Published
August 12, 2026
Updated
August 12, 2026
A new class action accuses the maker of DEWALT power tools of building tariff costs into its prices, then keeping the government refund after those tariffs were struck down. If you bought DEWALT products during the tariff period, the case is about your money — but it was filed on August 7, 2026, and there is no settlement or claim form yet.
Allegations Only · No Settlement Yet
This article describes a class action complaint. The statements below are unproven allegations. Stanley Black & Decker, Inc. has not been found liable, there is no certified class, and nothing to claim at this time. This page is informational and is not legal advice.
What Is This About?
Stanley Black & Decker, Inc. — the maker of DEWALT, CRAFTSMAN, STANLEY and BLACK+DECKER tools — is facing a proposed class action alleging that it raised prices on DEWALT-branded products to recover tariffs it paid at the border, and is now recovering those same tariffs a second time as a federal refund, while the customers who allegedly absorbed the cost at the register have no comparable path to get their money back. The company has not been found liable, and the allegations remain unproven.The case is captioned Skelton v. Stanley Black & Decker, Inc., Case No. 3:26-cv-01268-SRU. It was filed on August 7, 2026 in the U.S. District Court for the District of Connecticut — the district where Stanley Black & Decker is headquartered. The complaint brings a claim for declaratory relief under 28 U.S.C. § 2201, the common-law doctrines of unjust enrichment and money had and received, and a claim under the Maine Unfair Trade Practices Act, on behalf of a proposed nationwide class and a Maine subclass.
Status
Complaint Filed · August 7, 2026
Skelton v. Stanley Black & Decker, Inc. · D. Conn. · No. 3:26-cv-01268-SRU
Products at Issue
DEWALT-branded tools and outdoor equipment sold during the tariff period
The complaint defines the class by the price increases, not by a published model list
Allegation
Tariff costs passed to customers while the company collects a government tariff refund
IEEPA tariffs were struck down in February 2026; the complaint alleges a risk of double recovery
Can I Claim?
No — nothing to claim yet
No settlement announced, no class certified, and no consumer claim form at this stage
The Tariff "Double Recovery" Problem
The case joins a wave of consumer suits built on the mechanics of U.S. tariff law, alongside tariff-refund cases already filed against Campbell's, Amazon, Toyota, Ford, and Five Below. When a tariff is imposed, the importer of record pays the duty at the border and typically raises prices to recover that cost, so the customer effectively pays part of the tariff at checkout.When the tariff is later struck down, the refund runs back to whoever paid the duty at the border — the importer — not to the customer who paid the higher shelf price. The complaint argues that this lets a company collect the tariff once from customers during the tariff period and again from the government afterward, and it asks the court to order Stanley Black & Decker to return the money.
The complaint quotes Justice Kavanaugh's dissent in the Supreme Court case for the same point: the government "may be required to refund billions of dollars to importers who paid the IEEPA tariffs, even though some importers may have already passed on costs to consumers or others." The plaintiff's position is that this is exactly what happened here.
What the Complaint Points To
Many tariff pass-through suits rest largely on inference — the tariff went up, the price went up. This complaint leans instead on Stanley Black & Decker's own public statements, which discussed tariff costs and pricing in unusually direct terms.It starts with a written notice. According to the complaint, on November 15, 2024 the company told customers in writing that anticipated tariff increases "will require Stanley Black & Decker to increase prices on impacted SKUs," and that those increases would take effect thirty days after the effective date of increased tariffs. That notice matters to the case because it is a contemporaneous statement of intent, made before the tariffs landed, rather than an after-the-fact reconstruction.
The complaint then alleges the company did what the notice said. In April 2025, after the IEEPA tariffs took effect, it raised U.S. prices by high single-digit percentages, and on the April 30, 2025 earnings call its chief executive acknowledged the company was responding to the trade environment: "While the magnitude and frequency of these changes has exceeded our expectations, we have been and remain prepared to address this dynamic trade environment, and we are responding." On the July 29, 2025 call the company announced a second, more modest round of tariff-related price increases beginning in the fourth quarter of 2025.
The scale is not in dispute. Stanley Black & Decker told investors in mid-2025 that the tariffs then in effect carried an annualized gross impact of roughly $800 million, down from an earlier 2025 estimate that ran as high as $1.7 billion. The complaint alleges the company's finance chief explained that the exposure — and the pricing actions needed to offset it — was calculated on 30% incremental tariffs on goods from China, 30% on non-USMCA-compliant goods from Mexico, and more than 20% in the aggregate on goods from the rest of the world.
The plaintiff's reading of those statements — that the increases were passed through to customers as a deliberate pricing choice — is a characterization, not a finding by any court. Stanley Black & Decker has not responded to the complaint on the public record.
The Refund Is No Longer Hypothetical
This is where the case has moved since it was drafted, and it cuts in the plaintiff's favor on one point while complicating another.The complaint, filed August 7, 2026, describes the refund as something the company "stands to gain." For that it relies on the quarterly report for the fiscal quarter ended April 4, 2026, in which Stanley Black & Decker disclosed the Supreme Court decision and U.S. Customs and Border Protection's refund procedures while stating it had not recognized any benefit related to potential IEEPA refunds, citing uncertainty around the process.
That is no longer where things stand. In its results for the second quarter of 2026 — the quarter ended July 4, 2026, reported in late July, about two weeks before this complaint was filed — the company reported a pre-tax gain of approximately $118 million tied to Phase 1 of the IEEPA tariff refund process, and a net tariff refund benefit of roughly 17 cents per share. It has said it submitted claims under both Phase 1 and Phase 2 of the CBP refund process, and it raised its full-year 2026 adjusted earnings guidance to a range of $5.20 to $5.80 per share, a range that includes a net tariff refund benefit of about $0.05 per share and excludes refunds not yet realized.
For the lawsuit, that removes a defense that would otherwise be available: the company cannot argue the refund is speculative when it has booked part of it. What it does not do is establish that any of that money is owed to customers. Whether a buyer who paid a shelf price has any legal claim on an importer's refund is the contested question at the center of this case and every other one like it, and no court has answered it.
The Section 232 Complication
One issue the complaint does not address is likely to matter a great deal for a company that makes steel products.The Supreme Court's decision addressed tariffs imposed under IEEPA, and only those. The Section 232 tariffs on imported steel and aluminum rest on separate statutory authority under the Trade Expansion Act and were not part of the ruling. Section 301 tariffs on Chinese goods rest on a third authority that was also untouched — and the company's own 2026 guidance assumes new Section 301 tariffs will be implemented at levels similar to previous rates.
That matters here more than it does in a case about sauce or sneakers. Power tools are steel-intensive, so a meaningful share of a toolmaker's tariff bill may sit under authorities that remain valid and generate no refund at all. The refundable IEEPA portion is therefore narrower than the company's total tariff exposure, and the roughly $800 million gross-impact figure the complaint cites is not the same thing as the refundable amount. Establishing how much of any particular price increase traces to refundable IEEPA duties rather than to duties that still stand is one of the harder problems the case would face, and it is a problem the complaint leaves for later.
The Legal Claims
The complaint pleads four counts, and the structure is notably different from the grocery and retail tariff suits that came before it.The lead count is a request for declaratory relief under 28 U.S.C. § 2201 — a judicial declaration that the tariff overcharges were collected under tariffs never lawfully authorized, that the company has no right to retain them, that it must return them with interest, and that it must provide a full accounting of what it collected. Leading with declaratory relief rather than damages is a deliberate choice: it frames the case around an accounting the plaintiff cannot otherwise obtain, since only the importer knows what it paid and what it recovered.
The two equitable counts follow. Unjust enrichment seeks restitution of the tariff-related amounts allegedly collected through elevated prices. Money had and received is aimed at the refund proceeds themselves — the argument being that money the government returns represents, in equity, a return of costs that customers actually bore.
The one statutory count is under the Maine Unfair Trade Practices Act, 5 M.R.S. § 205-A et seq., and it is pleaded only for the Maine subclass rather than nationwide. The theory rests on unfairness rather than deception: that the company shifted the tariff burden to customers while retaining every benefit for itself, causing substantial injury not outweighed by any countervailing benefit and not reasonably avoidable — the three-part test drawn from State v. Weinschenk. Each count also pleads that class members lack an adequate remedy at law, a threshold requirement for equitable relief that the complaint ties to the fact that only the importer has standing to seek a refund in the Court of International Trade.
The complaint seeks restitution and disgorgement, disgorgement of any refunds already received or still to come, prejudgment and post-judgment interest, and attorneys' fees. Those are requests tied to unproven allegations; no money has been awarded and no finding of liability has been made.
The IEEPA Tariffs and the Supreme Court Ruling
Beginning in February 2025, the federal government imposed tariffs on imports from most countries by invoking the International Emergency Economic Powers Act — 25% on goods from Canada and Mexico, escalating rates on Chinese goods that reached as high as 145%, and a baseline 10% "reciprocal" tariff on nearly all other imports, with higher country-specific rates on dozens of countries. The de minimis exemption that had let low-value shipments enter duty-free was eliminated for China and Hong Kong in May 2025 and for all countries at the end of August 2025.On February 20, 2026, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in Learning Resources, Inc. v. Trump that IEEPA does not authorize the President to impose tariffs, invalidating those duties.
The refund machinery followed quickly. In March 2026, the U.S. Court of International Trade ordered U.S. Customs and Border Protection to liquidate entries covered by the decision without regard to IEEPA duties, reasoning that a narrower approach would deny the benefit of the ruling to importers who had not filed their own suits. According to figures cited in that litigation, CBP had collected roughly $165 billion in IEEPA duties, with interest accruing at approximately $650 million a month.
Importers can recover those duties through CBP's tariff-refund portal, and refunds began reaching businesses in May 2026. Customers who shouldered the cost through higher prices have no direct government mechanism to get their money back. Closing that gap is what this lawsuit and the others like it are built around. We have written separately about where the refund money is actually going, and about how a small business that imported directly can apply for its own refund.
Is There a DEWALT Settlement Yet?
No. This matters: Skelton v. Stanley Black & Decker, Inc. is a lawsuit filed on August 7, 2026, not a settlement.That means:
• There is no settlement fund.
• There is no claim form.
• There is no payout, and no deadline to act.
• Customers do not need to do anything at this stage.
The filing of a complaint is the beginning of a case, not the end. Stanley Black & Decker has not been found liable simply because a lawsuit was filed, and the case remains pending unless and until a newer docket entry says otherwise. If it is ever resolved through a settlement, or a class is certified, a formal claims process with its own eligibility rules and deadlines would be announced separately.
Who Could Be Affected?
The complaint proposes a nationwide class of people in the United States who bought goods from Stanley Black & Decker during the class period on which the company raised prices in response to the IEEPA tariffs, plus a Maine subclass defined the same way for Maine purchasers. The company and its affiliates, counsel for both sides, and the judicial officers assigned to the case are excluded.Two things about that definition are worth noticing. It is written around the company's own pricing conduct rather than around a list of products, so its real scope depends on records only the company has — which is part of why the complaint leads with a request for an accounting. And the complaint does not fix the class period, saying only that it is the period during which tariff-related overcharges were assessed and that its precise contours can be determined only through discovery. No class has been certified, and the definition, product scope and time period could all change.
If you bought DEWALT, CRAFTSMAN, STANLEY or BLACK+DECKER products during the tariff period, keeping receipts and retailer purchase history costs nothing and could matter if a class is later certified and a claims process opens. There is nothing to file right now.
This Is Not the First DEWALT Tariff Case
Legal trade press reported that a similar proposed class action was filed against Stanley Black & Decker in the same Connecticut federal court in June 2026, brought by a Wisconsin purchaser of DEWALT products and pleaded under Wisconsin's deceptive trade practices statute. The theory was the same: that DEWALT prices rose to offset IEEPA tariffs and that the company stands to recover the same tariff payments twice.Two overlapping consumer class actions against the same defendant in the same district usually do not stay separate for long. Courts commonly mark such cases as related and assign them to one judge, and plaintiffs' counsel often consolidate them into a single amended complaint with a leadership structure. That is worth watching, because a consolidated case would likely supersede the class definitions and statutory counts described on this page.
Beware of DEWALT Tariff Refund Scams
Important: when a class action is filed against a household-name brand, scammers follow with fake "tariff refund" texts, emails and calls asking customers to click a link, confirm bank details, or pay a small "processing fee." There is no DEWALT or Stanley Black & Decker tariff refund claim form right now, and the company has not announced any consumer refund program. A legitimate claims process — if one ever exists — would be run by a court-appointed settlement administrator, would be free to participate in, and would never ask for your banking passwords, gift cards, or up-front fees.What Happens Next?
Stanley Black & Decker now has a deadline to respond to the complaint, and in cases of this type the first move is usually a motion to dismiss. The arguments to expect are the familiar ones from the rest of the tariff wave: whether a customer who paid a shelf price has standing to sue over a duty someone else paid, whether the pass-through can be traced product by product at all, and whether equitable claims survive when the plaintiff has not identified a specific product whose price provably moved.This complaint has a particular exposure on that last point. It never identifies which DEWALT products the plaintiff bought, when, or at what price — it alleges only that one or more DEWALT products were purchased at prices increased by the company's tariff-related pricing actions. Defendants routinely attack that level of generality at the pleading stage, and it is the kind of gap a plaintiff typically fills through an amended complaint.
If the case survives that stage, the parties would exchange information in discovery — where the accounting the complaint asks for would actually happen — and the plaintiff would eventually ask the court to certify a class. Each step can take months, and the case could be amended, narrowed, consolidated with the earlier Connecticut filing, or resolved along the way. OpenClassActions.com will keep watching the docket for major updates, including a ruling on any motion to dismiss, consolidation, class certification activity, settlement talks, or any future claim form.
Frequently Asked Questions
Does this mean my DEWALT tools were overpriced?
That is what the complaint alleges, and it has not been proven. The complaint's position is that the company's 2025 price increases carried IEEPA tariff costs that a court has since held were never lawfully imposed. Stanley Black & Decker has not conceded that any particular tool's price included a tariff component that is now refundable, and no court has decided the question.Why can Stanley Black & Decker get a refund but I can't?
Tariff refunds run to the importer of record — the party that actually paid the duty to U.S. Customs and Border Protection. A customer who paid a higher shelf price is not the importer and has no standing in that refund process. The complaint makes this point directly, arguing class members have no adequate remedy at law because they cannot file in the Court of International Trade at all. That structural gap is the entire premise of this lawsuit and the others like it.Why is a Maine statute being used in a Connecticut court?
The suit is in Connecticut because that is where Stanley Black & Decker is headquartered and where the complaint alleges the pricing decisions were made, which supports both jurisdiction and venue. The Maine Unfair Trade Practices Act comes in because the named plaintiff is a Maine resident who bought there, and it is pleaded only for a Maine subclass — not nationwide. The nationwide claims are the declaratory and equitable counts, which do not depend on any single state's consumer statute.Is this related to the old DEWALT abrasive wheels settlement?
No. Stanley Black & Decker has separately resolved consumer cases over product labeling and abrasive wheels in past years. Those were product and advertising disputes and are unrelated to this one, which is about tariff costs inside the price rather than anything printed on the package.Should I do anything now?
Nothing is required. Keeping proof of purchase costs nothing and could matter later if a class is certified, but there is no form to submit, no deadline, and no one legitimate asking you for money or account details today.Sources
• Class Action Complaint, Skelton v. Stanley Black & Decker, Inc., No. 3:26-cv-01268-SRU (D. Conn. filed Aug. 7, 2026).• Learning Resources, Inc. v. Trump, 146 S. Ct. 628 (U.S. Feb. 20, 2026), including the dissent quoted in the complaint.
• Atmus Filtration, Inc. v. United States, No. 26-01259 (Ct. Int'l Trade Mar. 5 and Mar. 6, 2026), as cited in the complaint.
• Stanley Black & Decker, Inc., Quarterly Report (Form 10-Q) for the fiscal quarter ended April 4, 2026, as cited in the complaint.
• Stanley Black & Decker, Inc., Quarterly Report (Form 10-Q) for the fiscal quarter ended July 4, 2026.
• Manufacturing Dive, "Stanley Black & Decker to raise prices again, navigate $800M tariff impact" (July 30, 2025).
• Manufacturing Dive, "Stanley Black & Decker delivers positive Q2, citing tariff refunds and sale" (2026).
• Law360, "Black & Decker Owes Tariff Plan Refunds, DeWalt Buyer Says", on the earlier Connecticut filing.
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Status
Complaint Filed — Proposed Class Action
Case Title
Skelton v. Stanley Black & Decker, Inc.
Case Number
3:26-cv-01268-SRU
Court
U.S. District Court, District of Connecticut
Date Filed
August 7, 2026
Claims
Declaratory relief (28 U.S.C. § 2201); unjust enrichment; money had and received; Maine Unfair Trade Practices Act (Maine subclass)
