Your 2025 tariffs are being paid back with interest. How your goods came in decides if you see any of it

Yes, the emergency tariffs you paid in 2025 are coming back, with interest, and US Customs has been sending the money out since April. The catch is that it only goes to the importer of record on each shipment, and on most shipments there is a clock running. So the useful question is not "am I owed a refund" but "where is mine sitting". If a courier brought your goods in, the answer may be a portal you have not logged into. If you used a customs broker, it is a list of dates you need this week. If you bought from a US distributor, the refund is not yours at all, and the money you can still get back is in your supplier invoices.

The short version Every dollar of IEEPA duty that comes back to you is pure profit you already lost once. It went out of your margin in 2025, and it comes back as a lump in 2026. It is worth chasing. But three things decide whether you ever see it:

• Who was the importer of record on the shipment. Only that party, or someone it formally named, can be paid.
• How the shipment was entered. A formal entry through a broker, or an informal entry, the simplified route used for many low-value parcels.
• The liquidation date of each entry, which is the day Customs finalises the duty. Today's refund process only takes entries liquidated in the last 80 days.

What was struck down, and what still stands

On 20 February 2026 the Supreme Court decided, 6 to 3, that the International Emergency Economic Powers Act does not give the President power to impose tariffs. FedEx says Customs stopped collecting IEEPA duties at midnight eastern time on 24 February 2026, so the refundable period runs from February 2025 to that date.

Only the IEEPA part comes back. Section 232 duties (the steel and aluminium ones, which reach a lot of gym equipment), Section 301 duties, Section 201 duties and the ordinary duty rate all still apply. CBP gives its own example for goods from the EU, Japan, South Korea and Switzerland, where the deal rate was a combined 15 percent: if the ordinary duty was 5 percent, the refund is the other 10, not the whole 15.

Who Customs will actually pay

CBP is blunt about this. It refunds the importer of record, or a party the importer named on CBP Form 4811, and nobody else. It does not refund consumers or anyone further down the chain. Payment is by ACH into a bank account you register in the ACE Portal, the government's online import system, and CBP says that without an ACE Portal account there is no refund.

Two more facts from the same page. CBP charges no fee for any of this, so anyone asking for a fee while claiming to be Customs is running a scam. And interest is added under federal law, at a rate the IRS publishes quarterly, generally running from the day the duty was paid to the day the entry is liquidated or reliquidated.

Find your drawer

There are three places your refund can be. Work out which one before you do anything else.

Drawer one: a US distributor imported the goods and sold them to you. The distributor was the importer of record. The refund is legally theirs. Skip to the last section, because your money is in the supplier conversation, not at Customs.

Drawer two: a courier cleared the goods and billed you the duties. FedEx says it filed the early-phase refund declarations for customers where it acted as broker, whoever the importer of record was, unless the customer opted out, at no charge. It is now paying refunds, with the interest it received, to the shippers and customers who originally bore the charges, on a rolling basis. You check your shipments and submit your payment and tax details in the FedEx IEEPA tariff refund portal. Until you do that, the money sits with FedEx. UPS splits it two ways: if UPS was the importer of record, it says no action is needed from you; if you were the importer of record and UPS was only your broker, you file yourself or pay UPS to file for you.

Drawer three: you were the importer of record through a customs broker. This is the drawer with a clock on it.

The 80-day clock, with real dates

CBP's refund system, called CAPE, accepts an entry only if it has not liquidated yet or liquidated in the preceding 80 days. An entry liquidated more than 80 days ago is rejected as being in final liquidation.

In the normal course, CBP sets a formal entry up to liquidate about 314 days after entry. Add the 80 days and you get roughly 394 days from the day your goods came in. Here is what that looks like:

• A shipment entered on 1 October 2025 would normally liquidate around 11 August 2026 and drop out of CAPE around 30 October 2026.
• On today's date, 24 September 2026, a shipment entered before about 26 August 2025 is already out on the normal cycle.
• The last IEEPA entries, from late February 2026, run out around late March 2027.

So every week you wait removes roughly a week of your 2025 imports from the easy route. Your real dates can differ, because some entries liquidate early and some are extended. Your broker can pull them from ACE, and CBP's ES-003 report lists every entry line where IEEPA duty was assessed.

Informal entries are a different story. Federal rules put the liquidation date of an informal entry on the day the duty was paid. That means an informal entry was outside the 80-day window within weeks of the duty being paid, and every IEEPA-era informal entry is outside it now. If your parcels came in that way, they sit in the pile below.

The pile that is waiting on the courts

CBP lists entries whose liquidation is final as a future phase. That phase, Phase 3, opens on 6 October 2026, but according to CBP's 15 September filing with the Court of International Trade, as reported by trade counsel, it is for importers who have their own case at that court and gave CBP their importer number by 30 July 2026. The government's position is that it cannot refund older entries without a court order, and that fight is not over.

FedEx says that in Phase 3 it can only file for entries where FedEx itself was the importer of record. If you were, it tells you to take legal advice.

My honest read: if your older entries add up to a few hundred dollars of duty, a lawsuit is not worth it, and you should treat that money as gone unless the courts change the rules for everyone. If they add up to tens of thousands, spend an hour with a trade lawyer this month. Either way, do not let the argument about the old pile delay the entries that are still inside the window.

A refund can arrive with a bill attached

CAPE removes the IEEPA duty from an entry and then recalculates the whole entry. If other duties were underpaid, you can end up with a smaller refund or a bill. CBP also takes any undisputed debt you owe the government out of the refund before paying it. CBP says valid refunds are generally issued within 60 to 90 days of the declaration being accepted, and most land in your bank 3 to 5 weeks after the entry reliquidates.

What it does to the numbers a buyer reads

Your 2025 margin took the tariff. Your 2026 margin gets the refund. Neither year is your real business. A buyer valuing you on Seller's Discretionary Earnings will strip a one-off refund out of 2026 as an adjustment, and a good one will ask whether 2025 was depressed by a cost that has since gone away. You want to be the owner who can answer both questions with a folder: entry numbers, duty paid, refund received, dates. That is what clean books means in practice, and it turns a messy two years into a story you control.