IEEPA tariff refunds: which of the three buckets your entries are in

The short answer: the IEEPA refunds are real and moving: roughly $106.6 billion in duties plus interest had been certified to Treasury as of August 21, 2026, per CBP’s sworn filings. Whether you see yours depends on one variable: how long ago each entry liquidated. Unliquidated or liquidated within 80 days: file through CAPE, no lawsuit needed. Liquidated longer ago: today, only importers who sue get those refunds. And $1.7 billion is sitting undelivered for want of bank account details.

What happened, in six dated beats

The Supreme Court held on February 20, 2026 (Learning Resources, Inc. v. Trump) that IEEPA “does not authorize the President to impose tariffs.” An executive order the same day ended the IEEPA duties (collection wound down “as soon as practicable,” not instantly). The refund machinery was then built at the Court of International Trade, where one judge hears every IEEPA refund case, and by CBP, which stood up a new ACE module called CAPE to process refunds at volume: Phase 1 (April 20, 2026) for unliquidated and recently-liquidated entries, and Phase 2 (June 29) adding reconciliation-flagged entries. A Phase 3 for finally liquidated plaintiff entries is still in development. CBP’s refund guidance lists entries “for which liquidation is final” among the types it is evaluating for later deployments, with no date attached. CBP estimates the total exposure at $166 billion across 53 million entry summaries.

The three buckets

Bucket 1: unliquidated entries. Covered since April. CBP is directed to liquidate them without IEEPA duties. File a CAPE declaration (a CSV of entry numbers submitted in the ACE portal by the importer of record or its broker); no lawsuit required.

Bucket 2: entries liquidated within the last 80 days. Also covered, no lawsuit, but this is the bucket with a real clock. CBP’s guidance says it plainly: “ACE accepts CAPE Declarations containing entries liquidated within the preceding 80 days.” An entry summary more than 80 days past its liquidation date is rejected. The 80 days run from each entry’s own liquidation date, not from any program date, which means entries are aging out of this bucket every single day. CBP has not said why the cutoff is 80 days rather than the 90 that section 1501 gives it to reliquidate an entry on its own. This is the bucket where a week of delay costs real money.

Bucket 3: finally liquidated entries (more than 80 days). CAPE has never accepted one. The court’s July 17, 2026 order, entered case by case in more than 3,700 dockets, directs reliquidation of such entries for plaintiffs only, and the government’s own brief says refunds on finally liquidated entries are available “as long as the importer files a complaint in this Court.” Roughly 4,000 importers have sued so far, with new complaints filed daily. A pending class action (argued August 19, undecided) could extend relief to importers who haven’t sued; until it’s decided, the suit-or-not question is a live decision to make with trade counsel, with real dollar amounts attached.

The $1.7 billion nobody has picked up

As of August 21: 22,170 certified refunds, about $1.7 billion, not transmitted to Treasury because the importer (or its Form 4811 designee) has no ACH bank account information on file. The court has twice urged filers to fix this. Refunds are electronic-only now. If you’ve filed a CAPE declaration and seen nothing, check your ACH setup in ACE before assuming the system failed; this is the highest-value, lowest-effort item in the entire program. Also know the common rejection reasons: 5.9 million submitted entries failed validation, mostly because they were past the 80-day window (bucket 3), carried no IEEPA duty line, or were duplicates.

What CAPE still won’t take

Entries with open protests (functionality in development, no date), entries designated on drawback claims, entries not filed in ACE, AD/CVD entries for which Commerce has issued liquidation instructions but that are still pending liquidation under 19 U.S.C. 1504(d), and low-value de minimis questions, which every order in this line expressly carves out to separate litigation.

On “deadlines”: what’s actually known

The only official date we can verify in the program is September 8, 2026, and it’s merely the comment deadline on CBP’s paperwork notice; nothing is forfeited by ignoring it. There is no published deadline for filing CAPE declarations. For court actions, the two-year limitations statute is real, but no court has fixed when the clock started, and it plausibly varies with each importer’s own entries. Treat any specific 2027 date you’ve seen as an unverified outer-boundary estimate. The honest planning rule: bucket 2 is urgent by definition, bucket 3 is a counsel conversation worth having soon, and neither benefits from waiting.

What we’re doing for importers this month

Reconciling entry lists against liquidation dates (that’s what sorts your book into buckets), filing CAPE declarations for buckets 1 and 2 before entries age out, confirming ACH details so certified money actually arrives, and preparing the entry-level numbers an importer needs to decide, with counsel, whether bucket 3 justifies a complaint. If you paid IEEPA duties in 2025 and haven’t sorted your entries yet, send us your entry numbers and we’ll map the buckets for you.

Verified against CBP’s published CAPE guidance, its sworn court declarations, the CIT’s orders, and the Federal Register as of September 2, 2026. Phase 3 status, the class action, and the dollar figures all move at the pace of the court’s closed status conferences. Those are set one at a time and do not appear on the court’s public calendar, so expect this picture to move again. We update this post as it does. General information, not legal advice.

Sources

• Learning Resources, Inc. v. Trump, 607 U.S. 229 (Feb. 20, 2026); EO 14389, 91 FR 9437
• CBP, CAPE refund worksheet notice, 91 FR 42207 (July 8, 2026) ($166B / 53M entries; CAPE mechanics)
• CIT, In re Tariffs Collected in Reliance on IEEPA, order of July 17, 2026 (plaintiff-only reliquidation of finally liquidated entries)
• Declarations of CBP’s Executive Director, Trade Programs, filed Aug. 25, 2026, and CIT orders of Aug. 27, 2026, Freestyle World, Inc. v. United States, CIT No. 26-01088 (all dollar figures, phase status, ACH backlog)
• CBP, “IEEPA Duty Refunds” (the 80-day CAPE intake rule and the list of entry types still under evaluation; page updated September 2, 2026)
• CSMS #68340863 (April 13, 2026: the April 20 Phase 1 deployment, and rejection of any entry summary over 80 days past the liquidation date)
• 19 U.S.C. 1501 (CBP’s 90-day window to reliquidate an entry on its own initiative, cited as background, not as the reason CAPE cuts off at 80 days)