Over 40 S&P 500 companies have booked $9.6 billion in tariff refunds and Apple alone reported nearly $2.2 billion. Goldman Sachs put the consumer share of the tariff bill at 55%. Whether any of it comes back to you depends on one line of a customs entry.
US Customs and Border Protection has authorized more than $100 billion in refunds since the Supreme Court struck down the IEEPA tariffs in February. The money goes to the importer of record, the entity whose name sits on the customs entry, and to nobody else. Goldman Sachs estimated that US consumers absorbed 55% of the tariff cost by the end of 2025 and US businesses 22%. Refunds do not follow that split. They follow the paperwork.
That gap is why over 80 class-action lawsuits are now working through federal courts, why FedEx is wiring $800 million back to shippers while Costco talks about lower prices, and why the same refund shows up as an earnings beat at one company and a liability at another.
What Happened
The Wall Street Journal counted more than 40 S&P 500 companies reporting roughly $9.6 billion in tariff refunds over the past quarter, with at least $2.1 billion of that landing as cash. Apple took the largest single amount at nearly $2.2 billion, followed by Nike at $986 million, FedEx at about $800 million, Amazon at $640 million and General Motors at $500 million.
The earnings effect is real where it lands. Apple said refunds added 11 cents to per-share earnings, about 5% of the quarter. GE HealthCare said refunds contributed 18 cents of the $1.24 it reported for the quarter ended June 30, having collected $107 million with $38 million still expected.
Customs had taken in just over 252,000 refund applications by July 31 and accepted $128.7 billion for processing, an agency official told a federal court last week. Cato Institute analysis of the CBP filings found that as of June 29 the agency had authorized $104.29 billion and paid out $71.06 billion including interest. Those approvals covered close to 60% of the government’s total obligation but only 30% of the affected entries, which tells you the queue is sorted by entry size. Judge Richard Eaton observed that the early money went to large importers including Walmart and Ford.
Meanwhile the tariff bills keep arriving. Caterpillar booked $392 million in expected recoveries and told investors its outlook assumes no further ones, against $2.2 billion of tariff payments it still expects to make this year.
The Backstory
The Supreme Court decided Learning Resources, Inc. v. Trump on February 20, 2026, holding that the International Emergency Economic Powers Act gives a president no tariff authority. Collection stopped four days later. The ruling said nothing about refunds, so the Court of International Trade ordered CBP to build a mechanism, and CBP built CAPE, the Consolidated Administration and Processing of Entries. Phase 1 opened April 20 and covered roughly 63% of affected entries. Court declarations put the total at about 330,000 importers, $166 billion and more than 53 million entries.
Three filters have shaped who gets paid, and each one strips out whoever kept the least documentation.
The first is liquidation status. Entries already finalized more than 80 days before the refund clock started sit in a disputed category, and on June 2 the Justice Department appealed to the Federal Circuit specifically to contest CBP’s obligation to refund them. Holland & Knight’s reading of the CIT orders is blunt about the consequence: importers that filed their own suits have a court-ordered path to that money, and importers that did not have no confirmed one.
The second filter is who cleared customs. Best Buy’s outgoing CEO Cori Barrie told investors in May that the chain is importer of record on only about 2% to 3% of what it sells. Amazon’s CFO said the company is not the importer on most of its goods either. For nearly everything on a big-box shelf, the refund stops at a supplier the shopper has never heard of.
The third filter is traceability, and it is the one killing the consumer lawsuits. Plaintiffs have sued Costco, Nike, Amazon and Walmart, and not one case has been certified as a class action. Lori Leskin of Arnold & Porter told the Associated Press that proving a specific price increase came from tariffs rather than from any other cost pressure is close to impossible, because retailers price on many inputs at once.
The Plan
Three responses have emerged, and they track how visible the tariff was on the customer’s document.
Carriers that itemized the duty are paying it back. FedEx began disbursing its $800 million this month, framing itself as a pass-through that had a legal duty to collect. UPS told investors in April it had paid $5 billion in tariffs for clients and applied for an initial $500 million across 2.5 million entries, with money reaching customers one to three months after Treasury reimburses it. DHL has filed on almost all eligible shipments where it was importer of record.
Industrial suppliers that ran tariff surcharges are splitting the money. IDEX, which sells pumps and valves, expects to rebate $14.7 million of the more than $20 million it received, roughly two thirds.
Retailers that buried the cost in shelf prices are converting it into future price competitiveness. Amazon identified a “limited set of circumstances” where it can trace a specific import charge to a specific customer and will refund those automatically. Everything else funds lower prices. Best Buy said it would return value to customers. Costco has said it plans to pass refunds back in some form at levels similar to what it passed on, while telling the court the process could take months.
The Business Model Angle
Itemizing a cost and burying it in the price look like the same decision until the cost reverses.
FedEx put the duty on the invoice as a separate line. That made the charge easy to justify at the time and made the refund a liability the moment the Supreme Court ruled, because the document proves who paid. Costco raised shelf prices. Nobody can point at a receipt and show which cents were tariff, which is exactly the evidentiary hole Arnold & Porter describes, and it is why Costco can talk about future value rather than restitution. The retailer that was vaguest about the cost ended up owning the reversal.
FedEx then went one step further and priced the speed of its own compliance. Customers who opt into limited shipment and refund data sharing through the FedEx portal go into the first disbursement wave. Customers who decline still get paid, on a slower timeline. FedEx turned the return of money it never owned into a data consent event, at zero cost, from a captive audience with a reason to log in. UPS applies refunds against open account invoices before cutting anyone a check, which converts a payable into collections on receivables it already had.
Run the arithmetic on the consumer channel. Goldman’s 55% incidence estimate against the $166 billion collected puts the consumer share of the burden near $91 billion. The announced carrier pass-through programs total about $1.3 billion, FedEx’s $800 million plus UPS’s first $500 million tranche. That is under 2% of what consumers carried. Even a generous upper bound, assuming UPS eventually returns the full $5 billion it paid on behalf of clients and DHL matches, lands under 7%. Goldman’s number is an economy-wide incidence estimate rather than a traceable per-transaction figure, and both carrier programs will grow. The order of magnitude does not change.
The Risk
The refund is not settled money. Of the $9.6 billion S&P 500 companies have reported, only $2.1 billion had arrived as cash. Zebra Technologies concluded it would recover all $73 million of its past tariff payments, held $14 million in cash at quarter end, booked the rest as a receivable and had collected $41 million by July 31. Fortive recognized $4.5 million and expects as much as $25 million more. Those receivables sit against a defendant that has appealed.
Investors are also capitalizing a one-time reversal. The tariff expense hit earlier quarters. The refund lands in this one, and where a company runs it through cost of sales it lifts gross margin, the line analysts extend forward. e.l.f. Beauty is the cleanest example: strip its roughly $50 million refund out and the adjusted EBITDA margin was 24.6% against 24.6% a year earlier, with all of the reported expansion coming from the refund. We covered that quarter in e.l.f. Beauty Spent Its $50 Million Tariff Refund Testing Its Own Prices.
The other risk runs the opposite direction. IEEPA died, and the tariff regime did not. A 10% Section 122 surcharge ran from February to July, and Section 301 forced-labor duties of 10% to 12.5% on 60 economies took effect the same minute Section 122 expired. Caterpillar’s $2.2 billion of expected tariff payments this year is the shape of the problem. Companies are booking a rebate on a dead program while paying into a live one.
Quick Questions
Do consumers get anything back? Some do. If you paid duty directly to FedEx, UPS or DHL on an overseas order, the money is coming back to the card or account you used, with no application needed. If you paid it inside a retail price, no.
Why does Customs pay the importer rather than the shopper? The importer of record deposited the duty and is the party with standing under federal trade law. Nothing in the statute reaches the person downstream who absorbed the cost.
Are the class actions likely to succeed? More than 80 have been filed and none has been certified. Attribution is the obstacle, not intent.
Which companies benefited most? Technology hardware leads at about $2.5 billion across half a dozen companies, and Apple is close to 90% of that. More than a dozen capital-goods companies reported around $1.3 billion, including Deere at $272 million, Lockheed Martin at $140 million over six months and Stanley Black & Decker at $118 million.
How big was the hit to households? The Tax Foundation put the 2025 tariffs at an average tax increase of about $1,000 per US household.
The Business Model Analyst Take
Whether you can recover a cost depends on whether you documented it, and the documentation choice gets made years before anyone needs it.
Every operator running a surcharge, a fuel adjustment, a delivery fee or a pass-through line is making that choice now. Put the cost on its own line and you get clean justification, easier customer conversations and a paper trail that will follow you when the cost reverses. Fold it into the price and you own the upside, at the cost of a lawsuit you will probably win and a customer relationship you might not.
Both positions are defensible. What is not defensible is picking one by accident. FedEx knew it was a collection agent and built the portal. Costco knew it was a merchant and priced accordingly. The companies with a problem are the ones that told customers a price increase was about tariffs, in a press release or an app notification, and then treated the refund as ordinary income. That combination is what 80 sets of plaintiffs’ lawyers are reading right now.
Check what your invoices actually say. The answer to who owns a reversal was written on them a long time ago.
