I counted "tariff" and "tariffs" on every earnings call held by current S&P 500 companies since January 2024: 4,952 calls from 464 companies, speaker-by-speaker transcripts, utilities left out because they use "tariff" for the rate schedules they file with regulators.
| Calls held | Calls | Mentioned tariffs | Mentions per call |
|---|---|---|---|
| Jan to Mar 2024 | 447 | 4.7% | 0.34 |
| Oct to Dec 2024 | 457 | 17.1% | 0.82 |
| Jan to Mar 2025 | 447 | 52.3% | 2.92 |
| Apr to Jun 2025 | 444 | 89.0% | 12.62 |
| Jul to Sep 2025 | 437 | 70.5% | 6.58 |
| Jan to Mar 2026 | 443 | 42.4% | 2.80 |
| Jul to Sep 2026 | 450 | 32.7% | 2.56 |
From the spring 2025 peak, mentions per call are down 79.7%. The share of calls mentioning tariffs is still about twice the late-2024 level, though, and last quarter mentions per call went up for the first time since the peak. That's where it gets interesting.
Five findings
1. What's left is mostly refunds. "Tariff refund" or "tariff refunds" was said 388 times on 72 calls from July to September 2026, against three times in all of 2025. The 82 calls where a speaker discussed tariffs and refunds in the same turn produced 927 of the quarter's 1,152 tariff mentions. The other 368 calls averaged 0.61.
2. The Supreme Court came first. Mentions of the Supreme Court alongside tariffs went from one or two calls a quarter in 2025 to 17 and then 20 calls in the first half of 2026. Refund talk followed a quarter later.
3. The peak was nearly universal. Of the 433 companies that ever mentioned tariffs in the period, 310 did so most often on their April to June 2025 call. Of the 121 that reached 20 or more mentions on one call, 36 didn't mention tariffs at all on their latest call.
4. It's now a retailer and toolmaker story. Last quarter's top calls were Dollar Tree (57 mentions, 21 of them "tariff refund"), Stanley Black & Decker (46), Williams-Sonoma (36), Masco (33) and Caterpillar (30). Financial services, real estate, energy and materials companies averaged under one mention every two calls.
5. October is quieter still. The 45 S&P 500 companies that held an October 2026 call and had one a year earlier mentioned tariffs 36 times, against 203 a year before, down 82%. McCormick went from 48 to 4, Nike from 10 to 0. General Motors went from 35 to 8, while saying it had incurred about $1.8 billion of tariff costs so far in 2026.
The traps I hit
- Utilities say "tariff" for something else. 29.4% of utility calls used the word in 2024, before trade tariffs were a theme: they mean regulated rate schedules, now including large-load tariffs for data centers. I report them separately.
- Group by when the call happened. A call held in April to June 2025 mostly reports January to March results. Fiscal-quarter grouping would smear the peak.
- One call per company per quarter. Where a call has duplicate transcripts, I keep the longest; calls under 1,500 words are dropped.
- Speech recognition misspells acronyms. The IEEPA count includes "IEPA" and the other variants the transcription produces.
- Same-turn rules for co-mentions. "Discussed tariffs and refunds" means one speaker turn contains both, so a CFO's refund aside doesn't get credited to an unrelated tariff answer half an hour later.
- Words measure attention, not exposure. A company can face big tariff costs and barely mention them.
Count it on one company
With the Equibles MCP server connected to Claude or ChatGPT, a prompt like "Using Equibles, how many times did Stanley Black & Decker say 'tariff' or 'tariffs' on each of its last eight earnings calls, and how often did it say 'refund'?" runs the same count for one stock. The same transcripts come as JSON, one record per speaker turn, from the earnings call transcript API if you'd rather count in your own code.
The full study has the charts, the sector table, all 16 calls with 20 or more mentions last quarter and the October same-company comparison: Are Companies Still Talking About Tariffs? Evidence From 4,952 S&P 500 Earnings Calls.
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