Class Action Lawsuits: Active Settlements and Growth Areas

Class action lawsuits in 2026 are breaking records on nearly every measure that matters: the ten largest settlements of 2025 totaled $79 billion, more than 13,000 new class suits were filed in federal court last year, and several of the biggest payouts in recent memory are either mailing checks or accepting claims right now. If you held Blue Cross Blue Shield coverage, paid for Amazon Prime, used an Android phone, were a Comcast customer in 2023, or bought beef between 2014 and 2019, there is likely money with your name on it.¹²

From 2022 through 2025, combined class action settlements topped $238 billion. Eight individual deals of $1 billion or more closed in 2025 alone. Antitrust cases carried the bulk of that weight at nearly $46 billion, followed by products liability at $17.9 billion, securities fraud at $3.45 billion, government enforcement at $3.29 billion, and consumer fraud at $2.1 billion.¹ A separate count by LexisNexis put federal filings at more than 12,200 for the year, a roughly 25 percent jump and the highest volume in at least a decade, with consumer protection cases driving nearly half of everything filed.³

Settlements Paying Out or Accepting Claims Right Now

Blue Cross Blue Shield Antitrust: $2.67 Billion

Initial payments to class members in In re: Blue Cross Blue Shield Antitrust Litigation began going out in May 2026, more than a decade after the case was first filed. The suit alleged that BCBS companies carved up geographic markets and agreed not to compete, pushing health insurance costs higher; the defendants denied wrongdoing.⁴ Roughly six million claims came in. After fees, about $1.9 billion will be distributed to subscribers who held BCBS coverage between February 2008 and October 2020.⁵ The settlement also forces BCBS to drop its rule requiring two-thirds of national revenue to come from Blue-branded products and lets certain large employers solicit bids from any BCBS plan nationwide.⁶

Amazon Prime Deceptive Enrollment: $2.5 Billion

The Federal Trade Commission’s $2.5 billion settlement with Amazon resolves claims that the company used manipulative interface designs to enroll tens of millions of consumers in Prime without informed consent and made cancellation unreasonably difficult. The FTC described a “four-page, six-click, fifteen-option” cancellation sequence; Amazon denied wrongdoing.⁷

The deal breaks down into $1.5 billion in consumer refunds and a $1 billion civil penalty. You qualify if you signed up through one of the challenged enrollment flows or tried to cancel between June 2019 and June 2025 and used no more than three Prime benefits in any 12-month period. Automatic refunds started going out in November 2025, capped at $51 per person. If you didn’t get one automatically, the FTC began contacting eligible consumers in January 2026, and you can file at the settlement website.⁸

Comcast Data Breach: $117.5 Million

Comcast faces a proposed $117.5 million settlement over an October 2023 breach that exposed personal information for more than 35 million customers, including usernames, hashed passwords, names, contact information, partial Social Security numbers, dates of birth, and security questions and answers.⁹ The case, Hasson v. Comcast Cable Communications, LLC, is pending in the Eastern District of Pennsylvania. Claims can be filed through September 14, 2026, with a final approval hearing set for August 2026.¹⁰

Google Android Cellular Data: $135 Million

In Joseph Taylor, et al., v. Google LLC, plaintiffs alleged that Android transmitted user data in real time without permission, even when apps were closed or location sharing was off. Google denied wrongdoing. The $135 million fund covers any U.S. resident who used an Android device with a cellular data plan since November 2017, though anyone who was paid under the earlier $350 million California-only settlement is excluded.¹¹ With roughly 100 million eligible claimants, individual payouts are estimated at just over a dollar. Final approval was scheduled for June 23, 2026.¹²

Beef Price-Fixing: $87.5 Million

A federal judge approved an $87.5 million settlement on May 27, 2026, resolving consumer claims that Tyson Foods and Cargill conspired to inflate beef prices. Tyson agreed to pay $55 million and Cargill $32.5 million. The class covers individuals and entities that bought certain fresh or frozen beef cuts from those companies between August 2014 and December 2019.¹³ Both companies agreed to help prosecute claims against the remaining defendants, including JBS USA and National Beef Packing.¹⁴ A separate $47 million settlement between commercial purchasers and Tyson is awaiting approval.¹⁵

Colgate-Palmolive Pension: $332 Million

A federal judge in the Southern District of New York approved this ERISA settlement on January 14, 2026, closing out a decade-long fight over whether Colgate-Palmolive shortchanged pension benefits for roughly 1,177 retirees by misinterpreting a 2005 plan amendment. The deal provides certain class members with lump-sum payments for missed prior benefits plus ongoing annuity payments.¹⁶ Class counsel was awarded $99 million in fees and expenses in February 2026.¹⁷

Other Active Settlements

Google Assistant, $68 million, resolving privacy claims tied to recordings by Google-made devices.
Tinder, $60.5 million, over allegations the app charged older users more for subscriptions in violation of California’s Unruh Act. The class covers California purchasers of Tinder Plus or Tinder Gold who were over 29 starting in March 2015 or over 28 starting in March 2016. Final approval was scheduled for May 20, 2026.¹⁸
Disney streaming antitrust, $50 million, resolving claims that Disney inflated streaming TV costs by forcing providers like YouTube TV and DirecTV Stream to bundle ESPN in their cheapest packages. The deal also requires Disney to consider proposals from streaming providers to offer packages without ESPN channels.¹⁹
Hyundai and Kia defective airbags, $62.1 million, with a claim deadline of March 2027.²⁰
Generic drug price-fixing, $200 million, in which Sun Pharmaceuticals and its subsidiary Taro agreed to settle claims they conspired with other generic manufacturers to fix prices on more than 180 drugs. Final approval was scheduled for January 15, 2026.²¹
Lakeview Loan Servicing data breach, $26 million, with claims open through June 22, 2026, and individual payouts of up to $5,000 for documented losses.²²

A separate stream of PFAS “forever chemicals” money, up to $13.6 billion from 3M, DuPont, Tyco, and BASF, is also moving in 2026, but those claims are for public water systems rather than individual consumers; key filing deadlines include March 31, July 31, and August 1, 2026.²³

Where New Class Actions Are Growing Fastest

Data Privacy and Online Tracking

Data privacy has become one of the fastest-expanding categories in class action law. Roughly 1,822 data privacy class actions were filed in federal courts in 2025, averaging more than seven per business day. That is 18 percent above 2024 and 1,613 percent above 2018, when only 109 such cases were filed.²⁴

Defendants, however, have been winning early. Federal courts granted motions to dismiss data privacy complaints in whole or in part in 67.5 percent of the 222 substantive rulings issued in 2025. Only three class certification rulings came out in data breach cases, and plaintiffs won just one. That dynamic has pushed many plaintiffs to settle early rather than risk certification.²⁴

A separate wave of litigation targets online tracking technologies rather than traditional breaches. Online privacy lawsuits grew from roughly 200 in 2023 to nearly 4,000 in 2024, and in 2025 they spread to 315 courts across 45 states against more than 3,500 defendants. Plaintiffs typically rely on common-law theories and older statutes like the California Invasion of Privacy Act, which carries potential penalties of $5,000 per violation, because most comprehensive state privacy laws do not include a private right of action.²⁵

Illinois’s Biometric Information Privacy Act continues to generate large settlements of its own. At least 100 putative BIPA class actions were filed in 2025, including a facial recognition case valued at about $51.75 million, a $47.5 million technology company deal, and an $8.75 million settlement over an education platform’s collection of face and voice models from roughly 660,000 students.²⁶ But in April 2026, the Seventh Circuit held in Clay v. Union Pacific Railroad Co. that the 2024 BIPA amendment limiting damages to a “per-person” basis for repeated collections of the same biometric identifier applies retroactively, overturning the earlier per-scan interpretation from Cothron v. White Castle System, Inc.²⁷ The ruling is expected to significantly reduce potential damages in pending BIPA cases.

ERISA and Retirement Benefits

Retirement benefits litigation has exploded this year. Nearly 70 proposed ERISA class actions were filed in just the first three months of 2026, roughly double the pace of the same period in 2024 and 2025.²⁸ Much of the activity traces to the Supreme Court’s unanimous April 2025 decision in Cunningham v. Cornell University, which held that ERISA’s exemptions for prohibited transactions are affirmative defenses the defendants must raise and prove, not elements plaintiffs must plead around.²⁹

The new filings cluster around a few theories. Around 20 target the investment performance of target-date funds, with more than a dozen focused on American Century Investments products. More than a quarter involve health plan tobacco surcharges, where appellate courts remain split. And a new wave led by Schlichter Bogard LLC challenges voluntary benefit programs like accident and critical illness insurance, alleging employers and benefits brokers allowed excessive premiums and broker commissions; one case alleges $33 million in excess broker commissions.²⁸³⁰ Traditional 401(k) fee suits and forfeiture cases, by contrast, have cooled while the plaintiffs’ bar waits for appellate guidance.

Artificial Intelligence

AI litigation has opened two separate fronts: copyright claims against the companies training large language models, and employment claims challenging AI-driven hiring tools.

On the copyright side, the biggest resolution so far is Bartz et al. v. Anthropic, where nearly half a million authors secured $1.5 billion after a court found that while training was “transformative” fair use, storing pirated copies of books was not. Estimated payouts work out to roughly $3,000 per copyrighted work. The consolidated MDL In Re OpenAI, Inc. Copyright Infringement Litigation is proceeding in the Southern District of New York, where the court denied OpenAI’s motion to dismiss in October 2025 and in March 2026 ordered production of tens of millions of log entries. Other active cases include Kadrey et al. v. Meta Platforms Inc. and Disney et al. v. Midjourney.³¹

On the employment side, Mobley, et al. v. Workday, Inc. alleges that Workday’s AI screening system disproportionately excludes African American applicants, individuals with disabilities, and older workers. A May 2026 discovery ruling ordered the company to produce certain demographic documents while shielding internal bias-testing data under attorney-client privilege.³² In Kistler et al. v. Eightfold AI Inc., filed in January 2026, plaintiffs allege that Eightfold’s hiring platform collects extensive applicant data to generate “likelihood of success” assessments without required Fair Credit Reporting Act disclosures. The case could set precedent on whether AI hiring tools must follow FCRA notice and dispute rules.³³

How Class Certification Is Shifting

Whether a case ever gets to a payout turns on class certification, and courts granted it more often last year. Of 435 motions decided in 2025, courts granted 297, a 68 percent success rate, up from 63 percent the year before. WARN Act motions were granted 100 percent of the time, ERISA motions 95 percent, securities fraud 79 percent, antitrust 77 percent, and wage and hour 76 percent. Data breach cases, by contrast, were certified only 33 percent of the time, and FCRA and products liability cases around 38 percent each.¹

Two procedural questions remain unresolved. In June 2025, the Supreme Court dismissed Laboratory Corporation of America Holdings v. Davis as “improvidently granted,” leaving open whether federal courts may certify class actions that include members who haven’t suffered a concrete injury. Justice Kavanaugh dissented, arguing that common questions cannot predominate in a class containing both injured and uninjured members.³⁴ And the Court’s January 2026 denial of certiorari in Richards v. Eli Lilly & Company left intact a deepening circuit split over Fair Labor Standards Act collective actions: the Seventh Circuit now applies a more demanding standard requiring evidence from both sides, the Fifth Circuit uses a rigorous one-step test, and most other circuits still follow the traditional “modest factual showing” approach.³⁵ Where a wage-and-hour case is filed can now change its outcome.

Why Private Lawsuits Are Picking Up the Slack

Running underneath these numbers is a sharp pullback in federal enforcement. The EEOC filed only 93 lawsuits in fiscal year 2025, a record low, with roughly three-quarters of them brought on behalf of a single individual. The agency spent most of 2025 without a quorum after two Democratic commissioners and the General Counsel were fired.³⁶ The Department of Labor’s Wage and Hour Division completed 17,300 compliance actions in fiscal year 2024, down from more than 24,700 three years earlier.³⁷

A presidential executive order issued in April 2025 directed federal agencies to stop enforcing the “disparate impact” theory of discrimination, a pillar of employment civil rights law for more than 50 years. The order tells the EEOC to cease new investigations, lawsuits, and “cause” findings under the theory and to assess whether to withdraw from pending cases. The doctrine remains available to private litigants under existing federal statutes and Supreme Court precedent.³⁸ Industry observers broadly expect private plaintiffs’ attorneys to fill the gap, particularly in AI-driven hiring discrimination, systemic recruitment practices, and pay equity, where the EEOC had historically been the primary enforcer.³⁶ That shift helps explain why 2026 is on course to deliver both the biggest settlement checks and the busiest filing dockets the class action system has seen.

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Meat + Poultry. Judge Approves Tyson, Cargill Beef Price-Fixing Settlements
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Yahoo Finance. Tinder $60.5M Age Discrimination Settlement
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WilmerHale. Seventh Circuit Weighs In on Critical BIPA Retroactivity Question
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