The customs line turns positive as refunds collapse

Net customs duties returned to positive in August 2026, at $12,835,527,290 for the month, according to the Monthly Treasury Statement released 15 September.¹ That follows three months in which refunds exceeded or nearly matched collections: net -$42.3 million in May, -$25.56 billion in June and -$8.55 billion in July.¹² The reversal is on the refund side of the ledger rather than the collection side.

1. Gross collections did not rise; refunds fell. Gross customs receipts were $23.38 billion in August against $24.83 billion in July — slightly down. Refunds went $49.18 billion in June, $33.38 billion in July, $10.54 billion in August, a fall of roughly two-thirds month on month and of nearly four-fifths from the June peak.¹ The net line moved $21.4 billion between July and August on a gross-collections change of about minus $1.4 billion.

2. Year over year the net is flat and the flows behind it are not. Net customs receipts for the fiscal year to 31 August stand at $167,308 million, against $165,191 million for the same period of fiscal 2025 — a difference of about 1.3 percent.¹ The gross and refund columns behind those two nearly equal numbers are not comparable at all. Gross receipts went from $171,865 million to $292,533 million, up about 70 percent; refunds went from $6,674 million to $125,224 million, roughly nineteen times larger.¹ A year-to-date net that has barely moved is the residue of two flows that have both changed scale.

3. The corpus projected the opposite, and its own indicator did not reach far enough to catch this. The August ledger recorded a projection that “monthly refund outflows are expected to keep the customs net line negative into the autumn even as § 301 replacement collections begin accruing at 10 and 12.5 percent,” and named as its observable indicator “the July Monthly Treasury Statement’s customs and refund lines in mid-August” (see War and tariff costs reach the data: the August ledger).²³ The July statement was negative, and against the indicator it named the projection was scored confirmed on 25 August.³ The substantive horizon in the sentence, though, was “into the autumn” — and autumn had not begun when the next print reversed the sign. The score was right about what it measured; what it measured closed six weeks before the claim did.

4. What the statement does not say is why refunds fell. The Monthly Treasury Statement reports the aggregate, not its composition, so it cannot distinguish between the certified pool of Court of International Trade refund claims being largely worked off, a processing pause, and a change in the pace of certification (see IEEPA refund certifications pass $86 billion; CIT orders Phase 3 reliquidation for suing importers).⁴ Flat gross collections are their own open question: the § 301 replacement duties at 10 and 12.5 percent were expected to add to the collection side, and the August gross figure is lower than July’s.¹² Neither question is answerable from this release.