The $100 Billion Tariff Refund: Who Gets the Money (Hint: Not You)
The Supreme Court killed the IEEPA tariffs. The government is now handing back the duty. You paid for those tariffs at the checkout, and you are not on the list.
For most of 2025, Americans heard that tariffs were being “paid by China.” Then, on February 20, 2026, the Supreme Court ruled in Learning Resources, Inc. v. Trump that the International Emergency Economic Powers Act never gave the president the power to impose tariffs in the first place. Customs stopped collecting the IEEPA duties four days later, and on April 20, 2026, the refunds began.
It is a lot of money going back. So where does it go?
Where the $100 billion comes from
Nobody has published an official refund total yet, so let’s build an estimate from the customs data itself. The Census Bureau reports, every month, the value of goods imported and the duty customs calculated at the border. Two simple ways to read those numbers point to the same order of magnitude.
The national view. In January 2026, the last full month of IEEPA collection, duty came to 9.9% of the value of everything the US imported. From March 2026 on, with IEEPA gone and every other tariff still in place, it settled at about 6.8%. That three-point gap is the IEEPA layer, roughly. Over the twelve months from March 2025 to February 2026, the US imported about $3.3 trillion of goods. Three percent of that is about $100 billion.
The country-by-country view. Doing the same thing for each of the 20 largest trading partners, comparing the measured duty rate just before and after collection stopped, and applying it to what each country shipped during the IEEPA year, gives about $76 billion for those 20 countries alone. The biggest pieces:
- China: about $24 billion (measured duty rate 31% before the ruling, 22% after)
- India: about $12 billion (20% before, 8% after)
- Vietnam: about $12 billion (12% before, 7% after)
- Mexico: about $4 billion (most Mexican goods enter duty-free under the USMCA)
- Japan: about $4 billion (13.5% before, 10.6% after)
The second number is a floor, not a ceiling: it uses the rates of late 2025, which were lower than the peak rates of spring 2025, when the IEEPA tariff on Chinese goods briefly reached 145%. So a fair range is $75 to $100 billion, and “$100 billion” is the round number at the top of it.
Two honest caveats. First, this is an estimate from public data, not a refund statement: not every importer will claim, and some entries may not qualify. Second, the monthly trade data record duty when goods arrive; refunds do not show up in them at all.
Follow the money: the importer of record
Here is the part most coverage skips. A US tariff is not paid by the foreign factory and not by the shopper. It is owed by the importer of record, the business named on the customs entry. That is who gets the refund.
- Big retailers and brands that import directly (apparel, electronics, toys, furniture, auto parts) are first in line.
- Manufacturers that import components get back the duty on their parts.
- Distributors and wholesalers that bring goods in and sell them on to stores collect too, even though the stores paid them higher prices.
- Small businesses that imported directly, say, an online shop that brought in its own goods from Shenzhen, are importers of record as well, and may be owed money they do not know about. Under customs law, overpaid duty is generally refunded with interest; entries that customs has already finalized can require a formal protest within strict deadlines. Anyone in that position should read CBP’s refund guidance or ask a licensed customs broker now, not later.
Why it’s not you
If you bought a laptop, a sofa or a pair of running shoes in 2025, you may well have paid more because of the tariffs. But you paid a higher price, not a duty. There is no customs process that traces a refund down to the person at the end of the supply chain, and nothing obliges a company that gets its duty back to cut its prices or send anyone a check.
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Did shoppers really carry the cost? The best-studied case is the 2018–2019 tariff round. Researchers found the tariffs passed almost fully into US import prices, so the burden landed on American buyers, not foreign exporters (Amiti, Redding and Weinstein, 2019; Fajgelbaum, Goldberg, Kennedy and Khandelwal, 2020). The 2025 round was bigger and messier, and how much reached store shelves depended on the product and on how much stock companies had piled up beforehand. The direction did not change: the duty was paid in America.
So the refund flows up the chain, to whoever filed the customs paperwork, while the people who absorbed the cost at the register get nothing back.
Will prices at least come down?
Don’t count on it. Three reasons:
- Most tariffs are still there. The duties under Section 232 (steel, aluminum, autos and more) and Section 301 (most duties on Chinese goods) were not part of the case. At about 6.8% of import value, the measured tariff rate is still close to three times its 2024 level of about 2.4%.
- A refund is a one-time check, not a lower cost. It can be booked as a gain without touching a single price tag.
- Prices go up like rockets and down like feathers. Once consumers have accepted a higher price, companies rarely rush to cut it.
What to watch next
- Company results. Large importers may report one-off refund gains in 2026. They flatter earnings once; they do not change the business.
- The federal budget. Tariffs became a serious revenue source in 2025: customs calculated $259 billion in duty at the border, against $77 billion in 2024. Refunds and the end of IEEPA collection cut into that, which matters for the deficit and for how much the Treasury has to borrow.
- New tariffs under other laws. The ruling closed one door, not all of them. Trade policy can still change quickly through other statutes.
Check the numbers yourself
Every figure in this piece comes from the Census Bureau’s customs data. You can follow it month by month, by type of goods and for each of the 20 largest trading partners, on gov.house, an independent public data site that shows the duty actually paid at the border rather than the announced rates. For a single product, its tariff lookup gives the current US duty from the official tariff schedule.
The bottom line: the IEEPA refund is real money, somewhere between $75 and $100 billion, and it goes back to the businesses that filed the customs entries. If you were not the importer of record, the tariff you paid is a sunk cost.
Data: U.S. Census Bureau, international trade data, imports for consumption and calculated duty, January 2024 to August 2026, as compiled by gov.house. The refund figures are the author’s estimates from that data, not official totals. Not investment, tax or legal advice.
Attila Rácz-Akácosi is the editor of gov.house, an independent publication on US government economic policy, the founder of WalletInvestor, and a member of the Hungarian Journalists’ Association (MÚOSZ).
