Tariff refunds are moving through the US customs system at a scale nobody has seen before, and plenty of small importers still have no idea whether any of it is theirs. Roughly 330,000 importers paid an estimated 166 billion dollars in duties under the emergency tariff programme, spread across more than 53 million entries. The Supreme Court ruled those duties were never lawfully owed, so tariff refunds are now being paid at a rate that outran the money coming in. Getting the money back is an administrative process with rules, deadlines, and one detail decides everything: whose name sat on the customs entry.
What the court decided
On February 20, 2026 the Supreme Court held 6 to 3 in Learning Resources, Inc. v. Trump that the International Emergency Economic Powers Act does not give a president the power to impose tariffs. The reasoning was that tariffs are a form of taxation, and taxation belongs to Congress. That made every duty collected under the emergency programme, including the reciprocal tariffs applied from April 2025, invalid from the start rather than from the date of the ruling.
The Court said nothing about how refunds should work. That question went to the Court of International Trade, which in March ordered Customs and Border Protection to liquidate affected entries as though the tariffs had never applied. The Penn Wharton Budget Model’s analysis covers the fiscal size of what was collected and why the refund question was left open.
Who receives the tariff refunds
This is where most small businesses lose out. Only the importer of record named on the entry can claim from CBP, or the licensed broker who filed on their behalf. The money goes to whoever wrote the cheque to customs, not to whoever ultimately paid the cost.
Think about how a small business usually imports. If your supplier ships DDP, delivered duty paid, the supplier or their forwarder was the importer of record and the refund lands with them. If you bought from a US distributor who imported the goods, the distributor gets the refund even though the tariff was baked into your price. Retail groups have already raised the awkward version of that question, and the National Retail Federation noted that refunds go to the entities that paid the duties directly, which has prompted arguments about whether anyone further down the chain should be reimbursed.
If you were not the importer of record, CBP is not your route. Your only claim is contractual, against the party who was, and it depends entirely on what your purchase terms say about duties. That conversation is worth having now rather than after the refund has been spent.
How the tariff refunds process works
CBP built a system called CAPE, the Consolidated Administration and Processing of Entries, inside the ACE portal. Phase 1 opened on April 20, 2026 and covered most unliquidated entries. Phase 2 followed on June 29 for certain reconciliation-flagged entries. Claims are filed as a CSV upload rather than entry by entry, which is why a large importer with thousands of entries and a small one with forty use the same mechanism.
A few operational rules catch people out. Electronic refund enrolment through ACH is mandatory, because CBP is not issuing paper cheques. Post summary corrections cannot be used to request these refunds, so the older habit of correcting an entry does not work here. CBP’s own refund overview puts the expected timing at 60 to 90 days after a declaration is accepted, and refunds carry statutory interest from the date the duty was deposited.
The scale is real. In a court declaration covering activity through July 31, 2026, CBP reported more than 75,000 CAPE declarations submitted, nearly 17.7 million validated entries liquidated without the tariffs, and around 128.7 billion dollars accepted for processing. BDO maintains a running FAQ on the mechanics that is more current than most news coverage.
Six steps to chase tariff refunds
- Establish whether you were the importer of record. Pull any entry summary from your broker and look at the IOR field. If it is your name and EIN, you can claim. If it is your supplier or a forwarder, you have a supplier conversation instead of a customs filing.
- Get into the ACE portal. Small importers who leave everything to a broker often have no portal account. You need one to see your own data, and you need ACH bank details registered before a refund can be paid.
- Run the entry summary report. The ES-003 report exports to a spreadsheet. Filter the tariff column for the Chapter 99 codes beginning 9903.01 and 9903.02, which is where the emergency duties were reported, and you have your exposure in an afternoon.
- Ask your broker where your claim stands. Most brokers filed on behalf of their clients months ago. Ask which of your entries went in, which were accepted, which were rejected on validation, and what remains outstanding. A rejected claim can usually be corrected and refiled, and rejections have been common enough that nobody should assume silence means payment.
- Read your purchase contracts. If you paid tariff surcharges to a distributor or a DDP supplier, the question of who keeps the refund is answered by your terms, or by nothing at all, which is its own answer. Raise it in writing.
- Ask your accountant how the refund lands. The duties were deducted as a cost when you paid them. A refund arriving now sits in a different tax year, and the treatment is worth confirming before the money shows up.
Do not budget for a tariff-free world
The tariffs did not vanish, they changed statute. A 10 percent global surcharge was imposed under Section 122 of the Trade Act of 1974 in late February. The Court of International Trade found that unlawful on May 7, though it limited relief to the plaintiffs before it, and the surcharge then expired by operation of law at its 150 day statutory limit in July without a congressional extension. Meanwhile two Section 301 investigations covering dozens of tariff determinations have been running, alongside Section 232 actions. Section 301 tariffs carry no expiry date and rest on much firmer legal ground, as Greenberg Traurig’s trade update sets out. Treat tariff refunds as recovered working capital, not as a signal that import costs are going back to 2024 levels.
Tariff refunds FAQ
Can I claim if my supplier was the importer of record?
Not from CBP. The refund is paid to the importer of record or the broker who filed for them. Your route is a commercial claim against that party, governed by your contract terms.
Do I have to file anything, or is it automatic?
A CAPE declaration has to be submitted by you or your broker. Filing it does not speed up liquidation, and the refund follows once the entry liquidates or reliquidates without the tariffs.
Do tariff refunds include interest?
Yes. Statutory interest runs from the date the duty was deposited to the date of the refund, which matters when the deposit was made more than a year ago.