The Trump administration has refunded about $100 billion in tariffs in response to the Supreme Court ruling that declared the tariffs illegal, according to a new court filing this week.
Major corporations are getting huge refunds: $2.2 billion for Apple, $1.3 billion for Ford, $600 million for Amazon. (Amazon executive chairman Jeff Bezos owns the Washington Post.)
While some companies have said they will use the refunds to reduce their prices, experts say not to expect many price cuts. Kimberly Clausing, a UCLA professor who served as a tax policy official under the Biden administration, said some companies don’t feel confident enough to change their prices based on the revoked tariffs, since President Donald Trump has replaced those levies with others that are also likely to be partially or completely thrown out by courts.
“If you’re a firm, you’re wondering what the tariff policy is,” Clausing said. “Some of that pass-through to consumer prices has been slower than you might think if it were really permanent policies. That’s good news in the short term for consumers, but it also means you won’t necessarily see as big a swing in the other direction.” She noted that some companies were simply “gambling” all along that the import taxes would be thrown out in court, rather than raising prices much in the first place.
Even if they paid higher costs because of the now-invalidated tariffs, most American households won’t see any of the refund money directly.
The Tax Foundation estimates that the average U.S. household spent an extra $1,000 as a result of the tariffs in 2025, most of it relating to the specific tariffs that have been overturned.
Because Trump has since replaced most of those tariffs with new ones authorized in a different way, the organization estimates the average household will pay about $900 extra in 2026.
So why aren’t many individual consumers getting compensated alongside big companies?
In response to the Supreme Court ruling, U.S. Customs and Border Protection set up a process for requesting refunds. To use the system, the payers have to be registered with the government as an “Importer of Record” or an authorized Customs broker — in other words, not just someone who ordered an item on the internet that was made in a foreign country and ended up paying more for it.
If you paid a tariff on something you had shipped to you by UPS or FedEx, you can look up your tracking number for the shipment on the companies’ websites. If the companies got money back for your shipment, they are supposed to send you the refund.
Amazon said in a quarterly earnings call that it plans to send refunds to individual customers in limited cases for which it can identify customers who paid more due to tariffs. The company said it would “proactively contact” those customers but did not provide more information about how it would find them.
Some other companies that raised prices to accommodate the tariffs are taking heat for not passing on the refunds. Customers are suing Ford and Costco, among others.
Alan Sykes, a trade law expert at Stanford Law School, said he doesn’t think the customers have much to go on.
“They willingly paid the higher price. Ford could have raised the price of the car for any arbitrary reason. … You don’t have a claim,” Sykes said. “Certain companies are saying they’re going to lower their prices going forward … not because of a legal imperative, but a public relations logic.”
Matilde Bombardini, an economist at the University of California at Berkeley, said she understands the logic of a customer who wants money back.
She said research suggests that importers who paid 10% more because of the tariffs typically charged their customers about 3% more and absorbed the rest. “Costco’s getting back the whole 10%,” she said. “Conceptually, we could all agree that the 3% should go back to the consumers.”
She noted that the refunds are likely unprecedented in scope. The tariffs that were invalidated applied to almost all categories of goods from every country in the world, though there were some exemptions.
In the court filing this week, a Customs and Border Protection official said companies have filed more than 178,000 valid claims to refund tariffs on more than 25 million imports since the claim system opened in April, leading to more than $100 billion in refunds and interest so far.
