Bayer’s Monsanto unit has proposed a $7.25 billion Roundup lawsuit settlement to resolve current and future non-Hodgkin lymphoma claims tied to the weed killer’s active ingredient, glyphosate. The deal was filed in the Circuit Court of the City of St. Louis, Missouri, on February 17, 2026, received preliminary approval on March 4, 2026, and is scheduled for a final approval hearing on July 9, 2026.1Bayer. Monsanto Announces Roundup Class Settlement Agreement to Resolve Current and Future Claims2Chemical & Engineering News. Bayer Roundup Glyphosate Cancer Class Action Lawsuit Settlement Payouts to individual class members are estimated between $150 and $165,000, depending on exposure, age, and how aggressive the cancer is.3The Hill. $7.25B Settlement Over Roundup Weed Killers: Who Qualifies and How Much You Could Receive
Who Qualifies and How Much the Settlement Pays
The class covers anyone exposed to Roundup before February 17, 2026, who has already been diagnosed with non-Hodgkin lymphoma or who receives a diagnosis within 16 years of final court approval.1Bayer. Monsanto Announces Roundup Class Settlement Agreement to Resolve Current and Future Claims Qualifying diagnoses include a broad range of NHL subtypes such as diffuse large B-cell lymphoma, follicular lymphoma, Burkitt lymphoma, mantle cell lymphoma, and marginal zone lymphoma, along with certain leukemias including chronic lymphocytic leukemia and hairy cell leukemia.4Drugwatch. Roundup Lawsuit
Payments are set by a matrix that weighs the claimant’s type of exposure, age at diagnosis, and how aggressive the cancer is:3The Hill. $7.25B Settlement Over Roundup Weed Killers: Who Qualifies and How Much You Could Receive
- Occupational exposure of more than 80 hours on the job pays $60,000 to $165,000, with higher amounts for younger claimants and more aggressive cancers.
- Residential exposure averages $20,000 to $40,000, with a “quick pay” option of $7,700 to $14,500 for faster disbursement.
- Claimants aged 78 or older average around $10,000, with a $6,000 quick-pay option.
- Minimal exposure, defined as fewer than 16 hours or fewer than 10 lifetime days, pays $150.
Useful evidence for a claim includes purchase receipts, employment records, pesticide usage logs, and medical documentation that connects the diagnosis to the exposure timeline.4Drugwatch. Roundup Lawsuit Exposure can come through farming, landscaping, groundskeeping, utility work, or home weed control.
Deadlines, Opt-Outs, and What If You Already Sued
Class members had until June 4, 2026, to opt out or file objections. The final fairness hearing is July 9, 2026.2Chemical & Engineering News. Bayer Roundup Glyphosate Cancer Class Action Lawsuit Settlement The program is structured to pay out on a declining schedule over up to 21 years.1Bayer. Monsanto Announces Roundup Class Settlement Agreement to Resolve Current and Future Claims
One feature aimed at claimants who worry about delay: if a class member files a valid claim and is not paid within five years, they can exit the settlement and resume the right to sue Monsanto individually.3The Hill. $7.25B Settlement Over Roundup Weed Killers: Who Qualifies and How Much You Could Receive
Not everyone is satisfied. Attorneys representing close to 20,000 potential class members moved to intervene and challenge the scope of the deal, though the Missouri judge declined to delay preliminary approval.2Chemical & Engineering News. Bayer Roundup Glyphosate Cancer Class Action Lawsuit Settlement If you already have a pending individual case, whether in the federal multidistrict litigation in the Northern District of California or in state court, your options are to stay in the class or opt out and continue litigating. State statutes of limitations for personal injury can be as short as one year from diagnosis, though many states apply a discovery rule that starts the clock when a patient first connects the illness to Roundup.4Drugwatch. Roundup Lawsuit
How This Deal Differs From the 2021 Rejected Settlement
Bayer tried a broadly similar arrangement in 2021 for future claims. U.S. District Judge Vince Chhabria in San Francisco refused to approve it, calling it “clearly unreasonable” for undiagnosed users. He noted that the proposal offered only a four-year medical monitoring program for a cancer that can take 10 to 15 years to develop, while forcing claimants to waive punitive damages and defer to a court-appointed science panel on causation.5Courthouse News. Judge Rejects Settlement to Resolve Future Roundup Cancer Claims
The 2026 version was structured to answer those objections. It eliminates the science panel, stretches the coverage window from four years to as long as 21 years, and adds substantially more funding.1Bayer. Monsanto Announces Roundup Class Settlement Agreement to Resolve Current and Future Claims That does not guarantee final approval in July, but it removes the specific features that sank the earlier attempt.
The Supreme Court Case That Could Reshape Everything
Running alongside the settlement is a case the Supreme Court heard on April 27, 2026: Monsanto Company v. Durnell. The question is whether the Federal Insecticide, Fungicide, and Rodenticide Act (FIFRA) preempts state-law failure-to-warn claims when the EPA has never required a cancer warning on the Roundup label. Monsanto argues that federal rules control label content and state juries cannot override the EPA’s determination. The Trump administration filed a brief supporting Bayer’s position.6SCOTUSblog. Justices Debate Who Gets to Decide That Pesticide Labels Need a Cancer Warning7Bayer. Managing the Roundup Litigation
At oral argument the justices were divided. Chief Justice John Roberts and Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson pressed on why states should be powerless while the EPA works through multiyear review cycles. Justice Neil Gorsuch asked why states have the greater power to ban a product but not the lesser power to require a label change. Justice Brett Kavanaugh flagged a “retroactivity problem” in holding companies liable for following EPA-approved labels, and Justice Elena Kagan questioned how state-by-state variations fit FIFRA’s goal of national uniformity.6SCOTUSblog. Justices Debate Who Gets to Decide That Pesticide Labels Need a Cancer Warning
A decision is expected by early July 2026, just before the settlement’s final approval hearing. If Bayer wins, state failure-to-warn claims could be barred, undercutting the value of opting out. If Bayer loses, individual claims remain viable. Bayer has described the two tracks as “mutually reinforcing”: the settlement resolves claims regardless of the ruling, while a favorable ruling weakens anyone who opts out.1Bayer. Monsanto Announces Roundup Class Settlement Agreement to Resolve Current and Future Claims
The Verdicts and Prior Settlements That Set the Price
The 2026 proposal did not come out of nowhere. Since the first Roundup trial in 2018, juries have repeatedly returned large plaintiff verdicts, though most have been sharply cut in post-trial and appellate proceedings.
Dewayne Johnson, a California school groundskeeper diagnosed with mycosis fungoides, won a $289 million verdict in August 2018. That total, including $250 million in punitive damages, was later reduced to roughly $39.3 million by the trial court and further trimmed on appeal.8Penn State Ag Law. Review of Litigation Against Monsanto Regarding the Safety of Glyphosate9Justia. Johnson v. Monsanto Co., A155940 Edwin Hardeman’s federal bellwether trial produced roughly $5.3 million in compensatory and $75 million in punitive damages, later reduced to $20 million punitive and affirmed by the Ninth Circuit in 2021. The Supreme Court declined to review Hardeman and the $87 million Pilliod judgment in June 2022, leaving intact the principle that FIFRA does not block state-law claims, at least under those courts’ reasoning.10U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit. Hardeman v. Monsanto Company11MedTruth. Supreme Court Declines to Review $87M Pilliod Roundup Case
The largest single verdict came in January 2024, when a Philadelphia jury awarded John McKivison $2.25 billion, including $2 billion in punitive damages. The trial judge reduced the total to $400 million in June 2024, calling the punitive award “unconstitutionally excessive.” Bayer said it will appeal.12Law360 via Kline Specter. McKivison v. Monsanto Et Al.13Bayer. Bayer Litigation Statement – McKivison A $2.1 billion Georgia verdict in Barnes was vacated through a confidential settlement in November 2025, and the Missouri Supreme Court in October 2025 declined to review a $600 million judgment (originally $1.56 billion), making that award final.7Bayer. Managing the Roundup Litigation14TorHoerman Law. Roundup Lawsuit Bayer also wins cases: as of mid-2026, the company’s trial record stood at 10 defense wins and 8 plaintiff wins.15Simmons Firm. Monsanto Roundup
Behind those numbers is a much larger settlement history. In June 2020, Bayer announced a global settlement worth $8.8 billion to $9.6 billion to resolve about 75% of the roughly 125,000 claims then pending, plus a separate $1.25 billion fund earmarked for future claims (the piece Judge Chhabria rejected).16Bayer. Bayer Announces Agreements to Resolve Major Legacy Monsanto Litigation By mid-2025, Bayer reported 192,000 total claims filed and about 131,000 settled or deemed ineligible, leaving roughly 61,000 unresolved.17Bayer. Bayer Upgrades Currency-Adjusted Sales and Earnings Guidance and Establishes Additional Provisions for Litigation In the federal MDL (No. 2741), about 3,887 cases were pending as of March 2026, with tens of thousands more in state courts.18Motley Rice. Roundup Lawsuits
Where the Science Stands
The lawsuits do not require a scientific consensus that glyphosate causes cancer, and there isn’t one. The International Agency for Research on Cancer classified glyphosate as “probably carcinogenic to humans” (Group 2A) in March 2015, based on what it called “sufficient evidence” in animals and “limited evidence” in humans.19Reuters. Special Report: WHO IARC Glyphosate The EPA has reached the opposite conclusion, calling glyphosate “not likely to be carcinogenic to humans.”20EPA. Glyphosate A joint UN/WHO panel in 2016 and European regulators have reached assessments closer to the EPA’s.
Plaintiffs have leaned on a 2019 meta-analysis by University of California Berkeley researcher Luoping Zhang and colleagues in Mutation Research. Pooling data from nearly 65,000 participants across six studies, it found a 41% increased risk of non-Hodgkin lymphoma among people with high cumulative exposure to glyphosate-based herbicides.21PMC. Exposure to Glyphosate-Based Herbicides and Risk for Non-Hodgkin Lymphoma: A Meta-Analysis and Supporting Evidence The EPA disputed the methodology; its own re-analysis produced a 1.14 risk estimate that was not statistically significant.22EPA. Glyphosate Epidemiological Review – Zhang – Proposed Interim Decision The Ninth Circuit in 2022 vacated the human-health portion of the EPA’s 2020 interim registration review, finding that the agency’s own 2017 cancer review was internally inconsistent: it said it was “unable to reach a conclusion” on non-Hodgkin lymphoma while simultaneously making a formal “not likely” carcinogenicity finding.23National Agricultural Law Center. Ninth Circuit Orders EPA to Revisit Conclusion That Glyphosate Is Not Likely to Cause Cancer
What that means for a claimant is straightforward. The settlement matrix does not require anyone to prove causation in the abstract; it pays based on documented exposure and a qualifying diagnosis. The Supreme Court’s ruling, if it favors Bayer, could foreclose future state-court trials on the underlying science. If you fit the class definition, the practical question is whether to accept the settlement’s terms or opt out and bet on either an individual lawsuit or a favorable outcome in Durnell.