In brief: CBP pays IEEPA tariff refunds only to the company named on the customs entry, so buyers that paid the tariffs through higher supplier prices get nothing directly.
Implications:
Your claim: Any share of the refund has to come from your supplier, through your contract or a negotiation.
Your evidence: Supplier notices and invoice lines that blamed price increases on tariffs are direct proof you paid them.
Only IEEPA: Section 232 tariffs on steel and aluminum are not being refunded, so that part of a price increase stays paid.
The News
Genuine Parts Co, which owns NAPA Auto Parts, is the importer of record on less than 0.5% of its total purchases, it said in its third-quarter filing. The IEEPA tariff refunds it has claimed so far were not material to its results, though the same filing says tariffs kept driving up its product costs and the prices it charged customers through the first nine months of the year, on goods sourced directly or indirectly from China, Canada and Mexico.
After the Supreme Court struck down the IEEPA tariffs, US Customs and Border Protection began refunding them, through a claims process open only to the companies named on the customs entries. By Oct. 2 it had sent about $126 billion to the Treasury for payment, out of $136.6 billion accepted for processing, CBP said in a sworn declaration to the Court of International Trade. Another $1.1 billion is stuck because importers never gave CBP a bank account for refunds.
Why It Matters
A buyer’s only route to a refund is its supplier, because US customs law lets importers keep the whole refund even when they passed the tariffs on.
No duty to share: Nothing in customs law requires an importer to share with the buyers who paid the tariffs through surcharges or higher list prices.
The contract decides: Unless a contract says otherwise, “that windfall stays with the importer,” lawyers at Jones Walker wrote.
How It Works
A buyer’s claim on a supplier’s refund rests on the contract and the paper trail, and these are the facts Jones Walker says help most:
Cost-plus pricing: when duties are part of the supplier’s defined cost, a refund cuts that cost after the fact, and the invoice price should follow it down.
Price adjustment or true-up clauses: a refund can count as the change in cost that triggers a retroactive price adjustment.
Tariff notices and surcharges: emails, letters or invoice lines that blamed a price increase on IEEPA tariffs are direct proof the cost was passed on.
Most-favored pricing clauses: if the supplier’s costs fell retroactively, the clause may require a credit.
Where the contract is silent, buyers can argue unjust enrichment, that the importer is being paid twice for one cost, though some states allow that claim only when the contract doesn’t cover the issue. Either way, a buyer has nothing to claim until CBP pays the importer.
The refunds also cover only IEEPA duties paid between Feb. 4, 2025, and Feb. 24, 2026, Baker Donelson noted.
Who’s Exposed
Three kinds of buyers have the hardest claims:
Distributors buying from domestic importers: buyers like Genuine Parts paid the tariffs inside purchase prices and have no customs entries of their own to file on.
Fixed price lists: without a cost-plus or adjustment clause, the claim rests on notices, invoices and an unjust enrichment argument, the harder route.
Metal-heavy goods: the tariffs on their steel and aluminum content fall under Section 232, which is not being refunded.
Peer Insights
Some importers have already handed part of their refunds to the vendors that absorbed the tariffs for them. Williams-Sonoma set aside $47.5 million to reimburse merchandise vendors that had given it tariff-related concessions, while Gap committed about $95 million of its roughly $512 million refund to certain vendors. Williams-Sonoma’s vendors had cut their prices when the tariffs hit, the same kind of record a buyer needs to claim from its own supplier.
What’s Next
Oct. 22: the government and the importers in the trade court’s IEEPA refund class action propose a schedule. That case could open refunds on entries that are closed today, which would put more money in suppliers’ hands for buyers to claim.
Oct. 26: CBP files its next refund report with the court, showing how much more has gone out to importers.
Photo: Crisco 1492 / Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 4.0
