A family of four in Columbus, Ohio, is still paying roughly $1,300 more per year on imported goods because of tariffs that the Supreme Court has since declared illegal. That figure comes from applying the pass-through rate established by economists at the Federal Reserve Bank of New York to the dollar volume of duties collected under the International Emergency Economic Powers Act (IEEPA) before the Court struck them down. The finding has not changed across years of data: American consumers, not foreign exporters, absorb close to 90 percent of every tariff dollar. Foreign sellers barely discount their prices. U.S. importers pay the full duty at the border, and those costs travel through the supply chain until they land on families buying washing machines, auto parts, and canned food.
Two Supreme Court rulings have now killed the legal authority behind those IEEPA tariffs. A federal court has opened the door for importers to claim refunds. Yet as of June 2026, grocery receipts and retail price tags have barely budged. The gap between courtroom victory and kitchen-table relief is one of the most consequential disconnects in American trade policy right now.
The Supreme Court shut the door on IEEPA tariffs twice
The decisive blow came in the Supreme Court’s 2025 term. In Docket No. 24-1287, Chief Justice John Roberts wrote for the majority that IEEPA did not grant the president authority to impose broad import tariffs. The statute, the Court held, was designed to address national security emergencies through financial sanctions and asset freezes, not to function as a backdoor mechanism for trade policy. The ruling invalidated the legal foundation for the duties.
A separate challenge during the same term had already weakened the administration’s position. The article relies on publicly reported accounts of two Supreme Court defeats involving IEEPA tariff authority during the 2025 term; however, the name, docket number, and exact decision date of the second case have not been confirmed in the sources available for this article. In that earlier case, the Court expressed pointed skepticism about stretching IEEPA’s text to cover commercial trade restrictions, rejecting the government’s argument that economic competition with a foreign nation constituted the kind of “unusual and extraordinary threat” the statute contemplated. Together, the two decisions closed off the legal pathway the executive branch had used to bypass Congress on tariff authority.
The specific executive orders that imposed the IEEPA-based tariffs have not been identified by number in the sources used for this article. Readers seeking to verify the original orders should consult the Federal Register entries referenced in the Supreme Court’s opinion in Docket No. 24-1287.
A federal court subsequently ruled that importers who had already paid duties under the voided orders could seek refunds. The Associated Press reported on the refund ruling, which opened the door for companies to file recovery claims with U.S. Customs and Border Protection. In theory, recovered money could eventually reach consumers through lower wholesale costs and retail prices. In practice, the path from a court order to a cheaper price tag at a big-box store is neither short nor guaranteed.
Who actually pays: what the New York Fed found
The New York Fed’s tariff research program, led by economists Mary Amiti, Stephen Redding, and David Weinstein, has been running since the first wave of broad U.S. import duties hit in 2018. Their work tracks prices at the border and follows costs downstream through warehouses, distributors, and retail shelves. The findings have been published through the bank’s Liberty Street Economics blog and in peer-reviewed journals, including the Journal of Economic Perspectives and the American Economic Review.
The core finding is blunt: when the U.S. imposed tariffs, foreign exporters did not cut their prices to absorb the hit. American importers paid the full duty, and those costs moved through the supply chain with minimal absorption along the way. Close to 90 percent of the tariff burden landed on domestic buyers. That conclusion has held across multiple rounds of duties, multiple years of trade data, and multiple peer-review cycles.
The $1,300-per-household estimate for IEEPA-specific tariffs is derived by applying that pass-through rate to the total revenue collected under the now-voided orders. It is a narrower slice of the full tariff picture. Broader analyses covering all active U.S. import duties, including Section 301 tariffs on Chinese goods and Section 232 tariffs on steel and aluminum that remain in effect under separate legal authority, have produced annual household cost estimates ranging from roughly $1,900 to over $3,800. Those figures appear across multiple publications from the Yale Budget Lab and the Tax Foundation; the specific reports, dates, and datasets behind the range have not been independently verified for this article. Both organizations have published research showing that lower-income families bear the heaviest proportional burden because they spend a larger share of their income on goods subject to duties.
Why prices have not come down
Courts can void a tariff. They cannot void a price increase that has already been written into supplier contracts, inventory valuations, and the pricing algorithms that large retailers use to set shelf prices across thousands of stores.
Economists call this “sticky pricing,” and it is one of the most reliable patterns in trade research. When a cost shock hits, businesses raise prices within weeks. When the shock reverses, the downward adjustment is slower, partial, or sometimes nonexistent. A 2020 study by economists Aaron Flaaen, Ali Hortacsu, and Felix Tintelnot, published in the Quarterly Journal of Economics, documented this dynamic in the U.S. washing machine market: prices jumped after tariffs were imposed in 2018 and did not fully retreat when exclusions were later granted. The new price simply became the baseline.
Concentrated market power reinforces the stickiness. In product categories dominated by three or four large companies, there is little competitive incentive to be the first mover on a price cut. If your two main rivals are holding prices steady, lowering yours means sacrificing margin without gaining much market share.
The refund process adds another layer of friction. Importers must file claims with Customs and Border Protection to recover duties paid under the invalidated orders. The timeline and total dollar volume of those refunds remain unclear as of June 2026. Smaller importers without dedicated trade compliance teams may struggle to navigate the paperwork. And even importers who do receive refunds face a business decision, not a legal obligation, about whether to pass savings along to customers or restore profit margins that were compressed during the tariff collection period.
The administration has not explained what happens next
One of the most notable gaps in the public record is the executive branch’s operational response to the court defeats. No detailed statement from the Treasury Department or the U.S. Trade Representative has surfaced explaining how tariff collection procedures changed after the Supreme Court opinions came down. Whether collections stopped immediately, were phased out, or whether the administration explored alternative legal authority for similar duties remains unclear from publicly available documents as of June 2026.
That silence has practical consequences. The speed of administrative compliance determines how quickly refunds reach importers and whether the legal victories translate into tangible relief for the households that absorbed the higher prices. Congressional oversight hearings have touched on the topic, but detailed operational disclosures have not followed. No timeline for completing the refund process has been made public.
Meanwhile, tariffs imposed under other statutes remain fully in effect. Section 301 duties on hundreds of billions of dollars in Chinese imports and Section 232 duties on steel and aluminum were not part of the IEEPA cases and were not affected by the Supreme Court rulings. For consumers, this means the IEEPA victories removed only one layer of added cost. The broader tariff architecture, and the household burden it carries, is still standing.
How solid is the evidence
Two pillars support this story, and both are strong. The Supreme Court opinions are primary legal records establishing that the IEEPA tariff orders exceeded the president’s statutory authority. The New York Fed’s research program provides the empirical backbone: institutional work with transparent methodology, peer review, and years of consistent findings. These carry substantially more weight than opinion columns or political talking points making similar claims from either direction.
The weaker link is the precise per-family dollar figure. The direction of the finding, that consumers pay the vast majority of the tariff bill, is robust across multiple independent research teams. The exact number depends on modeling choices about household spending patterns, product-level pass-through rates, and which tariffs are included in the calculation. The $1,300 estimate is a reasonable benchmark for the narrower set of IEEPA-based tariffs, but it should not be read as an exact invoice for any individual family. Spending patterns, geography, and household size all affect the real-world impact.
What families are still waiting for as refund claims stall in June 2026
The legal fight over IEEPA tariffs is largely settled. The economic fallout is not. American households absorbed costs from tariffs that two Supreme Court decisions declared unlawful, and the mechanisms that might return that money are moving slowly when they are moving at all.
Refund claims are grinding through Customs and Border Protection with no public timeline for completion. Retailers face no legal requirement to lower prices, and competitive dynamics in concentrated markets provide little incentive to do so voluntarily. Congress has not passed legislation addressing the gap between the court rulings and the prices families are still paying. No member of either chamber has introduced a bill specifically requiring that recovered tariff revenue be directed back to consumers.
The result is a situation where the law has changed but the cost of living has not caught up. Families won in court. They have not yet won at the register.
David M. Keller is a finance writer based in Columbus, Ohio, covering personal finance and consumer-focused economic topics. He earned his degree in journalism from Ohio University and began his career reporting on local business and economic trends for a regional media outlet. Since then, he has contributed to a variety of online publications, focusing on clear, practical coverage of topics such as cost of living, debt, and everyday financial decision-making.
