About 75% of eligible companies plan to keep some of their tariff refund as cash, the Atlanta Fed found in its Survey of Business Uncertainty.
The survey polled 1,156 C-suite executives between August 10 and 21. About 25% said their company is eligible for a tariff refund, and roughly 40% of eligible firms had already received one. The average refund was equivalent to 1.7% of a firm’s annual revenue. Larger, publicly traded companies were more than twice as likely to have already received a refund, MDM reports.
Companies could select multiple planned uses for their refunds. Beyond cash, 52.5% said they planned to use some of the money toward research and development or capital projects. Smaller shares planned customer rebates (17.2%), temporary price cuts (14.8%), employee bonuses (12.7%), manager bonuses (10.1%) or paying down liabilities (8%).
Individual companies have already split along similar lines. Nike booked $986 million of its refund straight to earnings, while FedEx has been returning $800 million to the shippers who paid the duties. BJ's Wholesale routed its refund into member price cuts.
The broader refund pool is substantial. Nearly $170 billion in IEEPA tariff payments was subject to potential refunds, with roughly $100 billion refunded by late July, according to the Atlanta Fed.
