Whose account does the refund land in?
FedEx, UPS and DHL, which paid the duty as customs brokers on imported parcels, have begun passing the government's refunds to the customers they billed. FedEx says it has started the process for the 800 million dollars it received and that customers do not need to apply. UPS said in April that it had paid 5 billion dollars in duties for clients and applied for 500 million dollars in a first phase, with customers seeing the money one to three months after the company is reimbursed by the Treasury.[1]
The buyer this channel selects is a narrow group. Most large overseas sellers paid the duty themselves and either wrote it into the invoice as a separate line or folded it into a higher price. The buyer who pays at the door appears only on shipments where a smaller seller left the bill to be settled on arrival, and that is exactly where the refund becomes traceable. A household that paid the same duty at the shelf holds no separate line showing what it paid. Another reading is available: the refund routes are still running in phases, and coverage may widen as the customs agency works through claims.[1]
The household that paid inside the price
The difference in scale shows up here. About 100 billion dollars has gone back to companies under the system run by U.S. Customs and Border Protection. The Tax Foundation puts the 2025 tariffs at an average tax increase of 1,000 dollars per US household, and most of that burden was paid indirectly. Money returning to a company's account does not travel back along the same road the household's money took.[1]
The big retailers' answer sharpens that split. Amazon received 600 million dollars in refunds in the second quarter, and finance chief Brian Olsavsky said the company is not the importer of record on most of what it sells, that it will automatically return money in the limited set of cases where it can trace a specific import charge to a customer, and that the rest will go into lower prices. Best Buy is the importer of record on only 2 per cent to 3 per cent of what it sells. A price cut delivers a gain, but it delivers it to whoever shops next, not to the household that paid two years ago and is not walking down that aisle today. Costco's promise to return the duty passed to consumers in some form ties the amount and the timing to the refunds it collects and to the lawsuit over the return process.[1]
What is left is the courtroom
For buyers who paid at the shelf, the route still open is litigation. Customers across the country have filed more than 80 class actions against retailers including Costco, Nike, Amazon and Walmart, and none of those suits has been certified as a class action. Lori Leskin of Arnold & Porter says plaintiffs will have to prove the price increase they paid came from the tariffs rather than some other market force, and that establishing this will be very hard. The burden of proof sits where the duty lost its trace.[1]
A week ago in this column I wrote that the refund returns to the importer that remitted the duty and that no return route was defined for the household. Part of that judgement has changed this week: the shipper channel works, and it does move money to households. What has not changed is whom the channel covers. If not one of the suits is certified as a class action by the end of the year, the refund that reaches households stays confined to the buyer the shipper billed; the signal to watch is the certification decisions in the filed cases and any settlement that is announced.[1], [2]