Key Takeaways
• The calculator gives importers a rough order of magnitude refund figure before committing to a full program review.
• Two inputs drive the estimate: duties paid across the five year lookback, and the share of those imports later exported or destroyed.
• The export share is entered as a decimal, so 30% goes in as 0.30.
• Drawback refunds up to 99% of eligible duties, so the output should be read as an upper bound rather than a guaranteed figure.
• The result is a planning number, not a filed claim. Actual recovery depends on which duties are eligible and what the records can support.
Here’s the deal, sometimes you may have a goal in mind but you don’t really know how to go about getting that accomplished. Or maybe you know how, but you don’t know who can help you do it that can be trusted.
This is why we built our estimated drawback refunds calculator. So that as a business, you can have a really good idea as to what kind of duty drawback refunds you can expect to see if you complete a drawback program with CITTA Brokerage Co.
The things you need to know for the estimate:
- Take the dollar amount of duties you paid in the last 5 years (or to play it safe, 3 years)
- Times that by the percentage of those imports that you exported ANNUALLY (example 30% is .30 in our software)
- Then you will have an estimated refund value. Click the image below to complete your estimations easily.
Click here to check your estimated drawback refunds, and then once you are done and have your numbers, go ahead and send us an email to let us know of your results.
#Drawbackrefunds #calculateyourdrawbackrefunds #DutyDrawback #Dutiespaid #Refundsondutiespaid
Frequently Asked Questions
Total duties, taxes, and fees paid on imports over the last five years, taken from entry summaries or an entry data report rather than from an accounting accrual. Freight, insurance, and broker fees are not duties and should be left out, because they were never paid to CBP.
The estimate treats every duty as eligible. In practice antidumping and countervailing duties are excluded, Section 232 duties are treated differently, and any export without proof does not support a claim. A realistic figure normally lands below the calculator output once eligibility is applied.
Yes. Destruction under CBP supervision is treated the same as export for drawback purposes, so inventory scrapped, destroyed after a recall, or written off to destruction belongs in that percentage. Companies that count only physical exports understate the number.
Start with the ratio of export sales to total sales as a proxy, then refine it. The figure only has to be close enough to tell you whether a proper review is worth doing. Precision matters at the claim stage, not at the estimate stage.
Not on its own. What decides it is whether the duties are eligible, whether import and export records can be tied together, and whether the volume recurs. A one time spike from a single shipment behaves very differently from a steady annual pattern.
