Why Your CAPE Refund May Take Longer Than 60 to 90 Days

CBP’s official guidance says that, after a CAPE declaration is accepted, refunds are generally issued within 60 to 90 days. That window includes roughly 45 days of CBP review plus Treasury processing through ACH.

It is a useful baseline. It is not a universal promise.

Many importers are reading “60 to 90 days” as a guarantee for every entry on their list. The CBP webinar and the Phase 1 Trade Information Notice tell a more cautious story: the published window applies to clean, eligible entries. Several other entry conditions sit inside Phase 1 but explicitly will not refund on that schedule.

If you treat the 60-to-90-day figure as a flat deadline, you will misalign cash flow forecasts, customer commitments, and internal reporting.

What CBP Actually Said About Timing

The official position has three parts:

Acceptance is the start of the clock, not submission. A declaration must pass initial validation and batch validation before the clock starts.
The 60-to-90-day window covers CBP’s internal review and Treasury’s ACH processing. CBP review is targeted at about 45 days, with the remainder for payment.
Certain entry statuses inside Phase 1 will not be liquidated or refunded on that schedule. They keep their existing liquidation posture and only move forward once that posture is resolved.

So the real question is not “is my entry in Phase 1.” It is “is my entry one of the clean Phase 1 entries that the 60-to-90-day window was designed for.”

The Statuses That Slow Phase 1 Down

The Trade Information Notice flags four statuses where Phase 1 will accept the entry but will not produce a fast refund:

Suspended liquidation — the entry’s normal liquidation has been paused, often for an enforcement, AD/CVD, or program reason.
Extended liquidation — CBP has extended the statutory liquidation period, usually to keep an entry open for review.
Under review — CBP is actively reviewing the entry for a substantive issue.
Warehouse and warehouse withdrawal — the entry sits in a warehouse-related posture and will not move on the standard schedule.

These entries can still be uploaded inside a CAPE declaration. CBP’s stated approach is to keep their existing liquidation status and refund them only after the underlying status is resolved.

That can take far longer than 90 days. Sometimes it depends on a separate enforcement action. Sometimes it depends on AD/CVD case timing. Sometimes it depends on a manual review queue.

Why “Accepted” Does Not Mean “Approved for Payment”

The ACE Portal CAPE flow has multiple gates. An entry has to clear all of them before money moves.

The CSV file has to load — anything over 1MB is rejected outright.
The declaration has to pass initial validation.
The declaration has to pass batch validation.
The declaration moves into a CBP review state.
CBP completes its review within roughly 45 days for clean entries.
Treasury issues the consolidated payment over ACH.

A claim status of Accepted or Accepted with Error(s) confirms that your filing is in the queue. It does not confirm that every entry on the list is approved for refund.

If you want to understand the difference between Accepted with Error(s) and a full rejection, see What to Do When CAPE Shows Accepted with Errors.

Why Some Entries Will Pay Faster Than Others on the Same Filing

CAPE refunds are consolidated. CBP groups entries by importer of record and by liquidation date, then issues one ACH payment for each group.

That has two consequences for timing:

A single declaration can produce multiple refund payments on different dates, because different liquidation dates land in different groups.
A clean entry sitting on the same declaration as a suspended entry will not be held up by the suspended one. The clean entry can still move on the standard 60-to-90-day track.

This is why your accounting team should expect several smaller deposits over time, not one lump sum hitting the account on day 90.

For more on why a deposit may not match what you calculated in advance, see Why Your IEEPA Refund May Not Match Your Estimate.

Operational Pre-Conditions That Quietly Add Weeks

Even on a clean Phase 1 entry, a refund will not arrive within 90 days if your basic ACE and ACH posture is not ready.

No usable ACH refund account on file. Refunds will not disburse until a valid refund account is in ACE. The account used for paying duties is not automatically the same account used to receive refunds.
ACE access tied to the wrong person. If the only Account Owner is no longer at the company, you will burn weeks just regaining administrative control.
Broker authorization gap. If the broker that filed the entries is no longer the one you work with, only an authorized broker or the importer of record can submit the CAPE declaration.
Entry list not de-duplicated. Duplicate entries inside or across declarations are rejected, which forces re-work and resets your acceptance clock.

If any of these are open issues, the published timing window simply does not start. The setup work has to happen first. See How to Set Up Your ACE Portal Account for CAPE Filings and ACH Enrollment Is Required Before You Can Receive an IEEPA Refund for the prerequisites.

What a Realistic Timing Plan Looks Like

A more honest internal plan should split your entries into three timing tiers:

Tier A — Clean, Phase 1 eligible, ACE and ACH ready. Plan for 60 to 90 days from declaration acceptance. Expect to receive multiple consolidated ACH deposits across the period, not a single lump sum.

Tier B — Phase 1 eligible but in a slower posture. Suspended, extended, under-review, warehouse, or warehouse-withdrawal entries. Plan for an open-ended timeline tied to the resolution of the underlying status. Forecast no specific date.

Tier C — Outside Phase 1. Final-liquidated entries, drawback, reconciliation, open protests, AD/CVD pending liquidation, and entries not properly reflected in ACE. These do not run on Phase 1 timing at all and need a different recovery strategy. See What to Do If Your Entries Are Outside CAPE Phase 1.

If your forecast assumes everything is Tier A, your forecast is wrong.

Communicating Timing Internally

A few communication practices reduce friction with finance, leadership, and customers:

Report per-tier expected timing, not a single number.
State that CAPE refunds are consolidated, so deposits arrive in groups.
State that no specific entry has a guaranteed payment date, even when it appears in an accepted declaration.
Reserve a separate line of communication for entries that may need a protest or CIT path instead of CAPE.

Setting expectations this way protects you from the most common internal complaint — “we filed weeks ago, where is the money” — when the real answer is that the entries you are waiting on were never on the fast track to begin with.

Next Step

If you are not sure how your entries split across the three timing tiers, start with How to Submit a CAPE Declaration in the ACE Portal and the step-by-step refund guide. For a deeper review of complex entries — multi-broker, foreign IOR, AD/CVD exposure, or open protests — request a confidential assessment.

We are not a law firm. We help importers understand the CAPE process and connect them with vetted trade-law professionals when a case needs legal judgment.

Update — May 20, 2026: CBP Now Officially Confirms the 60–90-Day Window

CBP refreshed its IEEPA Duty Refunds page on May 19–20 with roughly 15 FAQ items stamped “Updated 5/20/2026.” One of those items puts the refund-timing language directly on the agency’s own page for the first time, instead of leaving it in webinar slides and CSMS messages:

“Valid IEEPA refunds will generally be issued within 60–90 days following acceptance of the CAPE Declaration.” The same FAQ confirms that roughly 45 of those days are CBP processing time; the remainder covers liquidation, reliquidation, and Treasury ACH issuance.
The FAQ language uses the word “generally,” not a promise. The tier framework above (Tier A clean / Tier B slow posture / Tier C outside Phase 1) still drives the actual outcome on each entry. CBP’s update did not change which entry conditions sit in which tier.
CBP also confirmed on the same page that refunds can be reduced or paused entry-by-entry when the IOR has unpaid debts to CBP, and that CBP has paused sanctions and surety demands on unpaid IEEPA tariff bills — see our breakdown: CBP just paused IEEPA bill collection — here’s what it means if you still owe →.

If you communicated a hard 90-day deadline to finance or leadership, the May 20 FAQ language is the right citation to add to your forecast note — it is the first time the timing window appears in CBP’s own “frequently asked questions” voice.

Update — May 31, 2026: Real-World Turnaround Averaging 18 Days

CBP’s May 26 progress report to the CIT added a data point that changes the timing conversation: the average refund turnaround is ~18 days (~14 days for electronics/consumer goods) for entries that clear validation. That is significantly faster than the published 60–90-day window.

The caveats still matter:

The 18-day average applies to clean Phase 1 entries that pass both file and entry validation. The ~33% of declarations that fail file validation and ~22% of entries that fail entry validation are not in that average.
The Tier A / Tier B / Tier C framework above still holds. Suspended, under-review, warehouse, and otherwise atypical entries still run on their own timelines.
Thousands of refunds are still stuck on missing ACH banking information — the 18-day clock does not start until both validation and ACH are ready.

What to tell finance: Update your forecast to reflect that clean Tier A entries may land in 2–3 weeks rather than 2–3 months, but Tier B and Tier C entries still have no predictable date. And confirm ACH banking is live before you assume any entry is on the fast track.