The Tariff Went Away. The Surcharge Didn’t.

In February, the Supreme Court ruled 6–3 that the president never had the authority to impose the reciprocal tariffs — the across-the-board import duties that took effect in April 2025. They were struck down, and Customs opened a process to refund the duties importers had already paid. (The administration briefly replaced them with a smaller Section 122 surcharge, which itself expired in July.)

The broad tariff layer, in other words, has largely gone. Not every “tariff surcharge” on a supplier’s invoice has gone with it.

That’s the thread to pull. A tariff surcharge is supposed to track a tariff. When the tariff shrinks or disappears and the surcharge holds, it has stopped measuring a cost and started being a price.

How the label got loose

Two things happened in 2025 that most owners lived through without connecting them.

The first: the surcharge turned from a disclosure into a tool. When input costs rose, suppliers found that attaching the word “tariff” to an increase did something a plain price hike couldn’t — it moved the reason to Washington. A price increase invites you to push back or shop around. A “tariff surcharge” tells you the increase is external, temporary, and nobody’s fault, so you absorb it and move on. The New York Fed, surveying manufacturers and service firms last year, found “a significant share” of companies raised prices on goods that weren’t subject to any tariff at all. The label traveled faster than the tariffs did.

The second: some surcharges were never the size of the tariff to begin with. Ubiquiti is facing a class action alleging its 7.2% “Tariff Surcharge Fee” ran higher than the duties it actually owed, and that it kept the money after the tariffs were struck. Comparable suits have been filed against Costco, FedEx, and others; the allegations are unproven. How widespread this is, nobody has cleanly measured — which is why the only reliable read is your own invoices, not an average.

One caution, because it matters. The point isn’t that your suppliers are cheating you — most pass-through was real, and not every tariff vanished. The steel and aluminum duties were imposed under a different law, untouched by the ruling, and are still in force; a surcharge tied to those is legitimate. What changed is narrower: you can no longer assume the number is what it claims to be, and now you have a clean way to test it.

Why a temporary cost turns permanent

This is not new, and it is not really about tariffs. Fuel surcharges arrived twenty years ago as a temporary line item to cover a diesel spike; two decades later they are permanent, and when diesel falls, carriers reset the floor so the surcharge drops slower than the cost behind it. Economists have a name for the wider pattern — “rockets and feathers”: a price rises fast when a cost rises and drifts down slowly, if at all, when it falls. Part of the reason is us. Once a higher number has sat on the invoice for a while, buyers treat it as the new normal and stop questioning it. A cost blamed on policy speeds that up — it arrives pre-labeled as external and temporary, so no one argues with it, and by the time the policy is gone the number has already set.

What to do this month

Pull your three or four biggest recurring vendors and find every line that mentions tariffs, duties, or trade. Send each supplier one email with one question: which specific tariff is this, on which input, at what rate, and now that the reciprocal tariffs have been struck down and are being refunded, what happens to this charge? A surcharge tied to a real, current tariff can be substantiated in a sentence. One that can’t — because the tariff behind it was struck down, or because the charge was always larger than the duty — is the one to question. You may not get it removed. But you’ll know which of your costs are anchored to something real and which are anchored to a habit.

And if your company imported goods in 2025, check who was listed as importer of record and whether the duties you paid are in the refund process. CBP refunds go to the importer of record, which may be you, a carrier, or another intermediary depending on how the shipment was structured. Major carriers have established processes for returning eligible refunds to customers, but downstream businesses that absorbed tariff-related costs without being the importer of record may have no direct claim against CBP. In other words: don’t assume money that ultimately came out of your pocket will automatically find its way back to you. Ask.

The prediction

Here is the falsifiable part. With the reciprocal tariffs struck down and refunding, and the Section 122 surcharge expired since July, there is no broad tariff left behind most of these line items — and I’d expect a real share of “tariff surcharges” to stay on invoices anyway, the way fuel surcharges did. If instead they come off in step with the tariffs that justified them, I’m wrong, and this was ordinary cost pass-through all along. Either way, it’s a thing you can check on your own next invoice.

Sources: U.S. Supreme Court, Learning Resources v. Trump (Feb 20, 2026); CBP CAPE refund process (Holland & Knight; Norton Rose Fulbright); Federal Reserve Bank of New York regional business surveys (via Fortune, 2026); Higgins v. Ubiquiti, D. Del.; reporting on importer-of-record refund eligibility (The Detroit News; Self-Employed, 2026); asymmetric price transmission / “rockets and feathers” (Borenstein et al.); freight fuel-surcharge ratchet (industry reporting, 2025–26).