Amazon Price Gouging Lawsuit: 2026 Ruling and Class Claims

The Amazon price gouging lawsuit is a proposed federal class action accusing the company of charging inflated prices on essentials during the COVID-19 pandemic, with alleged markups ranging from about 50% on some items to as much as 1,800% on face masks. Filed in 2021 in the U.S. District Court for the Western District of Washington, the case survived Amazon’s motion to dismiss on January 5, 2026, and is now moving forward toward discovery and class certification.

What the Lawsuit Alleges

The complaint, Greenberg v. Amazon.com Inc. (case number 2:21-cv-00898-RSL, originally filed as Steinberg v. Amazon), makes two core claims.¹ First, that Amazon allowed third-party sellers on its platform to charge what the plaintiffs call “flagrantly unlawful” prices for staples during the pandemic. Second, that Amazon itself inflated prices on products it sold directly from its own inventory.²

The complaint catalogs specific price spikes between January 31, 2020, and October 20, 2022:

Face masks up to 1,800% (from $4.21 to $79.99)
Arm & Hammer baking soda up to 1,523% (from $3.08 to $50.00)
Quilted Northern toilet paper up to 1,044% (from $17.48 to $200.00)
Disinfectant wipes over 745% (from $20.71 to $174.96)
Yeast up to 625% (from $7.02 to $50.95)
Black beans up to 521% (from $3.54 to $21.99)
Aleve pain reliever up to 233% (from $18.75 to $62.40)

The named plaintiffs each point to specific purchases. Alvin Greenberg, a 74-year-old toxicologist with asthma, paid $58.19 for three bottles of Clorox bleach on April 21, 2020, a 168% increase over the January 2020 price of $21.74. Michael Steinberg paid $39.97 for a two-pound pouch of Red Star yeast on April 3, 2020, a 469% jump from $7.02. Julie Hanson, who has Parkinson’s disease and a chronic lung condition, paid $14.19 for flea spray previously priced at $8.99.³

The plaintiffs also cite studies by the Public Interest Research Group and Public Citizen finding that Amazon marked up its own health products by over 50% in February 2020, and applied markups from 48% to 1,010% on essentials it sold directly. A separate PIRG review of 750 Amazon product listings found 409 saw price increases over 20% and 136 at least doubled in price between December 2019 and December 2020.⁴

The legal theory rests on Washington’s Consumer Protection Act, which broadly prohibits “unfair” business practices. Washington has no standalone price-gouging statute, so the plaintiffs argue the pandemic-era markups qualify as “unfair” conduct under the general consumer protection law.⁵

Who Is Covered by the Proposed Class

The proposed class includes anyone who bought a consumer good or food item designated as an emergency good on Amazon between January 31, 2020, and October 20, 2022, at a price alleged to have been unfair.⁵ Covered product categories include medical supplies, cleaning products, work-from-home equipment, and other home goods. The case seeks to represent shoppers nationwide, though the claims themselves rest on Washington state law.⁶

The class has not yet been formally certified. The exact identification of which prices qualify as “unfair” will be refined during discovery and expert analysis.

The January 2026 Ruling

On January 5, 2026, U.S. District Judge Robert S. Lasnik denied Amazon’s motion to dismiss, allowing the case to proceed.⁷ Amazon had argued that Washington’s consumer protection laws were too vague to apply to its pandemic pricing. Judge Lasnik called that argument “unpersuasive.”

The ruling turned on an element of the Washington Consumer Protection Act’s unfairness standard: whether consumers could have avoided the harm by shopping elsewhere. Judge Lasnik found it “plausible to infer” that public health directives, product shortages, and the mass shift to online shopping left consumers “no meaningful choice but to purchase from Amazon despite the allegedly unfair prices it was charging.”⁸

Steve Berman, the Hagens Berman managing partner leading the case, said after the ruling that internal Amazon documents indicate the company was aware of price gouging on its platform and had previously assured state attorneys general it was working to prevent it. He called the decision “a significant victory for consumers who allege that Amazon made billions in excess profits during the pandemic.”⁹

The Washington Supreme Court Ruling That Made the Case Possible

The January 2026 order built on a state supreme court decision nearly two years earlier. In April 2023, Judge Lasnik paused the federal case and certified a legal question to the Washington Supreme Court: could price-gouging allegations qualify as “unfair” conduct under state law without a specific price-gouging statute?¹⁰

In August 2024, the state supreme court answered yes, 7-2. Justice Helen Whitener, writing for the majority, held that if the plaintiffs’ allegations were true, Amazon violated the Consumer Protection Act by causing substantial and unavoidable financial harm to consumers who had no meaningful alternative. The court rejected Amazon’s argument that only the legislature could create a price-gouging cause of action, calling that reasoning “unpersuasive” and “unconvincing.”¹¹

The court declined to set a specific percentage threshold for what counts as “unfair.” Instead, it said the “context, magnitude, and impact” of each price increase must be evaluated case by case. A dissenting justice noted the ruling made Washington the first state supreme court to recognize a damages claim for price gouging under a general consumer protection law.⁹

Allegations That Amazon Destroyed Evidence

A separate front in the case involves document preservation. In December 2025, the plaintiffs filed a sealed motion asking Judge Lasnik to sanction Amazon for what they described as the destruction of an “untold number of documents” relevant to the case.¹²

The motion followed a September 2025 order in which the court found that Amazon had failed to implement an effective litigation hold. According to that ruling, Amazon’s duty to preserve documents arose in April 2020 when the original complaint was filed, but the company did not notify anyone internally about the litigation for six months. Only six employees were placed on a case-specific hold by October 2020. Another two years and eight months passed before preservation efforts expanded to other relevant employees. During the critical early months, documents kept by key pricing employees, including Word files, presentations, spreadsheets, and notes, were deleted under Amazon’s routine data retention policies. Email and chat records were preserved by automated systems.¹³

The court ordered Amazon to produce its litigation hold notices and preservation information for seven employees within 14 days so plaintiffs could assess the scope of what was lost. No ruling on the December 2025 sanctions motion has been recorded on the docket.

Damages Sought

The plaintiffs seek repayment of overpayments, treble damages under the Washington Consumer Protection Act, and an injunction against future overpricing. No specific total dollar figure has been made public, though plaintiffs’ counsel has alleged Amazon earned “billions in excess profits” during the pandemic period.⁵

Amazon’s Position

Amazon has publicly maintained it took aggressive action against price gouging during the pandemic. In a March 23, 2020, statement, the company said “price gouging has no place in our stores,” and reported removing over half a million listings and suspending more than 3,900 U.S. selling accounts for violating its fair pricing policies. Amazon said it used “dynamic automated systems” to identify unfairly priced items and coordinated with attorneys general in more than ten states.¹⁴

An academic study of 3M mask pricing on Amazon found that significant price hikes by third-party sellers were visible from mid-January through March 2020, suggesting enforcement did not begin in earnest until roughly the time of Amazon’s public statement. When Amazon was out of its own inventory, new sellers entering the platform raised prices by an average of 178%, while established sellers raised them by about 57%.¹⁵ The plaintiffs’ complaint alleges that when one consumer contacted Amazon customer service about a price spike in April 2020, agents said they had no access to pricing data and that “it is up to another department to figure out whether a price is appropriate.”³

Other Amazon Pricing Cases This Is Not

Several other pricing cases against Amazon are moving through the courts at the same time, and they involve different theories and different plaintiffs. They are not part of the pandemic consumer class action.

California Attorney General Rob Bonta filed an antitrust lawsuit against Amazon on September 15, 2022, in San Francisco Superior Court. That case alleges Amazon coerces vendors into pressuring competing retailers to raise their prices, not that Amazon gouged consumers during the pandemic. A preliminary injunction hearing is set for July 23, 2026, and trial for January 19, 2027.¹⁶

In September 2023, the FTC and 17 state attorneys general (later joined by Vermont and Puerto Rico) sued Amazon in the same federal court where the class action is pending, alleging Amazon illegally maintains monopolies in online retail and marketplace services. A central piece of that case is “Project Nessie,” an algorithm the FTC says Amazon used to raise prices in ways competitors would follow. Judge John Chun denied most of Amazon’s motion to dismiss in October 2024, and a bench trial is scheduled for October 2026.¹⁷

Washington’s own attorney general has separately taken action. In January 2022, then-AG Bob Ferguson reached a settlement in which Amazon shut down its “Sold by Amazon” program nationwide and paid $2.25 million to fund antitrust enforcement. Current Attorney General Nick Brown has intervened in the federal class action to defend the legality of price-gouging claims under the Washington Consumer Protection Act following the 2024 state supreme court ruling.¹⁸

1
Hagens Berman Sobol Shapiro LLP. Online Retailer Price Gouging
2
The Daily Record. Amazon COVID Price Gouging Class Action Ruling
3
ClassAction.org. Greenberg et al. v. Amazon.com Inc., Complaint
4
U.S. PIRG Education Fund. Comparing Pre-Pandemic Prices to Today’s on Amazon
5
Hagens Berman Sobol Shapiro LLP. Court Denies Amazon’s Motion to Dismiss Consumers’ Lawsuit Regarding Price Gouging
6
Top Class Actions. Amazon Class Action Claims Company Destroyed Documents in Price Gouging Suit
7
Missouri Lawyers Media. Judge: Amazon COVID Price Gouging Lawsuit Can Proceed
8
Silicon UK. Amazon COVID Price Gouging
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Legal Newsline. Amazon Again Fails to Beat COVID Price Gouging Claims
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CourtListener. Steinberg v. Amazon.com Inc., Docket
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Post Guam. Washington State Supreme Court’s Ruling in Amazon Case Sets Precedent on Price Gouging
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CourtListener. Steinberg v. Amazon.com Inc., Docket Page 2
13
eDiscovery LLC. Discovery on Discovery Ordered After Amazon’s Flawed Implementation of Litigation Hold
14
Amazon. Price Gouging Has No Place in Our Stores
15
PMC / National Library of Medicine. Price Gouging on Amazon During COVID-19
16
California Department of Justice. AG Bonta Delivers Victory Against Amazon in Ongoing Price Fixing Case
17
Courthouse News Service. Judge Advances Antitrust Suit Against Amazon
18
Washington Attorney General. AG Ferguson Investigation Shuts Down Amazon Price Fixing Program Nationwide