particularly value.
The tariff situation has effectively forced a comparison. When showroom prices rise 4 to 5 percent in a year and direct prices rise less or hold steady, the gap becomes explicit in a way that vague talk of value and service cannot fully close.
The Design Trends That Make 2026 a Good Year to Buy — If You Buy Smart
There is a case to be made that 2026 is actually a strong year to invest in quality home pieces, provided you approach it correctly.
Interior design in 2026 is moving emphatically away from the cold, sterile minimalism that defined the mid-2010s and toward what designers are calling curated warmth, spaces that feel intentional, lived-in, and built to last rather than staged for a photograph.
The color palette reflects this. Rich earth tones, deep chocolate browns, warm terracottas, and creamy ivories are replacing the grey-and-white schemes that dominated the last decade. Texture is becoming a primary design tool rather than an afterthought. Linen, rattan, velvet, and natural wood are all trending not just aesthetically but functionally, as materials that age well and improve with use.
Rattan in particular is having a sustained moment. After years of occasional appearances in trend reports, it has settled into something more durable, a material that photographs beautifully, holds up outdoors, is lightweight enough to be moved and rearranged, and reads as premium at a price point that is significantly lower than comparable wooden or metal furniture.
Modular outdoor seating is trending alongside it. The shift toward treating outdoor spaces as genuine extensions of the living room, complete furniture, considered layout, intentional lighting has accelerated since 2020 and shows no sign of reversing. Americans are spending more time at home, spending more on the spaces where they spend that time, and increasingly viewing their terrace or garden as part of the home rather than an afterthought.
All of this creates a useful window. The pieces that are trending in 2026, rattan, warm upholstery, modular outdoor sets, sit in the product categories where direct pricing is most advantageous relative to showroom retail. The tariff exposure on these categories is either moderate or structured differently than upholstered indoor sofas. And the pieces themselves are designed to last, meaning the return on investment over a five or ten year horizon is genuinely strong.
How to Actually Navigate Furniture Buying in 2026
Given everything above, here is what practical furniture buying looks like in 2026.
Understand what you are actually paying for. Before you buy anything, ask yourself how much of the price reflects the furniture and how much reflects the retail infrastructure around it. Showroom prices carry overhead that direct-to-consumer prices do not. That overhead is real and not without value, but if you are buying online anyway, you are receiving none of the showroom experience that justified the markup.
Know which categories are tariff-affected. Upholstered indoor sofas and sectionals are the most exposed. Solid wood pieces, outdoor rattan, and lighting face different or lower duties. If you have flexibility in what you buy and when, this matters.
Buy direct where the category allows it. The structural advantage of direct pricing is largest in exactly the categories most affected by tariffs. This is not a coincidence. It is the result of supply chain efficiency that exists independent of the tariff situation and simply becomes more visible when retail prices rise.
Do not wait for prices to fall. The 25 percent tariff is in place through at least 2027. The higher increases were delayed, not cancelled. Trade negotiations are ongoing but their outcome is genuinely uncertain. Buying now at current direct prices is likely to be better than buying later at potentially higher prices, for the same product, regardless of what happens politically.
Think in years, not months. A well-made outdoor rattan set that costs $700 today and lasts ten years costs $70 per year. A cheaper alternative that degrades in three years and needs replacement costs more over the same period. In an environment where prices are structurally rising, buying quality once is the most cost-effective approach.
A Final Note on What This Means for Your Home
The tariff conversation is ultimately just a specific, visible version of a more general truth: the traditional furniture retail model is expensive to operate, and those operating costs have always been passed to consumers. Tariffs have not created that dynamic. They have amplified it and made the gap between showroom and direct pricing harder to ignore.
The good news is that 2026 is a year where the aesthetics align with the economics. The pieces that look best warm, textured, natural, designed to age well — are largely available through direct channels at prices that reflect actual manufacturing and delivery costs rather than the full weight of a retail infrastructure built for a pre-internet shopping world.
Your home deserves quality furniture. The question is whether you pay for the furniture or for the building it was displayed in.
At Sfeerco, every piece ships free to your door, with a 30-day return window and no showroom markup built into the price. Browse the Sfeerco outdoor collection or the Maison sofa collection and find what your space deserves.