Another day, another tariff announcement from the White House. This time, it’s a 10% import tax on softwood lumber and timber.

It’ll go into effect mid-October, at the same time as the 25% tariffs President Donald Trump announced last week on kitchen cabinets, bathroom vanities, and upholstered furniture. And those will go up even more in January.

Homebuilders and home buyers will be first to feel the impact of these new tariffs.

If you go into a Home Depot or Lowe’s, you’ll see a whole lot of lumber. Greg Kuta, CEO of Westline Capital Strategies, said much of it was once Canadian pine trees.

“That's ultimately used to frame the walls, the floors, the roofs, the trusses of single family, multifamily, commercial, residential buildings,” he said.

Canadian softwood lumber is popular with homebuilders. And there’s a lot of it sitting around right now, said Chris Beard, vice president of building products research at John Burns Research and Consulting.

“There's been talk throughout this summer of what we call, like, a wall of wood,” he said. “Literally, like piles and piles and piles of Canadian lumber stacked up at U.S. distributors and dealers.”

That’s because producers and importers rushed extra inventory into the country earlier this summer to try to get ahead of tariffs Trump implemented back in August, specifically on Canadian lumber.

So even though tariffs are higher now than they were a couple months ago, lumber prices are lower — both because of that oversupply and because demand in the housing market has been weak.

But Beard said those lower prices are unlikely to last.

“This ‘wall of wood,’ if you will, is going to get drawn down. And so that will eventually probably be reflected in the prices,” he said.

About 80% of the softwood lumber the U.S. imports comes from Canada.

In a couple of weeks, it will be subject to this new 10% tariff on top of the 35% import tax that’s already in place.

“Certainly, that cost can't be eaten by just the importers,” Beard said.

Who will ultimately have to eat the increased cost is still an open question, said Rachel Brewster, a professor at Duke Law School.

“It's either going to be borne by the consumer directly and raise housing prices, or, you know, a lot of American builders are simply going to internalize those costs, and it's going to decrease their own profits. But the tariffs are a tax,” she said.

And one way or another, someone will have to pay it.