How CBP Liquidation Deadlines Affect Refund Rights

Two importers paid the same IEEPA tariffs. One gets an easy refund. The other has to sue for it, or gets nothing.

The difference usually isn't the money or the merchandise. It's a date most importers never think about: when CBP liquidated the entry.

Liquidation deadlines quietly decide which refund path you get, and whether you still have one. Miss the wrong window and a valid refund can close for good.

Here's how the timing works, and why the calendar is the thing to watch.

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What "liquidation" actually means

Liquidation is CBP's final accounting on an entry. It's the moment CBP says "this shipment is settled, here's what was owed," and closes the book.

Until an entry liquidates, it's still open and easy to adjust. After it liquidates, the door starts closing.

Here's the part that surprises people. If CBP does nothing for a year, the entry liquidates on its own, at the rate you originally declared. That's called deemed liquidation. Your entries don't stay open indefinitely waiting for you to act.

So "we'll deal with it later" runs into a clock you didn't set.

Not sure whether your entries are open or already closed? Call us at (602) 649-3887 and we'll check where they stand.

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The date of liquidation controls your options, not the date you paid

Most importers think about when they paid the tariff. For refunds, that's the wrong date to watch.

Your options are set by when each entry liquidated. And entries don't liquidate all at once. They close on their own separate schedules, so a single importer can have entries in several different buckets at the same time.

That means part of your refund can be simple while another part is already at risk, all from the same year of imports.

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The windows, in plain English

Think of it as a ladder. The further an entry has gone down the ladder, the harder the refund.

Entries that are still open, or that liquidated very recently (within about 80 days), go through CBP's automated refund tool, CAPE, filed in the entry system. This is the easy path.

Once an entry has been finalized for longer than that, CBP's ability to just reopen it in the automated flow shuts off. These are the finalized entries, and the government's position is that refunds on them go only to importers who filed a lawsuit at the Court of International Trade (CIT), the federal court for customs disputes.

You may hear that entries in a middle window can be handled with a CBP protest, which is the standard form you file to dispute a liquidation. Be careful relying on that here. The trade court has treated IEEPA duty charges as not the kind of decision you can protest. So for these specific duties, the dependable way to protect a refund on a liquidated entry is a timely CIT case, not a protest.

Want us to map your entries to the right path before a window closes? Find out where your entries stand.

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The deadline most importers can't see

There's an outer limit on all of this.

The CIT's window to hear these refund cases runs two years from when the duties were paid. Once that runs, there's no recovery channel left, administrative or judicial.

The earliest IEEPA entries date to early 2025, so those deadlines start expiring in early 2027.

That sounds far away. It isn't, once you account for identifying every affected entry, confirming the IEEPA duties on each, and getting a complaint filed correctly. A blown statutory deadline has no late-filing fix.

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What to do now

Start by finding out where each entry sits. Open, recently liquidated, or finalized. That single fact decides your path and your urgency.

For open and recent entries, the CAPE filing may be all you need. For finalized entries, a CIT case is what preserves the claim, and the clock is already running toward early 2027.

At Frost Law AZ, our attorneys handle this from the entry-by-entry review through the CIT filing and the refund itself. We work alongside your customs broker, not around them.

Not sure which of your entries are still recoverable? Tell us what you're working with in the form below, and we'll give you a straight answer.