WORLD
Post-Supreme Court ruling, economists peg US tariff refunds to importers at $182 bn
- IBJ Bureau
- Mar 06, 2026
A federal judge has ordered the US government to begin paying refunds of President Donald Trump’s emergency tariffs that the US Supreme Court has deemed illegal.
This could ultimately return $168 billion to $182 billion to importers,analysts estimate.
The mechanism for doing that is far from clear, but Court of International Trade Senior Judge Richard Eaton has ordered the Customs and Border Protection (CBP) agency to report its initial ideas for a refund plan that would avoid thousands of individual lawsuits.
“I want to make it clear to the customs service that they have to refund any money that was unlawfully collected," Mr Eaton has told a hearing.
Economists of the University of Pennsylvania’s fiscal research group, Penn Wharton Budget Model, estimate that the CBP has collected up to $182 billion in gross revenue from tariffs imposed under the International Emergency Economic Powers Act (IEEPA) between February 4, 2025, and February 23, 2026.
The estimate, produced at the Reuters’ request, is derived from a ground-up forecasting model that cross-references tariffs on about 11,000 product categories across 233 countries.
Penn-Wharton has used an alternative method to reach a second estimate of about $177 billion in IEEPA tariff revenues. Economists have arrived at that figure by calculating the percentage of total US Treasury customs receipts that were IEEPA tariffs through December 14, then applying that same share to later customs receipts.
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