Tariff and duty refunds

The 2025 tariffs are coming back, with interest

On February 20, 2026 the Supreme Court held that IEEPA, the emergency statute behind the 2025 reciprocal and fentanyl tariffs, does not authorize tariffs at all. CBP stopped collecting them four days later and opened a refund pipeline called CAPE inside ACE that April. By mid-2026 it had accepted claims worth over a hundred billion dollars and repaid most of them, with statutory interest on top under 19 USC 1505(c).

Two things about CAPE decide everything else. Only the importer of record or the licensed customs broker who filed the original entries can file, and the refund goes to the importer of record. A declaration is a list of entry numbers, up to 9,999 per filing, so the work is mostly knowing which entries qualify and getting the list right.

If you imported anything between April 2025 and February 2026 and paid those duties, this applies to you. It does not require having sued anybody.

Which door your refund goes through

The 2025 IEEPA duties go through CAPE. Nothing else does: Section 301 China duties, Section 232 steel and aluminum, and antidumping duties are all outside it, and an entry with an open protest or drawback claim on it needs untangling first.

Everything else has its own door, and the door depends on where your entry is in its life. An entry that has not liquidated yet can be fixed with a post-summary correction, which is available up to 300 days after entry and no later than 15 days before scheduled liquidation. An entry that liquidated within the last 180 days can be protested under 19 USC 1514. Goods you imported, paid duty on, and then exported or destroyed can earn back 99 percent of the duties, taxes and fees through duty drawback under 19 USC 1313, and a first drawback claim can reach back five years.

A Section 301 exclusion you were entitled to but did not claim at entry is recovered the same way: post-summary correction before liquidation, protest within 180 days after. Which of these fits is exactly the ten-minute conversation to have before anyone signs anything.

The two fees under every entry, and where they moved

Two federal fees ride on almost every ocean import and neither one is a tariff. The merchandise processing fee is 0.3464 percent of entered value. That rate has not moved since October 1, 2011, when the Trade Adjustment Assistance Extension Act raised it from 0.21 percent. What moves is the floor and the ceiling. They sat at 25 and 485 dollars for years, then started an annual inflation adjustment under the FAST Act: 29.66 and 575.35 for fiscal 2023, 31.67 and 614.35 for 2024, 32.71 and 634.62 for 2025, 33.58 and 651.50 for 2026. On October 1, 2026 they become 34.58 and 670.86 under CBP Decision 26-14, published at 91 FR 48398.

The harbor maintenance fee is the other one: 0.125 percent of value, ocean only. It has not changed since 1987, it is not adjusted for inflation, and it is not charged on exports, because the Supreme Court struck that half of it down in United States v. United States Shoe in 1998.

Put numbers on it. A container with 150,000 dollars of entered value carries 519.60 in merchandise processing fee and 187.50 in harbor maintenance fee, about 707 dollars before a single tariff is counted. The ceiling starts to bite above roughly 188,000 dollars of entered value today and roughly 193,700 from October, so on a high-value container the fee is effectively a flat 651.50, soon 670.86. Both of these are refundable in circumstances most importers never look into, which is the next two sections.

Ten years of tariff layers, in the order they landed

Nothing about the current mess started in 2025. Section 301 arrived in 2018: lists 1 and 2 at 25 percent, list 3 at 10 percent from September 23, 2018 and then 25 percent from May 10, 2019, list 4A at 7.5 percent. Those rates are still running today. The statutory four-year review closed in September 2024 with increases across 382 product categories, electric vehicles, batteries, solar cells, semiconductors, ship-to-shore cranes, syringes, critical minerals, staged through 2025 and 2026 and reaching 100 percent on some lines.

Section 232 arrived the same year, 25 percent on steel and 10 percent on aluminum, and it has only grown. Derivative product codes were added in 2020. In February 2025 both metals went to 25 percent, in June 2025 both went to 50 percent, copper joined at 50 percent in August 2025, and the first inclusions process that same month pulled in more than 400 additional product codes. In April 2026 the calculation itself changed, from the metal content of a product to its full value on many lines.

The de minimis exemption is the change most small importers felt hardest. Shipments under 800 dollars entered duty-free for years. That ended for China and Hong Kong in May 2025 and for every country on August 29, 2025 under Executive Order 14324, and the suspension was made indefinite in June 2026. If you are filing formal entries now on freight that used to arrive duty-free, that is why, and the merchandise processing fee minimum in the section above is the number you are meeting on every small entry.

What is refundable, and what never is

Duty drawback is governed by 19 CFR 190.3, and it is more generous than most importers assume. What is subject to drawback: ordinary customs duties, marking duties under section 304(c), internal revenue taxes that attach on importation, the merchandise processing fee under 19 CFR 24.23, and the harbor maintenance tax under 19 CFR 24.24. Yes, both of the fees in the section above. Most of the drawback content published in this market never mentions them.

What is not: antidumping and countervailing duties, flatly, and over-quota agricultural duties with narrow exceptions. Section 301 duties are drawback-eligible and CBP said so in CSMS 18-000419. Section 232 duties are not, because every Section 232 proclamation carries its own express no-drawback clause, starting with Proclamations 9739 and 9740. That distinction is worth real money on a mixed entry and it is the one people most often get backwards.

So the same container can hold three kinds of charge with three different fates: a Section 301 duty you can drawback, a Section 232 duty you cannot, and a merchandise processing fee you probably did not know was on the table. Which is why the useful question is never "can I get a refund", it is "which line on my 7501 are we talking about".

The deadlines that decide it

The protest clock is the unforgiving one: 180 days from liquidation, jurisdictional, and day 181 is simply too late. The drawback window is five years from importation. CAPE has announced no filing deadline, but waiting on a government refund window that has no stated closing date is not a plan.

For IEEPA entries that finished liquidating long ago, the courts set protective filing deadlines: February 4, 2027 for the fentanyl-order tariffs and April 5, 2027 for the reciprocal tariffs. How CBP will treat older entries for importers who never sued was still being worked out in court in mid-2026, which is a reason to talk to a broker now rather than after the dust settles.

Where this money actually gets lost

Waiting to be told. No one calls you when an entry becomes refundable, and no one calls you when it liquidates. CBP posts liquidation to the ACE portal and that is the whole notification. Most entries liquidate within about ten months of entry, and the statute deems them liquidated at a year if CBP has not acted, so an importer who checks once a quarter is checking too rarely. The fix is a standing entry list from whoever filed for you, with liquidation dates on it.

Counting money that belongs to someone else. The refund goes to the importer of record, full stop. If you bought on delivered terms, or a forwarder acted as importer of record on your behalf, the entry is not yours and neither is the refund. Look at the importer of record number on the CBP Form 7501 before you plan around the cash. This is the single most common surprise in the CAPE process.

The harder case is an entry that already has something on it. A post-summary correction filed, an open protest, a drawback claim designating it. These do not stack cleanly and the sequence matters, because a protest denies what a correction could have fixed and a designated entry may not be available twice. That is a broker conversation before anything is filed, not after.

Then records. Drawback is a documentation exercise, not a legal argument: proof of export, the trace from the import line to the exported article, and inventory records that survive five years under 19 USC 1508. Importers who never intended to claim drawback rarely kept that trail, which is how a genuinely eligible five-year lookback shrinks to whatever the last eighteen months of files can prove. If you export anything at all, start keeping the trail now, before you know whether you will claim.

What refund companies charge, and what filing should cost

A wave of refund-recovery firms is charging 15 to 25 percent of the refund, on contingency, for IEEPA claims. For a claim that is genuinely complicated that can be fair. For a straightforward one it is a very expensive CSV file: brokers file CAPE declarations for flat fees in the hundreds to low thousands of dollars, or a small per-entry charge, and the refund lands with you either way because CBP pays the importer of record.

Our advice costs nothing: the broker who filed your entries already has the entry data, which is why a straightforward claim should cost far less than a contingency shop charges. Get in touch either way and we handle it from there, so you do not have to go and find anyone.

Drawback is different: it is genuinely specialist work, most drawback firms work on contingency, and above roughly fifty to a hundred thousand dollars a year in recoverable duty a program starts paying for itself. Below that, run the numbers before committing.

Who can file, and how to start

Preparing and filing customs entries, refund claims, protests and drawback is customs business under federal law, and doing it for someone else requires a customs broker license. Any company that offers to file your refund without one has just told you something important about how it reads rules.

So the first question is simply who filed your original entries, because that broker can usually file the refund too. Beyond that, every situation is its own conversation: get in touch, tell us what you imported and when, and we will take it from there.