The Supreme Court struck down the IEEPA tariffs: refunds, deadlines and what survived

What changed

On 20 February 2026 the Supreme Court held, 6 to 3 with Chief Justice Roberts writing, that the International Emergency Economic Powers Act does not give the president authority to impose tariffs. That power belongs to Congress. The reciprocal tariff programme and the fentanyl related duties on China, Canada and Mexico all rested on that statute, and all of them fell with it.

Collection stopped four days later. From 24 February 2026 CBP no longer assessed IEEPA duties on new entries. In the same week the administration replaced part of the lost coverage with a 10% global surcharge under Section 122 of the Trade Act of 1974, which has since expired and been replaced again.

What the Court did not do is order anyone money back. It ruled the tariffs unlawful and left the mechanics of restitution to the agencies and the lower courts. The government has said it will not oppose reliquidation and will refund unlawfully collected IEEPA duties once there is a final and unappealable decision, but that is a concession rather than a judgment.

CBP built a refund pipeline anyway. CAPE, the Consolidated Administration and Processing of Entries, opened its first phase on 20 April 2026 inside ACE. An importer of record or their broker files a single CAPE declaration covering up to 9,999 entry numbers per uploaded CSV, which is what makes the volume tractable at all. Refunds are issued electronically, so ACH banking details have to be on file first, and CBP has been paying accepted declarations in roughly 60 to 90 days.

The scale is genuinely unusual. By 31 July 2026 more than 75,000 CAPE declarations had been submitted, 17.69 million entries had been liquidated without IEEPA duties, and around $128.68 billion in potential and certified refunds had been accepted for processing.

Who it affects

• Any importer of record that paid reciprocal or fentanyl related duties between 2025 and February 2026. That is most commercial importers rather than a niche group.
• Sellers who passed the tariff through in retail pricing and now hold a refund claim against goods that were sold long ago.
• Businesses whose entries liquidated outside the CAPE Phase 1 window, who are on a protest clock rather than on the declaration route.
• Anyone who was quoted a delivered price by a supplier or forwarder with duty bundled in. The refund follows the importer of record, so check whose name is actually on the entry.

A worked cost example

Take a mid sized importer that paid $340,000 in IEEPA duties across 2025 on roughly 1,200 entries. What is actually recoverable depends far less on that total than on when each individual entry liquidated.

The trap in that table is the third line. A protest deadline runs from each entry liquidation date, one entry at a time, and it does not pause while you wait to see how the class litigation resolves. Importers who pulled an ACE liquidation report early kept options that importers who waited lost by default.

What importers should do

1. 1 Pull an ACE report of every entry that carried an IEEPA duty line, with its liquidation date attached. That report is the entire basis of the claim.
2. 2 Get ACH banking details onto your ACE portal account if they are not already there. CAPE refunds are electronic only, and an incomplete banking record stalls payment after acceptance.
3. 3 Sort entries into CAPE eligible and protest only. Anything in the second bucket carries a hard 180 day clock from its liquidation date.
4. 4 Confirm with your broker who filed as importer of record on each entry. If it was not you, the refund is not yours to claim.
5. 5 Do not spend it. Certified is not the same as paid, and the litigation over refund scope is still open.

Questions importers keep asking

Primary sources

• Congressional Research Service on the IEEPA tariff ruling →
• CBP guidance on IEEPA duty refunds →

Related changes

What to re-check, and when

This page is about the IEEPA tariffs, and the ruling that struck them down, and no published instrument names a closing date for the measure itself, so this site records no scheduled end for it: it runs until the authority behind it revokes or amends it, which is a finding about the measure rather than a gap in the record, while any temporary provision sitting alongside it carries its own date in the passage above that describes it, and what is dated below is the reading rather than the measure.

The claims on this page about the IEEPA tariffs, and the ruling that struck them down were last read on 28 August 2026, against the sources it names, and what to check first is the sentence under this one.

The moving part here is the litigation over refund scope, so check the current CAPE phase and the Court of International Trade docket before you rely on any recovery figure.