Section 301 Drawback: Which Tariff Lines You Can Reclaim and How the Claim Gets Paid

Section 301 duties are refundable. That sentence is worth a lot of money to anyone who imported from China in the last five years, and it is the one sentence most importers never hear, because every published rate table - ours included - is about the charge side. CBP's own trade-remedy guidance is explicit: duties paid under Section 301 of the Trade Act of 1974 are eligible for drawback, and so are duties paid under Section 201. Section 232 duties on steel and aluminum are the exception: they are not refundable, by direction of Presidential Proclamations 9739 and 9740.

This page answers the question that follows: on which of my HTS lines is there actually a 301 charge to reclaim, what can go wrong in the substitution rules, and how long do I have. Every count below is recomputed at publication time from our own copy of the USITC Chapter 99 extract joined to the 23,193-line HTS schedule, with the printed Chapter 99 rate column used as an independent cross-check.

The exposure census: where 301 duties actually sit

Our Chapter 99 extract resolves 10,391 eight-digit subheadings to 12 Section 301 action headings across four rate tiers (7.5%, 25%, 50%, 100%). Joined to the ten-digit schedule, those subheadings reach 21,215 of 23,193 lines (91.47%). The concentration matters more than the total: two headings - the 25% List 3 heading 9903.88.03 and the 7.5% List 4A heading 9903.88.15 - carry 82.6% of the covered lines between them.

Read the last two columns before you budget anything. 7,745 of the 21,215 covered lines (36.5%) carry a general rate of "Free" - the entire government charge on those lines is the Section 301 duty itself. That is the single most useful fact on this page, because it means a drawback claim on those lines recovers almost the whole government charge, not the marginal slice that a 3% MFN duty leaves behind. It also means a recovery project scoped by "how much duty did I pay" systematically under-counts: on a Free line the duty line reads zero while the 301 line reads 25% of value.^*

What the substitution rules do to that answer

Unused-merchandise drawback under 19 U.S.C. 1313(j)(1) requires the same article to leave the country. Most real programmes cannot meet that, so they use substitution under 1313(j)(2): export or destroy merchandise that is fungible with what you imported, and claim against the imported goods anyway. Substitution is where the schedule text becomes decisive, because the regulation conditions it on classification rather than on physical likeness. Under 19 CFR 190.32 and 190.22 the imported and substituted goods must fall in the same eight-digit HTS subheading - unless that subheading is described as "other", in which case both must match at the ten-digit level and neither may be described as "other".

That carve-out is not a corner case in the 301 universe. Of the 3,116 covered subheadings that have a printed eight-digit row in the current schedule, 1,263 (40.5%) are captioned "Other", and they carry 6,194 ten-digit lines. Within those lines, 2,779 are themselves captioned "Other" at the ten-digit level - the case where the regulation's own words leave no substitution route at all, so only direct identification under 1313(j)(1) is available. A drawback study that samples HTS chapters instead of sampling captions will overstate recoverable volume on roughly four lines in ten.

Worked example: three lanes, one declared value

Take three real lines from the census, each entered at a declared value of $250,000.00 by sea (so HMF applies; drop the HMF column for air freight), and add the fee layer from the FY2027 schedule: at this value the merchandise processing fee is capped at $670.86 per entry summary and the harbor maintenance fee is $312.50, identical in all three lanes, so they sit in the "Charges" column rather than in columns of their own. The last column is what a claim actually pays: 99% of the duties, taxes and fees, because the statute keeps one percent.

Two of the three lanes are instructive in opposite directions. The play-yard line has a Free base rate, so a duty-only recovery scan finds nothing on it - yet the entry carried $62,500.00 of Section 301 duty and $63,483.36 of total government charge. The electric-vehicle line is the other extreme: at a 2.5% base rate plus the 100% rate the four-year review assigned to Chinese EVs, the government charge ($257,233.36) exceeds the invoice value of the goods, and the reclaimable figure at the 99% ceiling is $254,661.03 per $250,000.00 of merchandise. Where the 301 layer dominates the entry, the drawback question stops being a compliance nicety and becomes the margin.

What is and is not refundable on the same entry

The layer that surprises importers is the fee layer: MPF and HMF are drawback-eligible, because 19 CFR 190.3(a) lists them alongside ordinary customs duties. What is not eligible is the part of the trade-remedy layer that Congress and the Proclamations carved out: antidumping and countervailing duties are excluded by 190.3(b) and 19 U.S.C. 1677h, and Section 232 steel and aluminum duties by Proclamations 9739 and 9740. Section 201 safeguard duties, by contrast, are refundable - the carve-out is specific, not a blanket rule against trade remedies. So a Chinese steel article that carries both a 301 duty and an AD/CVD order has a split outcome on one entry summary: the 301 portion can be claimed, the AD/CVD portion cannot. Our AD/CVD refund guide covers the separate administrative-review route for that half, which is a different mechanism with a different clock.

Note what the table implies about claim design: the recoverable amount is computed per entry line from the duties, taxes and fees actually paid, so the same shipment can be partly claimable and partly barred. Building the claim from a total duty figure rather than from the entry-summary lines is how claims get rejected at acceptance rather than at audit.

The claim clock, in order

Drawback is a deadline business before it is a paperwork business. The outer bound is five years from the date of importation to the date the claim is filed (19 CFR 190.51 for claim completeness; 190.32(a) states the same five-year window for unused substitution). Inside that bound sit two notices that are easy to miss and impossible to cure afterwards: CBP Form 7553, the notice of intent to export or destroy, must reach CBP five working days before exportation and seven working days before destruction for unused merchandise, and the form has to be filed with the claim in ACE within 24 hours of the claim unless the claimant holds a one-time waiver or waiver of prior notice. Export first and ask later, and the export is not a qualifying exportation.

The Chapter 99 line is the one that trips 301 claims specifically. CBP requires the filer to report the Chapter 99 HTS number and the underlying Chapter 1-97 number, with quantity and value, in the same order as the ACE import entry. Claims filed before that requirement was enforced had to be perfected by asking the drawback specialist to return the claim to trade control - which is a cure that exists, but only for claims still open. If your entries were filed with only the Chapter 1-97 line, that is the first thing to audit, not the arithmetic.

Section 301 tariff refund vs Section 301 duty drawback: two names, two mechanisms

Importers search for a Section 301 tariff refund, a Section 301 duty drawback and a plain refund interchangeably, but they are not the same filing. A duty drawback claim recovers duty that was properly assessed on goods that later left the country or were destroyed; a refund recovers duty that should never have been assessed at all. Getting the two confused costs the only clock you had, so the next two paragraphs separate them.

Not every 301 refund is a drawback. If the product had a USTR exclusion at the time of entry, the recovery route is a Post-Summary Correction inside the PSC window, or a protest against liquidation once that window has closed - CBP says so directly in the same FAQ. That is a refund of duty that should never have been assessed, not a drawback of duty properly paid, and the two have different evidence standards: a PSC needs the exclusion and the entry, while a drawback claim needs the export or destruction plus the 7553. Filing the wrong one wastes the only clock you had. Our 301 heading inventory and rate-tier census map which headings the tiers sit on; the stacked-tariff guide shows what the entry summary looks like when 301, 232 and the base rate all land on one line.

Sizing your own claim

The arithmetic that survives an audit is boringly linear. For each candidate entry line: take the duties actually paid on that line (base plus Chapter 99 additional duties), add the MPF and HMF attributable to it, remove anything the table above marks as ineligible, then apply the 99% ceiling. Do it per line, not per shipment, because eligibility is a property of the line's charge mix. Then sort the result by recoverable dollars and check the substitution basis of the top lines first - that is where the "Other" caption decides whether the volume is real. On the three lanes above the reclaimable amounts run from $62,848.53 to $254,661.03 per $250,000.00 entered, a spread that comes almost entirely from the 301 tier rather than from the base rate.

Two operational notes. First, the five-year window means the claimable universe is a rolling five-year slice of your import history, not the current year - a 2022 entry is still live today and will not be next year. Second, the fee layer is small per entry but it is not zero and it is per entry summary, so a programme with thousands of small entries can recover more from MPF and HMF than from duty; our MPF/HMF primer works that floor out, and the landed-cost sheet prices the same fees on the inbound side.

Where this page stops

Everything numeric above is recomputed from two USITC extracts and the FY2027 fee schedule, and the two extracts are cross-checked against each other: the Chapter 99 printed General column for all 12 action headings must state the same percentage the 301 map carries, and the build aborts if any of them disagrees (0 mismatches on this snapshot). What this page cannot tell you is whether your merchandise qualifies: that turns on whether the exported or destroyed goods meet the substitution standard, whether the entry was liquidated, and whether a protest is open. Those are facts about your file, not about the schedule. Confirm with a licensed broker or a drawback specialist before you book the recovery - and if the volume is large, get the ruling before the claim, not after.

If you are still at the pricing stage rather than the recovery stage, the tariff calculator prices the 301 layer on a live lookup, and the batch uploader prices up to 200 lines per request for signed-out visitors. What a subscription adds is the alerting layer: a 100-code watchlist against 3 on a free account, plus the rate-change feed that answers 403 on a free account and 200 on a paid one - which is how a drawback programme learns that the tier it is claiming against moved.

Methodology and caveats

• Slice definition: the 10,391 eight-digit subheadings in our Chapter 99 extract whose action is Section 301 China, joined to 23,193 ten-digit HTS lines on the eight-digit prefix. "Free" is a literal prefix match on the general column; percentage legs parse the first percentage token. Lines whose base rate is neither Free nor a percentage are counted in the tier totals but excluded from the worked examples.
• The "Other" census counts only covered subheadings that have a printed eight-digit row in the current schedule (3,116 of 10,391); the remainder are reached through ten-digit rows alone and are not counted, so the 40.5% share is a floor for the printed subset, not a schedule-wide rate.
• Rate cross-check: the Chapter 99 printed General column (separate extractor, same USITC PDF) is compared heading by heading with the 301 map; 0 disagreements on this snapshot.
• Fee legs use the FY2027 schedule effective 2026-10-01 (MPF 0.3464%, floor $34.58, cap $670.86; HMF 0.125%), retrieved 2026-10-16. Re-verify after the next fiscal-year adjustment.
• Worked examples use one hypothetical declared value and assume a waterborne entry; a real claim is built line by line from entry summaries. Nothing here is legal advice.