If Tariffs Are Ruled Unconstitutional, Here’s How Companies Get Refunds

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Between February and December 2025, American importers paid more than $133.5 billion in what Trump called “reciprocal tariffs.” The Supreme Court could rule any day now on whether President Trump exceeded his authority.

Even if companies win at the Supreme Court, getting their money back will require dealing with a complicated process with many steps that could take years and leave many smaller importers with nothing.

The government won’t automatically send you a check. Every company that wants its tariff money back will need to file formal protests with U.S. Customs and Border Protection, prove exactly what you paid with original receipts and paperwork, and potentially litigate disputes over calculations that could drag on long after the Supreme Court has moved on to other cases.

The clock is already ticking. Some of the import entries from early 2025 are approaching deadlines that will make them legally final. If you don’t act soon, you’ll lose the right to challenge them.

The Scale of the Problem

Between February and December 2025, American importers paid more than $133.5 billion in what Trump called “reciprocal tariffs”. These weren’t targeted duties on specific products or countries—they were a baseline 10 percent on most imports, with rates climbing to 50 percent for countries Trump deemed to have unfair trade surpluses with the U.S., though maximum rates and threats on certain goods reached substantially higher levels, in some cases up to 200 percent.

Every one of those payments represents a separate customs transaction. A single company might have hundreds or thousands of individual import entries, each with its own paperwork, its own tariff calculation, its own place in Customs’ vast database. If the Supreme Court rules the tariffs were illegal, companies will need to identify each of those entries, gather the documentation proving what they paid, and file individual protests challenging the tariff assessment.

Trade compliance experts describe it as a situation where you have to fight for each individual shipment separately where success depends on your ability to prove three things: what you paid, why you paid it, and under what legal theory you’re owed repayment. Companies with incomplete records, lost documentation, or unclear records about who actually owned the goods face far more complex negotiations with Customs—or no refund at all.

Electronic Payment Enrollment

You need to be enrolled in Customs’ electronic payment system and have set up electronic refunds in your account before any refunds start processing. No enrollment, no money—at least not until you scramble to set up the electronic infrastructure, which could take weeks or months.

For large companies with sophisticated customs operations, this is a minor administrative task. For smaller importers, especially those who rely on customs brokers to handle their filings, it’s a potential disaster.

The Documentation Gauntlet

Every import entry comes with a stack of paperwork: customs entry forms, commercial invoices, packing lists, bills of lading, and often dozens of additional documents depending on what you’re importing and where it’s from.

Once an entry reaches that point, changing it requires multiple formal steps. You have to file a formal protest, ask Customs to reopen and recalculate the charges, and prove your case with documentation. The entry was closed months ago and you’ve since filed away the paperwork—or trusted your broker to keep it? You might discover you can’t prove what you paid or which specific tariff authority was applied.

This is where big companies have a huge advantage. Multinational companies maintain detailed databases of all their import transactions going back years. They have dedicated customs compliance departments. They can readily produce proof of every tariff payment on demand.

Small and mid-sized companies often lack these capabilities. Many rely on brokers for documentation and have limited records or knowledge about what they paid from early 2025. For a small importer that brought in goods in February and never expected to think about them again, locating the original documentation and filing a formal protest eleven months later might require hiring outside experts—costs that could run from hundreds to thousands of dollars per entry, depending on volume.

The result: large companies recover most of their overpayments relatively quickly while small companies either recover only a fraction or exhaust their refunds through legal expenses.

Who Gets the Refund?

Customs collects duties from the company officially listed as the importer—whoever’s name is on the import paperwork. But in modern supply chains, the company on the paperwork might not be the company that actually owns the goods.

You imported through a broker who collected the tariff payments and remitted them to Customs. Can you demand a refund directly from Customs? Or must you recover the money from the broker, risking disputes if the broker has insufficient records or contests your claim that you paid for those particular duties?

This creates a major problem for the refund process: who, legally, is entitled to payment when commercial reality and customs formalities diverge? The Supreme Court’s ruling on the tariffs themselves won’t answer this question, leaving Customs to interpret the law as it administers refunds.

Some importers aren’t waiting to find out. Some companies are selling their refund claims to companies that buy them at a discount—sometimes getting only 60 to 70 percent of what they’re owed—rather than waiting years for Customs to process their claims. These transactions create yet another layer of complexity, raising questions about whether refunds claimed by firms other than the original importers would be processed more slowly or subjected to greater scrutiny.

How Long This Could Take

Customs suddenly facing millions of refund claims simultaneously will strain the agency’s capacity.

The most optimistic scenario involves the agency moving staff to handle refunds, creating special teams just to process these refunds, and implementing faster procedures that speed up the review process. In this scenario, companies might receive refunds within a few months.

Customs hasn’t publicly committed to any special procedures. The agency’s track record handling surge demand provides little confidence in rapid processing.

More problematic: disputes could drag on for years over who qualifies, how much they’re owed, and whether they have the right paperwork. If Customs says no, you can appeal. Customs’ initial determination is challenged? The case could go to the Court of International Trade, and if still unresolved, potentially to the Federal Circuit Court of Appeals and even the Supreme Court. For many small companies, they’ll accept the loss and move on rather than invest resources in pursuing claims that take years to resolve.

The Interest Question

You eventually get refunded for tariff payments made during 2025. Should you also receive interest on the money Customs held during that time?

Under federal customs law, when Customs wrongly collects tariffs, it must refund the original amount plus interest at a rate set by law, usually 6-10 percent per year. A company that overpaid $10 million in tariffs in May 2025 could potentially claim $500,000 or more in interest by the time the money is refunded in 2027.

Figuring out interest on billions of dollars creates new arguments. From which date should interest start being calculated? The date the tariff was paid? The date the Supreme Court ruled? The date Customs issued a refund decision? Choosing different starting dates could change the total interest by hundreds of millions of dollars in aggregate interest across all claimants.

Customs could try to pay only the minimum interest required by law or delay interest payments while they write new rules. But this would directly contradict the principle that companies should be made whole when the government has improperly collected money from them.

What Companies Are Doing Right Now

Companies and their legal advisors have already begun positioning themselves for the most advantageous possible outcome if the Supreme Court rules against the government.

The most direct approach: filing lawsuits early to preserve their right to sue later at a special court that handles trade disputes before Customs finishes processing the case in a way that might complicate subsequent refund claims. These protective actions create a legal record demonstrating that you challenged the tariff authority before it became too late, strengthening your claim to get refunds faster.

This costs money—you have to hire lawyers to file the lawsuit. If Customs says the tariffs were legal? You’ve wasted those legal fees. But for large companies with substantial emergency tariff exposure, the insurance value justifies the cost.

A second approach is joining a group lawsuit with other companies through industry associations or working with other companies in the same situation to present refund claims as a group. This allows companies to share legal costs and may pressure Customs to establish streamlined procedures for processing large batches of claims simultaneously. But it also means accepting whatever deal the group works out rather than pursuing individual claims that might result in larger refunds.

The most expensive approach is hiring accounting firms and lawyers to review all your paperwork for every shipment over the entire collection period, organizing them in a spreadsheet, and preparing individual refund claims for each one. This gives you the best chance of winning by having all your paperwork ready, but it also multiplies legal and accounting costs substantially—sometimes reaching millions of dollars for large importers.

Big Companies Join the Fight

For months, smaller companies were the main ones suing over the tariffs—specialized companies, regional players, mid-sized firms hit hardest by the tariffs on specific product categories.

Then in January 2026, Costco Wholesale Corporation joined the lawsuits seeking tariff refunds. One of the largest retail companies in the United States determined that the potential refund was worth the cost of suing.

This matters because it changes how the government will handle refunds. If refund claimants are mostly smaller companies, the government can make the refund process harder—requiring large minimum claims, lots of paperwork, and little interest—and many affected companies will simply absorb the losses rather than fight further.

But when Costco and other major retailers and manufacturers are claimants, they have money, media attention, and political power that can force more favorable refund procedures. “This is the first time we’re seeing big companies take their heads out of the sand publicly,” observed Marc Busch, a trade law expert at Georgetown University. “Small companies have been doing most of the suing against tariffs. It’s good to finally see big companies getting involved.”

The involvement of large companies also means that refund disputes, when they arise, will be litigated by high-powered law firms representing major corporations rather than through default proceedings, creating more legal precedent and potentially forcing Customs to adopt more transparent procedures.

Stacked Tariffs and Calculation Problems

Many imported goods have multiple tariffs stacked on top of each other. An auto part might be subject to the emergency tariff, plus a tariff on steel, plus tariffs on Chinese goods. If only the emergency tariff is ruled illegal but the others stay? Customs has to figure out which part of what you paid gets refunded and which portion should be retained.

This gets complicated when the materials you imported also had tariffs. Say you imported steel with a 25 percent tariff and made it into finished products. Your finished products cost more because of the steel tariff. If the steel tariff is ruled illegal and refunded, do you also get money back for paying more for your materials?

The answer depends on the specific facts of your case. There’s no established procedure for handling this for millions of cases.

Customs could simplify by using the same refund formula for everyone—refunding only the original tariff amount plus a set interest rate, refusing to pay you back for the extra cost of your materials. But companies would probably sue, saying they didn’t get all their money back. Alternatively, Customs could let companies file individual claims for these extra costs, but this would make the process much more complicated.

What Happens If Trump Imposes New Tariffs?

The Supreme Court’s ruling may not be the final word on the tariff question. Trump has indicated that if the Court rules against him, his administration will try to impose tariffs again using different laws—particularly laws that let the president impose tariffs for national security or to fight unfair trade, which require investigations and steps that take time.

If Trump pursues this strategy, you’d face a mess: waiting for refunds while new tariffs hit. You’d have to decide whether to pay new tariffs or challenge them, whether to fight the new tariffs while waiting for old refunds, and how to manage your cash when money is coming in and going out at the same time.

For companies that make small profits on imports, this could be devastating.

When things happen matters a lot. If refunds start processing right after the Supreme Court ruling, you could use the refund money to pay new tariffs. But if refunds process slowly while new tariffs take effect right away, you could run out of money—owing new tariffs while waiting for refunds of old ones, draining your cash reserves and forcing you to make business changes.

Who’s Ready and Who Isn’t

Large multinational corporations with experienced customs departments that keep detailed records can file large refund claims quickly. They can easily prove what they paid and have money to sue if needed.

Small and mid-sized companies don’t have these advantages. Many use customs brokers to handle their paperwork and don’t have good records of what they paid. For a small importer who brought in goods in February and forgot about them, finding the original paperwork and filing a complaint eleven months later might require hiring lawyers—costing hundreds to thousands of dollars, depending on how many shipments you had.

This creates an unfair situation where big companies get most of their money back quickly using advanced procedures while small companies either get only part of their money back or spend it all on lawyers and paperwork.

Some experts have suggested Customs create a simpler refund process for small claims—for example, automatically refunding 90 percent of tariffs on imports under $100,000 without requiring all the paperwork, so small companies get some money back without hiring lawyers.

Customs hasn’t announced any such process and hasn’t said whether it will.

What This Means for You

The Supreme Court will decide whether Trump had the power to impose these tariffs. But what actually happens next—whether companies can get their money back, how long it takes, and whether they can handle all the paperwork—depends on how Customs runs the process and whether the Trump administration makes it fair.

Right now, the federal government has only switched to electronic payments. But it hasn’t said it will speed up the process or hire more staff for handling mass refund claims.

Companies that want the best chance of getting their money back have started filing lawsuits and gathering paperwork. Many haven’t, so thousands of companies might discover after the Supreme Court rules that they’ve missed important deadlines.

Even if you win at the Supreme Court, you might not get your money back from Customs. Winning the legal case is different from actually getting your money. Right now, the refund process favors companies with money and experienced staff and the ability to hire expensive lawyers to fight over each shipment.

Everyone else will discover how difficult the government can make it to get your money back.

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