The 60-Second Overview

The Three CAPE Phases

Where your money sits depends entirely on the liquidation status of your entries and, for the oldest ones, on whether you have filed a lawsuit. This table is the fastest way to locate yourself.

The Finally Liquidated Problem

After the Supreme Court ruling, the working assumption across the trade bar was that everyone who paid IEEPA duties would eventually be refunded and that the remaining questions were mechanical. CBP has taken a narrower view, and it is the single most consequential feature of the current landscape.

The Court of International Trade has not accepted that position. Its March 2026 order required reliquidation across the board, reaching importers who had not sued. The government has appealed that order to the Federal Circuit, arguing it amounts to impermissible universal relief and that only importers who filed their own actions are entitled to refunds on finally liquidated entries. Briefing is under way.

Rather than wait for that appeal, CBP built Phase 3 to serve plaintiffs. If you are a plaintiff, your route is open and running. If you are not, the practical consequence of CBP’s position is simple to state: you need an order, and the way to get an order is to file.

What Counts as “Finally Liquidated”

Two periods matter and they are frequently confused.

You Can Still File, and the Clock Is the Only Thing Stopping You

A great deal of commentary published in the run-up to October 6 described the July 30, 2026 deadline as though it closed the door on everyone who had not already sued. It did not, and importers who read it that way and gave up are leaving recoverable money on the table.

This is the heart of it. CBP has already built the machinery and it is running at a scale that is hard to overstate. By October 2, 2026 it had accepted declarations covering 27.4 million entries, liquidated or reliquidated 21.19 million of them without IEEPA duties, and certified approximately $126 billion in duties and interest to Treasury. What CBP says it needs before it will do the same for your finally liquidated entries is an order naming you. Obtaining one is ordinary litigation of a kind the CIT is now processing at volume across roughly 3,700 cases, on a legal question the Supreme Court has already resolved in importers’ favour.

Where the Two Years Runs From

The accrual date for an illegal exaction claim of this kind is not settled, and reasonable arguments place it at different points. The prudent approach is to assume the earliest defensible date, which is when each tariff was imposed, and work backwards from there. On that assumption:

Read the first row again. If your exposure is concentrated in the Trafficking tariffs on Canadian, Mexican or Chinese goods, which is where a great many importers’ exposure sits, the window on the conservative reading is measured in months.

Your Options If You Have Not Sued

Options 2 and 3 are free only until your own limitations period starts closing, and for the earliest entries that point is now visible on the calendar. Filing is not costless and it is not right for everyone: on modest exposure it may cost more than it recovers. On substantial exposure it is protection against the one outcome that cannot be fixed afterwards.

How We Got Here

The legal principle animating all of this is illegal exaction. Where the government collects money under an authority later held unlawful, longstanding precedent establishes that it may not retain those funds. What remains contested is not whether the money is owed but whether CBP can pay it to importers who never went to court. For any individual importer, that contest can be sidestepped entirely by going to court.

Are Your Entries Eligible?

Checking HTSUS Codes in Your Entry Summaries

Review your entry summaries for Chapter 99 codes. Any entry with a code beginning 9903.01 (Trafficking) or 9903.02 (Reciprocal) is potentially refundable. Other Chapter 99 series, including 9903.88 and 9903.80, cover Section 301 and Section 232 duties and are not refundable through CAPE. Your broker can pull this from ACE directly.

Which Tariffs Are Refundable

Only IEEPA duties. The Supreme Court’s ruling addressed that statute and nothing else. This remains the single most commonly misunderstood aspect of the refund question.

Refundable Through CAPE

Not Refundable — Still in Force or Separately Authorised

What to Do Before You File

The filing itself is simple by design. The preparation is where refunds get delayed. Of the 297,887 CAPE declarations submitted through October 2, 2026, only 209,262 passed file validation, and CBP attributes most failures to three causes: importer of record or filer mismatches on the declaration, entry number problems such as incorrect length or a number that does not exist, and a CSV file that does not match the published template.

How to File Your CAPE Declaration

What Happens After You File

Key ACE Reports

Common Post-Filing Issues

• Rejected entries inside an accepted declaration. Entry-level validation is separate from declaration-level validation, and the gap is large: of the entries submitted through October 2, 2026, 6.2 million failed entry-level validation. CBP gives three main reasons: the entry date is past its 90-day reliquidation authority, the entry carries no Chapter 99 code used to assess IEEPA duties, or the entry was already filed on an earlier CAPE declaration. Use the REV reports to find which of yours failed and why.
• Entries that remain suspended. Entries previously suspended for AD/CVD determinations or reconciliation may stay suspended, with refunds issued only on eventual liquidation.
• Refunds held against CBP debts. Under 19 CFR Part 159, CBP can offset refunds against legally fixed and undisputed debts you owe the United States, including outstanding penalties and liquidated damages.
• Netting adjustments. The refund is the net of over- and under-payments at liquidation. An entry with under-declared Section 301 duties nets to less than the pure IEEPA figure.

Refund Timing and Interest

How Long It Takes

CBP’s published guidance is 60 to 90 days from acceptance of a CAPE declaration, absent compliance concerns requiring further review. In a March 2026 declaration to the Court of International Trade, CBP represented a 45-day internal target for simpler cases. Both are planning horizons rather than commitments, and actual timing depends on volume, entry complexity and individual review.

Interest

Refunds include interest. It accrues under 19 USC 1505(c) on duty overpayments from the date of deposit through the date of refund, at the rate established under 26 USC 6621. On duties paid in early 2025 and refunded in late 2026 or beyond, the interest component is material, and it continues to accrue while a case is pending.

Who Receives the Money

Refunds go to the Importer of Record on the entry, or to a notify party designated on CBP Form 4811 before liquidation. There is no mechanism within CAPE for redirecting refunds to a consignee, foreign supplier or other party that economically bore the tariff cost. Those parties have contractual claims against the IOR, not claims against CBP, and recovery depends on what the commercial agreement says about tariff pass-through.

Complications That Delay or Block Refunds

Protests and CAPE

Many importers filed protests under 19 USC 1514 seeking IEEPA refunds after liquidation. CBP suspended many of them pending CAPE. Importers may now withdraw pending IEEPA protests to allow CAPE processing, which CBP has indicated may produce faster refunds. If a protest remains suspended, contact the port to request removal of the suspension before withdrawing. Take advice first where the protest also raises non-IEEPA issues or interacts with pending litigation.

CIT Litigation

Roughly 3,700 individual IEEPA cases sit on the CIT docket. For plaintiffs, the July 2026 orders provide judicial authority for refunds on finally liquidated entries, processed through CAPE Phase 3 rather than through a separate judicial payment mechanism. Plaintiffs should confirm with their CIT counsel that their importer-of-record information has been submitted and that their entry population is captured. Plaintiffs who submitted an importer-of-record number after July 30, 2026 are not excluded; CBP has told the court it will provide them with additional instructions regarding Phase 3.

Surety-Paid Duties

Entries where a surety paid the IEEPA duties in whole or in part sit outside the standard process. The refund follows the subrogation relationship between the importer and the surety, and needs coordinating directly with them.

AD/CVD Liquidation Instructions Pending

Entries subject to antidumping or countervailing duty orders with liquidation instructions pending under 19 USC 1675 remain outside CAPE processing and will follow the normal AD/CVD liquidation process after Commerce completes its determinations.

Post Summary Corrections Are Blocked for IEEPA

PSCs cannot be used to request IEEPA refunds. CAPE is the exclusive administrative mechanism. PSCs remain available for classification, valuation and origin corrections, and should be filed and resolved before the CAPE declaration on the same entries.

What Replaced IEEPA

Importers budgeting on the assumption that the tariff burden fell away in February 2026 should look carefully at what followed, because it did not.

Section 122 Came and Went

The 10% Section 122 global surcharge that replaced IEEPA on February 24, 2026 was always temporary. Section 122 of the Trade Act of 1974 caps the rate at 15% and the duration at 150 days absent congressional action. It expired by operation of law at 12:01 a.m. on July 24, 2026, and Congress did not extend it.

Section 122 duties collected between February and July 2026 are not IEEPA duties and are not refundable through CAPE.

Section 301 Replaced It Without a Gap

USTR initiated Section 301 investigations in March 2026 covering roughly 60 economies, announced final action on July 23, and the new duties took effect at the same moment Section 122 lapsed: 10% or 12.5% depending on country of origin, with exemptions including Section 232 goods and USMCA-qualifying goods. A separate Section 301 action on Brazil took effect on July 22.

Section 232 Has Continued to Expand

Section 232 tariffs were untouched by the IEEPA ruling and have grown since, including a 100% duty on patented pharmaceuticals effective July 31, 2026. Relief from Section 232 duties runs through product-specific exclusion processes or a direct challenge to the underlying proclamations, not through CAPE.

When to Handle This Yourself, and When to Get Help

Most importers do not need a lawyer for this. The honest calculus looks like this.

You Probably Do Not Need an Attorney If:

• Your exposure is modest and all of it sits in Phase 1 or Phase 2 scope.
• You have a competent customs broker who can identify eligible entries and file the declaration.
• You have no pending protests, no litigation, and no drawback, reconciliation, AD/CVD or surety complications on the same entries.
• Your ACE account setup is clean and your ACH refund enrolment is current.

You Should Get Advice If:

• You have meaningful exposure on finally liquidated entries and have not filed at the CIT. This is the one with a clock attached, and once the limitations period runs it cannot be fixed.
• You are a CIT plaintiff and need to confirm your entries are in the Phase 3 population, particularly if your importer-of-record information went in after July 30, 2026.
• You have pending protests and need to decide whether withdrawing them helps or hurts.
• Your entries carry drawback, reconciliation, surety or AD/CVD complications affecting sequencing.
• You expect CBP to offset your refund against existing debts.
• You bore the tariff cost commercially but are not the Importer of Record.
• Your CAPE filing could invite scrutiny of classification, valuation or origin positions on the same entries.

Frequently Asked Questions