Duty drawback companies and services: who files claims, and how to choose (2026)

Duty drawback claims are almost never filed by the importer alone. The refund is worth 99% of eligible duties, but the work is a records problem — linking import entries to exports across years of data, then defending that linkage if CBP asks — and most importers buy that capability rather than build it. This page describes the kinds of firms that do the work, names the ones whose practices are publicly documented, and sets out how to choose between them.

Dutiable is not a drawback filer and does not take referral fees. We build free customs tools and a tariff-monitoring service. Nothing below is a ranking, a rating, or a recommendation of one firm over another — the firms are grouped by what they do, described from their own public materials, and listed alphabetically within each group. Verify anything that matters to your decision directly with the firm.

Before you shortlist anyone: is there a claim worth filing?

Drawback engagements have a floor. A filer working on contingency has to earn its share out of your recovery, and a filer working on a flat fee has to be worth the fee. Both mean small, one-off recoveries rarely justify an engagement — and the honest version of that conversation is one you can have with yourself first.

Three numbers decide it: the duties, taxes and fees you actually paid on the imports in question; the share of those goods that were later exported, destroyed under customs supervision, or rejected; and how much of the duty sits in programmes that are drawback-eligible at all. Section 301 duties generally are eligible and often dominate the claim. Section 232 duties are not — the proclamations bar drawback on the additional 232 amount even though the MFN duty on the same entry stays claimable.

Run those through the duty drawback calculator before you talk to anyone. It is free, it takes no account, and it gives you the order of magnitude you need to know whether a filer's fee is a rounding error or the whole refund.

Drawback-only specialists

These are licensed customs brokers whose practice is built around duty recovery rather than around freight. They tend to run their own drawback software, keep dedicated analytics staff, and take on the full programme — the ruling application, the data matching, the filing, and the audit defence. They are the usual answer for a manufacturing drawback programme or any claim where the import-to-export linkage is genuinely hard.

Alliance Drawback Services (alliancechb.com) is a licensed customs broker founded in 2001 that works on drawback recovery programmes across automotive, electronics, petrochemical, aerospace and agricultural clients. It states publicly that it works strictly on a percentage of recovery.

Charter Brokerage (charterbrokerage.net) is a drawback-focused broker with a long-standing base in petroleum and chemicals, running a proprietary drawback platform it calls Hamilton alongside its filing team. It describes itself as the largest US drawback filer by recovered value.

Comstock & Holt (dutydrawback.com) was formed in 2025 by combining Comstock & Theakston, Inc. (established 1894) and C.J. Holt & Co., Inc. (established 1856), two drawback houses that had worked together since 1987. The combined firm is one of the oldest continuously operating drawback practices in the country.

J.M. Rodgers Co., Inc. (jmrodgers.com) is a family-owned customs brokerage and freight forwarder founded in 1951 with a dedicated drawback practice covering unused, manufacturing, direct-identification and substitution claims. It also describes itself as the largest US drawback filer, measured by claim volume.

N.F. Stroth & Associates is a licensed customs broker founded in 1995 whose practice is duty drawback and duty recovery, working with importers on programme setup, filing and compliance.

A note on the superlatives: more than one firm above claims to be the largest drawback filer, on different measures — recovered dollars versus number of claims — and none of those claims is independently audited. Treat "largest" as marketing, not as a selection criterion. What matters is whether the firm has filed your drawback type, in your industry, recently.

Full-service brokers and forwarders with a drawback desk

Most of the large customs brokerages and forwarders offer drawback as one service inside a wider customs and logistics relationship. The advantage is data: if the same provider already files your entries and moves your freight, the import and export records they need are already in their systems, which removes the single most tedious part of a claim. The trade-off is depth — a drawback desk inside a large forwarder is usually built for standard unused-merchandise claims rather than for a complex manufacturing ruling.

C.H. Robinson offers US duty drawback within its customs services practice, aimed at importers already using it for brokerage.

DHL Global Forwarding operates DHL Duty Drawback Services as a licensed customs brokerage, covering programme research, the application, data collection and management, and filing.

Flexport offers duty drawback as a product alongside its Trade Advisory practice, with an emphasis on algorithmic matching of import and export data — a fit that tends to suit importers whose records are already digital and whose claims are high-volume and low-complexity per line.

If you already work with one of these for brokerage, ask them first. Not because they will be cheapest, but because the answer to "can you pull my last five years of 7501s" is the answer that determines how long the engagement takes.

Advisory and Big Four trade practices

KPMG runs duty drawback inside its Trade & Customs practice, positioned as part of a broader tariff recovery and mitigation programme rather than as a standalone filing service. The other Big Four firms and the trade-focused law firms operate similarly.

The reason to go here is not filing volume. It is when the hard question is upstream of the claim — whether a substitution structure holds, whether a manufacturing ruling is available for your process, how drawback interacts with a foreign-trade zone or a duty-deferral programme, or how to answer a CBP inquiry that has already arrived. Advisory hours are expensive and are usually paired with a specialist or broker who does the actual filing.

Fee models: contingency versus flat fee

Two models dominate, and the right one depends almost entirely on how repeatable your claims are.

Contingency (a percentage of recovery) means the filer is paid only out of what CBP actually refunds. It removes your downside on a first claim of uncertain size, and it aligns the filer with finding every eligible line. It is the more expensive model over the life of a large, stable, repeating programme, because you keep paying a share of a recovery that has become routine.

Flat fee per claim, or a retainer suits a mature programme with predictable volume and clean data. You capture the full refund and pay for the labour. It is the wrong model for a first claim where nobody yet knows whether the recovery is five figures or seven.

What to pin down in writing, whichever model you pick: whether the fee applies to accelerated payments or only to liquidated claims; who pays for the drawback bond; whether audit defence and any subsequent CBP inquiry are included or billed separately; who owns the compiled claim data if you change filers; and what happens to the fee if CBP later reduces or reverses a refund.

What no filer can do for you

The recordkeeping obligation is yours. 19 CFR Part 190 puts the burden of proof on the claimant, and a filer that compiles your claim from your data does not absorb that burden. If the import entries, export evidence and bills of materials cannot support the linkage, no firm can conjure it after the fact — and the claims that fail on audit almost always fail there rather than on a point of law.

The other thing outside a filer's scope is the future. Drawback recovers duty you have already paid. It does nothing about the rate that applies to your next entry, and the drawback-eligible share of your duty bill changes whenever a programme changes — a code moving into Section 232 coverage takes that duty out of your claim entirely. Watching the codes you import against is a separate, ongoing job from recovering what you already paid.

Where to go next

If you have not yet sized the claim, start with the duty drawback calculator — four jurisdictions, and a per-programme eligibility table showing what is claimable and what is not.

If you know a claim exists and want to file it well, how to maximize duty drawback refunds covers substitution matching, the five-year lookback, accelerated payment and the errors that shrink claims.

If you are filing for the first time, how to file a duty drawback claim walks the sequence from eligibility check to CBP Form 7551 in ACE.

And for the forward-looking half of the problem, the tariff tracker logs duty-rate changes across the US, EU and UK schedules as they are detected.