Tool Prices After the July 24 Tariff Swap: Stanley Holds, Festool Up 7.7%, Grizzly Cuts
Tool Prices After the July 24 Tariff Swap: Stanley Holds, Festool Up 7.7%, Grizzly Cuts - A step into the workshop.
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The August Deadline You Were Told to Beat Does Not Exist
August in the Puget Sound basin means damp mornings, a shop door I can leave open, and the stretch of the year when I lay out equipment purchases for the back half. This year the planning got noisy. The advice circulating in woodworking corners of the internet all summer has been some version of buy it now, before the August tariff lands. It rests on a date that is not real.
Power Tools Insider, the outlet the claim appears to trace back to, has retracted it. Its page now states plainly that "there is no additional tariff event scheduled for August 1, 2026," and that it has "not found a credible, sourced confirmation of a second SBD price increase tied to the July tariff change," with the "7-9% August increase" figure tracing back to older, unrelated reporting. Clever Dude's July 7 article by Brandon Marcus, still pushing the August date, cites no manufacturer statement, no percentage and no tariff document. It is affiliate content, and the source it leans on now contradicts it.
The price event already happened, on July 24. Anything you buy this month is being sold under the new regime, not ahead of it.
What Actually Changed at 12:01 a.m. on July 24
Two things happened in the same minute, and the swap is what lets you read a price tag.
The 10% global surcharge expired. Per Skadden, Proclamation 11012 imposed it under Section 122 of the Trade Act of 1974 effective February 24, 2026, filling the hole left when the Supreme Court struck down the IEEPA tariffs on February 20 in Learning Resources v. Trump and Trump v. V.O.S. Selections. Section 122 caps itself at 150 days, which set expiry at July 24.
Section 301 forced-labor tariffs took over at that same moment. Per Clark Hill, the USTR action took effect at 12:01 a.m. Eastern across 60 economies found to have failed to impose or effectively enforce bans on goods made with forced labor. Clark Hill lays out the tiers: 10% flat for 17 economies including Canada, Mexico, India and the United Kingdom, and 12.5% flat for everyone else investigated, which per Global Trade Alert includes China, Vietnam, Brazil and Russia. The EU and Taiwan are capped at 10% net of MFN duty.
One provision matters more than the headline rates. Clark Hill and Thompson Hine both report that goods already subject to Section 232 tariffs are excluded from these Section 301 duties, so an imported tool pays one or the other, never both. Section 232 itself got heavier this spring: BDO reports a proclamation effective April 6 under which duties on steel, aluminum and copper articles and their covered derivatives apply to the entire customs value of the product rather than to metal content alone, at a headline 25%. I read the White House's Annex III, the temporary reduction list running to the end of 2027, looking for relief at our end of the trade. There is none: its only Chapter 82 entries are metal-forming dies, nothing for saw blades, hand tools, woodworking machine tools or power hand tools. Whether those categories fall under Section 232 at all sits in annexes I could not obtain, so I will not tell you they do.
Stanley Black & Decker's Ledger Says Hold, Not Hike
Power Tools Insider puts the single confirmed 2026 increase at +4% in Q1, on DeWalt 20V MAX, FLEXVOLT and Craftsman V20 lines. Separately, the Q1 earnings summary carried by Yahoo Finance from the April 29 call reports pricing actions contributing a 4% benefit to organic revenue against a 5% volume decline. Those are two different measurements, and stacking them would be wrong: a revenue contribution that largely reflects 2025's increases annualising is not a fresh sticker jump.
The Q2 call on July 29 settles it. In The Motley Fool's transcript, CFO Patrick Hallinan describes Tools & Outdoor organic revenue as reflecting flat pricing versus the prior year, with no list price increases taken in 2026 at all. Asked about direction, he said the company does not "have kind of an intention to do that on the downside," meaning it is holding list and working promotions instead. On the next move: "it appears more likely than not a price increase will be necessary by 2027."
The margin recovery came from elsewhere. Adjusted gross margin reached 33.7%, up 620 basis points year over year, and the company booked tariff refunds worth roughly $0.17 in EPS, about 250 basis points of that margin. Compare Manufacturing Dive's reporting on 2025, when SBD raised US retail prices by high single digits in April against a forecast $800 million gross tariff impact. The 2025 playbook was price. The 2026 playbook was refunds, productivity and cost work.
That refund money is worth understanding. Forbes, reporting on April 29, puts what Americans are owed after the Supreme Court ruling at $166 billion, and is equally explicit that only importers of record can claim it. Goldman Sachs economists have said companies "should not be expected to lower prices in response to tariff reductions nearly as quickly as they increased them in response to tariff increases." SBD is that sentence in one company: refunds booked, list prices flat. Not raised, not cut.
Festool Published Its Numbers, and They Give Up a Hidden 6%
Festool USA is the only major brand here that put a line-item list on the table. Its own document, "Festool price increase (US) – January 1, 2026," covers 449 items with old and new US retail prices. All 449 went up. None fell, none held. The median increase is 1.10%, and the full basket moved from $72,960.86 to $74,132.00, up 1.61%. Only 11 items rose more than 5%, while 205 rose 1% or less.
The revealing part is the old column. Every one of the 449 previous prices is a whole-dollar figure multiplied by exactly 1.06, no exceptions, and only one of them was itself a round dollar. Every new price is. That is the fingerprint of the import fee Festool announced in 2025 and never quantified. ToolGuyd reported on July 23, 2025 that Festool told customers it "expect[ed] to apply import fees" from August 1, citing increased international trade costs, without naming a percentage. The January list gives up the number. It was 6%, and January 1 folded that surcharge permanently into list price, rounded up to the dollar.
Measured against the pre-fee base, the current list is up a median 7.2% and a weighted 7.7%, the basket going from $68,831 to $74,132. That is the honest figure for Festool's tariff era: about 7.7% in two steps since mid-2025, not a fresh 2026 shock.
| Tool | Base | With 6% fee | Jan 1, 2026 |
|---|---|---|---|
| Domino DF 500 Q-Set US | $1,279 | $1,355.74 | $1,359.00 |
| Orbital sander RTS 400 REQ-Plus US | $315 | $333.90 | $349.00 |
The January step was regressive by price band, and the rounding is why. Items under $100 rose a median 1.1%; the seven items over $1,000 rose a median 0.2%. Rounding a $6.36 guard ring to $7.00 is 10.1%, while rounding a $1,058.94 plunge-cut saw to $1,059.00 costs six cents. Cordless tools took the largest category hit at a median 4.16%, and the steepest line was the RG 130 diamond grinder, $793.94 to $899.00, up 13.2%. One correction while we are here: forum discussion has the RTS 400 landing near $423, and Festool's own document shows $349.00.
Two Brands With No Announced 2026 Increase, for Very Different Reasons
Techtronic Industries, parent of Milwaukee and Ryobi, posted first-half 2026 results on August 4. Per the PR Newswire release carried by The Manila Times, gross margin ran 42.9%, up 258 basis points, with Milwaukee up 10.5% in local currency. TTI credits that expansion to "optimizing production, productivity gains, and supplier partnerships" and discloses no 2026 pricing action. I could not verify one elsewhere. That is an absence of evidence rather than a promise, but nobody has given you a documented reason to hurry.
Grizzly went the other way. ToolGuyd reported on December 29, 2025 that Grizzly announced price reductions across its 2026 catalog, with founder and CEO Shiraz Balolia saying he "cut prices to the bone for 2026" and attributing them to substantial inventory acquired at pre-tariff prices. ToolGuyd called the move extremely surprising and noted, usefully, that the cuts did not appear to touch the specific equipment its author was weighing. No model numbers or old-versus-new prices were published, so check your model by hand before counting on a discount.
The mechanism is sound, and it tells you how long the window stays open. Goods imported before a duty took effect carry their old landed cost forever, so a company sitting on deep pre-tariff inventory can undercut competitors restocking at 10% or 12.5% until that inventory runs out, and not a day past.
What I Would Actually Do This Month
Buy Grizzly if a Grizzly machine was already on the list, and verify the price on your specific model rather than a catalog headline, because that inventory advantage has a finite bottom. Do not rush DeWalt or Craftsman: the increase you were warned about happened in Q1, and the next one is signalled for 2027. Treat Milwaukee and Ryobi the same way, on thinner evidence.
I have come to believe the more durable habit is treating country of origin as a spec line, the way we already treat species and moisture content. Taiwan at 10% net of MFN against China at 12.5% is a narrow gap, but it is the first time in a while that where a machine was built shows up legibly in what it costs, and it will move again. On the used market I have no data worth publishing, and I am not going to tell you it beats new when I cannot put a number behind it.