Tariff refund.Frequently asked questions.

If your business imported into the U.S. between February 4, 2025 and February 24, 2026, and you paid the new tariffs the Supreme Court just struck down (the ones imposed under IEEPA, the emergency-powers law), you are likely eligible to file for a refund. The Court ruled in February 2026 that those tariffs were never lawfully authorized, and Customs opened a refund portal in April 2026. Most entries qualify under the rules in force right now; some sit outside the current window and will need a future round or court action. The fastest way to know is a free eligibility review with us.

Only the IEEPA tariffs are refundable. That's the bucket of new duties the President imposed starting February 4, 2025 under emergency-powers authority. That includes the 10% to 50%-plus reciprocal tariffs that took effect April 2, 2025, and the country-specific charges on China, Canada, and Mexico. On the entry paperwork your broker filed, they show up as their own line items (under tariff codes starting with 9903.01 or 9903.02 if you want to check). What is not refundable: the older China tariffs that have been in force since 2018–2019, the steel and aluminum tariffs, the new 2026 surcharge added on February 24, and the anti-dumping duties (the ones meant to offset foreign government subsidies and below-cost imports).

Entries where the refundable duties were paid or deposited between February 4, 2025 and February 24, 2026. Entries before or after that window do not qualify. Within the current refund window, the priority is entries that are still open with Customs, or that closed within 80 days of the refund portal's April 20, 2026 launch (entries that closed on or after January 30, 2026).

The current refund window does not cover entries that fully closed with Customs (the technical term is "finally liquidated") before January 30, 2026. The government has said a future round will address those, but as of May 2026 there's no published scope or timeline for it. If your closed entry is also outside the 180-day window to file a formal objection, recovery may require a lawsuit in the U.S. Court of International Trade. We'll tell you which bucket your entries fall into during the eligibility review.

Phase 1 is the current refund window. The one Customs opened April 20, 2026. It covers roughly 63% of refundable entries: the ones still open with Customs, plus the ones that closed within 80 days of launch. Phase 2 is the future expansion the government has signaled but not yet scoped. It's expected to cover the entries that closed earlier (the remaining ~37%), but there's no announced opening date or rules. We're working Phase 1 cases now and will help clients prepare Phase 2 claims when the government releases guidance.

It doesn't change your eligibility. Under the government's rules, only the importer on record or the licensed customs broker who originally filed your entries can submit the refund claim. If your broker hasn't filed for you, and most haven't because brokers aren't paid to chase refunds, we step in and handle it for you.

DDU is the hardest case. Under those terms, the end consumer is listed as the importer on record for customs purposes. And individual consumers usually don't have an account with Customs or any practical way to file a refund claim. These claims are likely to go unclaimed unless a service provider can pool them at scale. If you used DDU on past shipments, get in touch. We'll tell you whether your situation has any path to recovery.

Entries with an open or suspended protest are excluded from the current refund window. You may need to withdraw the protest before we can file the refund claim, or wait for the next round and let the protest run its existing path. We review your filing history during the eligibility check and tell you which path makes the most sense.

Nothing up front and nothing if we don't recover. Our fee is a contingency percentage of the refund Customs wires to you. It comes out of the recovery. You never write us a check. If Customs rejects the claim or pays nothing, our fee is zero.

It's a percentage of the total refund (including interest) that Customs pays into your bank account. We confirm the exact percentage in writing before we move forward. The fee is deducted from the recovered amount; you keep the rest.

No. We handle every part of the filing for you. You do not need to set up your own customs account, register a bank for direct deposit, or update any importer paperwork unless your specific situation requires it. If it does, we walk you through it. Most clients never log in to anything.

We need enough information to identify your shipments. Typically your importer number, a list of recent entry numbers from your broker, or your broker's contact info. If you have those handy, great. If you don't, we help you pull them. The second step of our intake form is optional precisely because most importers don't have entry data at their fingertips.

We're a tariff refund service. We help with the entire process end to end: intake, eligibility review, pulling your entries, building the claim, submitting it through the government's refund portal, monitoring it through Customs, and confirming the wire when it lands. You hire one team and we take it from there.

You owe nothing. Our fee is contingent on recovery. If your entries don't qualify in the current window, or Customs denies the claim, we don't get paid. We'll tell you up front during the eligibility review whether we think your case is worth pursuing.

Customs's stated target is 60 to 90 days from when your filing is accepted. The first refund payments hit importers' bank accounts on May 12, 2026. From the moment you sign with us to the wire landing in your account, most clean cases take roughly six to fourteen weeks. Some are faster. Some are slower if Customs flags a compliance review.

You'll get a single direct-deposit wire from Customs that includes the refund plus interest accrued at the IRS rate while the government held your money. Our contingency fee comes out of that wire. We notify you the moment we see the payment hit and send you a clean statement of refund, interest, and fee.

Yes. Customs includes interest on improperly collected duties at the IRS quarterly rate. As of Q1 2026, that's 7% per year if you file taxes as an individual or pass-through and 6% if you file as a corporation. Interest accrues from the date you originally paid the duty until Customs issues the refund.

The government hasn't published a hard deadline for the current refund window. But it's rolling. Once an entry closes with Customs and ages past 80 days without a refund claim on file, it falls out of the current window and into the next-round / lawsuit bucket. The longer you wait, the fewer entries stay easy cases. File now if you're going to file.

Self-service kits hand you a packet and leave you to navigate the customs portal, the bank registration, and the refund filing on your own. That works for some importers. For most small and mid-sized importers we work with, the time and complexity make it not worth it. They want done-for-you. Our team runs the claim end to end, you're not on a learning curve.

Large trade-law firms target eight-figure clients and bill hourly. They will take your matter, but the economics rarely work for an importer at $1M of annual import volume. We were built for the segment in between: done-for-you contingency-fee help for the importers the big firms ignore. No retainers, no hourly clock, no fee unless we recover.