Tariff refunds after final liquidation: CAPE Phase 3 opens October 6 — who can file, who must wait

CAPE Phase 3 opens on October 6, 2026 — but only for one group. CBP stated in a September 15, 2026 court filing that Phase 3 covers finally liquidated entries filed by plaintiffs for which the Court of International Trade has ordered reliquidation, and that plaintiffs who submitted a valid importer of record number to CBP by July 30, 2026 will be able to file CAPE Declarations from that date. Everyone else, including non-plaintiffs with older liquidated entries, has no published date. Find your pathway below before you file anything.

Which group are you in: the two pathways

Everything below depends on one question: are you a reliquidation plaintiff with an importer of record number on file by July 30, 2026? Read both blocks and stop at the one that describes you.

What CBP told the court on September 15

The date comes from a declaration filed with the Court of International Trade on September 15, 2026 by Brandon Lord, Executive Director of Trade Programs at U.S. Customs and Border Protection, in Freestyle World, Inc. v. U.S. Customs and Border Protection, Ct. No. 26-01088 (Doc 50). The operative sentences:

CBP will deploy CAPE Phase 3, which covers finally liquidated entries filed by plaintiffs for which the Court has ordered reliquidation, on October 6, 2026.

Plaintiffs who submitted a valid importer of record number to CBP by July 30, 2026, will be able to file CAPE declarations for Phase 3 as of October 6, 2026.

CBP will provide additional instructions regarding CAPE Phase 3 to the plaintiffs who provided an importer of record number after July 30, 2026.

Three things follow. The deployment date is October 6, 2026. The population is finally liquidated entries filed by plaintiffs for which the court ordered reliquidation — narrower than “everyone with an old entry”. And the first filing cohort is gated on an importer of record number submitted by July 30, 2026, with the group that missed that date promised further instructions rather than a date.

Why Phase 3 had to exist: ACE accepts CAPE Declarations containing entries liquidated within the preceding 80 days, so CBP can still reliquidate by day 90 under 19 U.S.C. § 1501. A CIT order issued July 17, 2026 directed CBP to reliquidate, without regard to IEEPA duties, entries belonging to plaintiffs liquidated for more than 80 days — and finally liquidated entries sit outside the window the portal was built around.

Why CBP’s own page still says otherwise

Check CBP’s own IEEPA Duty Refunds page and you will not find the date, which is expected. As of September 19, 2026 it carries Last Modified: Sep 02, 2026, the string Phase 3 appears in it zero times, and it still files the finally-liquidated population under future work — listing among the types CBP is “evaluating … in subsequent deployments of CAPE” the bullet: Entries for which liquidation is final.

So the sourcing statement has to be exact: October 6, 2026 is a CBP statement in a court filing, not a published CBP announcement. The CSMS message channel carries no Phase 3 message either — the newest CAPE CSMS in the record is #69127837, July 2, 2026, about warehouse entries. The date has been in law-firm and trade-press circulation since September 16, 2026, but the primary is the declaration. A filing dated September 15 has simply not reached a page last touched on September 2: treat the agency page as lagging, not as contradicting.

What changed, and what did not: the delay first, then the date

The trade press reads as if two positions conflict — “Phase 3 delayed, no new date” against “Phase 3 launches October 6”. It is one record with two dated states, both on the docket.

Write the second state; keep the first as history. Pages presenting the August delay as current are describing a superseded declaration. The deployment CBP originally targeted — the end of July, for a phase that would have handled roughly $11.4 billion of IEEPA tariffs — is not the date that governs. What has not changed is what the delay was about: the validations that keep non-IEEPA duty adjustments off finally liquidated entries, and the requirement that the first cohort be identified by an importer of record number already on file.

CAPE by the numbers: as of 3 p.m. ET, September 11, 2026

Every figure here is CBP’s, reported in the September 15, 2026 declaration as of 3 p.m. eastern time on Friday, September 11, 2026. None of it is our tally, and the bases are not interchangeable — which is why the third column exists.

Read the third column before quoting any of it. “Accepted for processing” and “certified to Treasury” are two stages of one pipeline; the Treasury figures further down are a third basis again, money actually paid as booked, and adding them together would double count. The 20,184 untransmitted refunds are why ACH details head the checklist below: those refunds are not disputed, they are undeliverable.

The legal layer: a class-certification motion, and what protests cannot do

If the pathways above leave you outside CAPE, two things are on the record, and they are not equivalent.

The pending class-certification motion

The mechanism for importers who are not reliquidation plaintiffs is a class-certification motion under Rule 23(b)(2) filed in V.O.S. Selections, Inc., et al. v. Donald J. Trump, et al., No. 25-00066-RKE (Ct. Intl. Trade), Doc 99, on June 4, 2026. It moves for an order certifying a class and, on certification, for an injunction directing the government to make CAPE available to process and pay refund claims, with interest, for all class members. Oral argument was held August 6, 2026. A parallel class motion was filed in Freestyle World (Ct. No. 26-01088, Doc 18) on June 23, 2026.

Two precision points. The proposed class is defined by CAPE ineligibility, which is broader than “finally liquidated entries”. And the motion is pending — it seeks to let importers recover refunds on finally liquidated entries without each filing an individual suit, and it has not been granted. Reporting it as settled relief reads a request as a ruling.

What protests do and do not do

A 180-day protest period exists, and importers routinely assume it is the fallback. On the current authority it is not a clean substitute for the finally-liquidated problem. In the September 18, 2026 analysis published by Ward and Smith, the existence of a 180-day protest period does not answer the Phase 3 problem, because “the question is not simply whether 180 days have elapsed since liquidation, but whether the particular issue the importer seeks to challenge is a decision Customs had authority to make.” The same analysis concludes that current authority does not establish that filing such a protest is either required to preserve the pure IEEPA claim or sufficient to obtain the refund on an older entry. Protests remain a real part of customs practice — do not let a protest deadline lapse on a different, protestable issue without advice — but a protest is not the Phase 3 answer for a non-plaintiff.

CAPE Phase 1 and Phase 2: the route that already exists

Phase 3 is the newest layer, not the only one. Phase 1 became available in ACE at 7:11 a.m. eastern time on Monday, April 20, 2026, and takes certain unliquidated entries and entries liquidated within the preceding 80 days — the 80-day figure being what leaves CBP room to reliquidate by day 90 under 19 U.S.C. § 1501. Phase 2 deployed new CAPE functionality at 5 a.m. eastern time on Monday, June 29, 2026, beginning with entries flagged for reconciliation (types 01, 02, 06) where the reconciliation entry (type 09) has not been filed.

Which is why this section sits below the Phase 3 material: if your entry is unliquidated or within 80 days of liquidation, your route was never Phase 3. It is Phase 1, and the question that governs you is not whether a window is open but whether your entry has aged past 80 days since liquidation.

The August 2026 Treasury data

Treasury’s Monthly Treasury Statement for August 2026, released September 11, 2026, is the first month that reads like the refund surge is behind us: customs duties in at $23.377B, refunds out at $10.541B, a net +$12.836B — the first net-positive month since April 2026. In June the same ledger was −$25.556B.

How to read these numbers. The label is Treasury’s MTS Customs Duties line: all customs duties — IEEPA, Section 232, Section 301 and ordinary duties together — not IEEPA alone, and there is no IEEPA-only monthly figure in the primary data. The $166B total is the one exception to this page’s sourcing rule: no primary document we could reach carries it, so it is attributed rather than asserted. Three refund totals circulate on three bases — paid (Treasury MTS), accepted for processing and certified to Treasury (CBP court filings) — and this page does not add them together.

Receipts are steady: every month since March 2026 has landed between $20B and $25B of gross customs receipts, six consecutive months on Treasury’s own line (counts that start from April say five). Refunds were the entire story and they peaked hard — June’s $49.183B is 4.7× August’s $10.541B. One figure worth separating: monthly receipts peaked in October 2025, and the widely quoted $31.354B for that month is the net line; gross was $33.090B.

Refund-status timeline: February 2026 to today

Authority note (September 19, 2026): the first row below is the ruling this timeline runs from, and Learning Resources, Inc. v. Trump (No. 24-1287) is also the starting point for who may impose a duty at all. As of September 19, 2026 a fifth mechanism is law: H.R. 5334, the Lindsey O. Graham Sanctioning Russia and Iran Act of 2026, signed into law on September 18, 2026, with ceilings of up to 500 percent on Russia and up to 100 percent on the secondary measure. No public-law number is published yet, and this page asserts none. For what the Court’s IEEPA ruling did and did not decide, see the authority comparison.

What to do now if you overpaid IEEPA duties

1. Fix your pathway first. Reliquidation plaintiff with an importer of record number on file by July 30, 2026 — you have October 6, 2026. Anyone else has no published date, and an ineligible claim gets a rejection, not a refund. Verify with CBP or a licensed customs broker.
2. Get your ACE Portal account and ACH details current now. Refunds are ACH only, and CBP withholds a refund until current US bank details are on file. CBP’s September 15 filing reports 20,184 refunds, approximately $1.3 billion, not transmitted because Automated Clearing House account information was never provided by the importer of record or its CBP Form 4811 designee.
3. Confirm you are the party who can file. Only the importer of record, or the licensed customs broker who filed the entries, may submit a CAPE Declaration; attorneys cannot. Refunds go to the importer of record or the Form 4811 notify party, so consumers cannot claim even where the duty reached them in the price.
4. Check whether Phase 1 covers you instead. Unliquidated entries and entries liquidated within the preceding 80 days are Phase 1 — the 80 days leave CBP time to reliquidate by day 90 under 19 U.S.C. § 1501. Inside that window, your route is today, not a wait. Verify each entry’s liquidation status — this is the step importers most often get wrong.
5. File through the CAPE tab in the ACE Portal, not ABI. It is a CSV of entry numbers, up to 9,999 entries per declaration. An accepted declaration cannot be amended and each entry may appear on only one accepted declaration, so screen the list first.
6. Do not use a Post Summary Correction. CBP’s CAPE notice prohibits starting an IEEPA refund request with a PSC; only the CAPE Declaration does.
7. Expect 60–90 days from acceptance, with interest. That includes about 45 days of CBP processing plus Treasury certification; interest runs under 19 U.S.C. § 1505. Verify an individual claim with CBP or a licensed customs broker.
8. If you are outside both phases, do not file to “get in the queue”. For a finally liquidated entry with no reliquidation order of your own, Phase 3 supplies no route merely because it opens on October 6, 2026. The mechanism seeking to change that is the pending class-certification motion in V.O.S. Selections; a protest is not established as a substitute. If the exposure is material, take advice from trade counsel.

One more mechanic: if you owe CBP money, a refund can be offset against outstanding CBP debt under 19 CFR § 24.72, and non-IEEPA amounts stay due.

Refund questions importers are asking

Last verified: September 19, 2026 (ET). Every figure here was re-derived from the primary documents named beside it — the September 15, 2026 declaration of Brandon Lord in Ct. No. 26-01088 (Doc 50), the August 25, 2026 declaration in the same case (Doc 38), and the Treasury Fiscal Data API (MTS Table 4 and Table 1). The one figure that is not from a primary source, the ≈$166B refund total ordered by the courts, is labelled as attributed. For CAPE as a whole no portal-wide deadline is published on any CBP surface reviewed here; for the Phase 3 population a date exists, and it is stated above with its source and its cut-off.

Key sources: Declaration of Brandon Lord, Ct. No. 26-01088 (Doc 50), filed 09/15/2026 · Declaration of Brandon Lord (Doc 38), filed 08/25/2026 · Plaintiff’s Motion for Class Certification, V.O.S. Selections (Doc 99), filed 06/04/2026 · Kelly M. Reid (Ward and Smith), After Learning Resources: Liquidation, Protests, and IEEPA Tariff Refunds (Sept 18, 2026) · CBP, IEEPA Duty Refunds (FAQ) · CBP, CAPE Trade User Information Notice (updated Jul 10, 2026) · CBP Fact Sheet, IEEPA Duty Refunds (Apr 17, 2026) · Treasury Fiscal Data — MTS Table 4 · Shapiro (Sept 16, 2026) · Leyton (Sept 17, 2026) · Barnes & Thornburg (Sept 11, 2026) · White House, H.R. 5334 signed into law (Sept 18, 2026)

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