US Tariff Refunds: What UAE Amazon Sellers Can Claim in 2026

There are two kinds of Amazon sellers in the UAE right now: those who only sell on Amazon.ae, and those who also push inventory into Amazon US. For the first group, the biggest American trade story in years changes nothing — Emirates-side customs, the 5% duty, your FBA fees, all untouched. For the second group, Washington may literally owe you money, and there is a late-July date to plan shipments around.

Here is the Gulf seller’s version of the story — shorter than the American one, because half of it does not apply to us.

Key Takeaways

• The US Supreme Court ruled 6–3 in Learning Resources v. Trump (February 20, 2026) that IEEPA never authorized tariffs. All IEEPA tariffs ended February 24 — including the 10% baseline UAE exports to the US had paid since April 2025.
• That 10% is refundable. US Customs is processing roughly $166 billion in refunds through the CAPE process in its ACE portal (~$23 billion already approved). Valid claims pay in 60–90 days, with interest.
• The refund goes to the importer of record in the US. If you shipped DDP from Dubai, that is probably your freight forwarder, not you.
• UAE goods entering the US now pay a 10% Section 122 surcharge plus normal MFN duty — and Section 122 legally expires on July 24, 2026. What replaces it is unknown.
• Selling on Amazon.ae is completely unaffected. This is a cross-border story only.

First, the triage: is this your problem?

Your Amazon.ae business runs on UAE import rules — the flat 5% duty at Jebel Ali, 5% import VAT, done. Nothing in a US court ruling touches that, and if the domestic marketplace is your whole game, that playbook is unchanged. Same for sellers expanding regionally into Saudi Arabia.

This article is for the growing group of Gulf-based sellers running the cross-border model: UAE company, goods entering the United States, revenue on Amazon.com. For you, three things just changed — a refund, a new rate, and a deadline.

The refund: your 10% is coming back

From April 2025 until February 2026, UAE-origin goods entering the US paid a 10% “baseline” tariff imposed under IEEPA, a 1977 emergency-powers law. The Supreme Court has now said that law never allowed tariffs at all — the duties were collected without authorization, so US Customs and Border Protection is giving them back.

The mechanism is called CAPE, inside CBP’s ACE portal, in three phases. Phase 1 (most 2025–2026 entries) has been paying out since April 20. Phase 2 opened June 29 for reconciliation entries. Phase 3, targeted for late July, covers old finally-liquidated entries — but only for importers who sued at the US Court of International Trade, which almost no Gulf seller did. Realistically, Phase 1 is where your money sits.

For a UAE seller who moved, say, $150,000 of goods into the US during that window, the claim is around $15,000. With interest. That is worth an afternoon of paperwork in anyone’s dirhams.

The DDP trap: check who your importer of record was

Here is the part that decides whether that $15,000 is yours or someone else’s. CBP refunds the importer of record — the entity named on the US customs entry.

Many UAE sellers ship to Amazon US on DDP terms, where the forwarder or a US clearance agent handles entry under their own bond. Convenient — and it means they are the importer of record and the refund claim legally belongs to them, even though the duty was baked into your DDP price. If that is your setup, email your forwarder this week and ask, in writing: are you filing CAPE claims on entries that carried my goods, and how will the recovery be passed through? Most will keep quiet unless asked.

If you registered your own US importer of record — the cleaner setup for serious cross-border volume — pull your Form 7501 entry summaries from April 2025 through February 23, 2026, have your US broker isolate the IEEPA duty lines, and file the CAPE declaration.

What UAE-to-US freight pays today — and the July 24 cliff

The tariff-free window lasted exactly zero days. On February 24 the US imposed a replacement: a 10% global surcharge under Section 122 of the Trade Act, on top of normal MFN duty. So UAE-origin goods still pay roughly what they did before the ruling.

The difference is the clock. Section 122 is legally capped at 150 days, so it expires July 24, 2026, and only the US Congress can extend it. Nobody knows what follows. A 15% version has been floated, and in June Washington proposed new Section 301 actions covering some 60 trading partners — a list Gulf exporters should watch, because that tool has no expiry date.

Operationally: a container clearing US customs before July 24 has a known landed cost. One clearing in August does not. With a US reorder pending from Dubai, I would rather land it early and eat a few weeks of storage than gamble on an unknown rate — run that against your own storage math before copying me.

Sourcing China, selling America: re-run the numbers

The most common Gulf cross-border model — source in China, operate from the UAE, sell on Amazon US — gets a real margin update. China-origin goods entering the US now stack to about 35% (10% Section 122 + 25% Section 301, which survived the ruling untouched), down from the 45–55% panic rates of 2025. Products you shelved last year because tariffs killed the margin deserve a fresh spreadsheet.

Two warnings before anyone gets creative. First: routing Chinese goods through Dubai does not make them UAE-origin. Country of origin follows substantial transformation — where the product was actually made — not the shipping route, and US Customs treats transshipment-to-dodge-tariffs as fraud. Repacking in Jebel Ali changes nothing. Second: de minimis is still dead — CBP proposed rules on June 23 to keep sub-$800 parcels dutiable under a separate law, so direct-from-China small parcels are not coming back.

Your checklist this week

1. Amazon.ae only? Close the tab. Nothing to do.
2. Cross-border to the US? Identify the importer of record on every 2025–2026 US entry.
3. Own IOR → file the CAPE claim through your US broker. DDP → email your forwarder about the refund today, in writing.
4. Re-run US landed costs at the new rates — 10% + MFN for UAE-origin, ~35% for China-origin.
5. Time US-bound freight before July 24 where possible. Known cost beats unknown cost.

I track US trade policy the same way I track Gulf marketplace changes — as an operations task, not news to skim. Subscribe on YouTube so the July 24 deadline does not catch you mid-reorder.