Amazon Prime FTC Settlement: Payments Expected Late 2026

At a glance

Status

Approved, awaiting payment

Defendant

Amazon.com, Inc.

Settlement fund

$2,500,000,000

Claim deadline

July 27, 2026

No-proof cash option

Yes — Up to $51, no proof

Estimated payout

Up to $51, no proof

Administrator

Verita (Verita Connect)

Official site

www.subscriptionmembershipsettlement.com

Court

U.S. District Court, Western District of Washington (FTC v. Amazon)

Case number

2:23-cv-00932

Last verified September 9, 2026

Key dates

Milestone	Date	What it means
Claim deadline	July 27, 2026(passed)	Last day to file for a payment
Opt-out (exclusion) deadline	None listed	Last day to leave the settlement and keep the right to sue
Objection deadline	None listed	Last day to object to the terms
Final approval hearing	None listed	When the judge decides whether to approve the settlement
Expected payout	Not yet scheduled	Payments are not sent until after final approval and any appeals

Where to file

Amazon Prime FTC Subscription Settlement is administered by Verita (Verita Connect). The only place to file is the official settlement website:

Verify on the official site

www.subscriptionmembershipsettlement.com

Filing is free. No legitimate settlement charges a fee to file a claim.

You cannot file on RecordingLaw.com. We are an independent publisher, not the settlement administrator, and we are not affiliated with any court, agency, or defendant.

The claims window for the Amazon Prime FTC settlement closed July 27, 2026. Whether you have anything left to do depends entirely on which of two eligibility groups you fall into, and mixing up the two is the single most common mistake people make about this settlement. Here is how to tell which one applies to you.

What the FTC says Amazon did

The Federal Trade Commission sued Amazon.com, Inc. in June 2023, accusing the company of enrolling millions of shoppers into Amazon Prime without clear consent and then making it deliberately hard to cancel. The case, FTC v. Amazon.com, Inc., case number 2:23-cv-00932, was filed in the U.S. District Court for the Western District of Washington. The FTC's complaint described checkout flows that used "dark patterns," design choices that push a shopper toward a paid subscription instead of clearly asking for their agreement to one.

The FTC alleged this conduct violated Section 5 of the FTC Act and the Restore Online Shoppers' Confidence Act, the federal law that governs subscriptions that renew automatically unless a customer cancels. The case ended in a settlement the court entered on September 25, 2025. Amazon agreed to pay $2.5 billion in total: a $1 billion civil penalty to the government, and $1.5 billion set aside for consumer refunds.

Where this stands right now, as of September 2026

This is an FTC law enforcement action, not a private class action lawsuit, and that distinction changes what you can and cannot do. There is no opt-out deadline here, no objection deadline, and no final approval hearing to track, because there is no class to leave or a private settlement for a judge to approve over objections. The FTC negotiated the refund terms directly with Amazon, and the court entered them as a final order back in September 2025.

Two rounds of payment follow from that order. The first round went out automatically, with nothing to file: Amazon and the settlement administrator sent payments to one group of eligible customers by late December 2025. The second round is a claims process for a different group of eligible customers, who must file to get paid. Claim notices for that second group began going out in January 2026, and the window closed July 27, 2026. The FTC says Amazon expects to send payments in late 2026, so people who filed are waiting on that distribution rather than on another deadline.

Who's actually eligible: two groups, not one

Both groups share a baseline requirement, and it is more than just a date. You must have enrolled in Amazon Prime between June 23, 2019 and June 23, 2025, AND your enrollment must have involved one of the sign-up flows the FTC challenged, or you must have tried to cancel Prime through Amazon's online process and been unable to do so. Simply having been a Prime member in that window is not enough on its own. Past that shared starting point, the two groups split based on how many Prime benefits you used in a 12-month period, and that split decides whether you already have your money or still need to act.

Automatic Payment Group. You fall here if you enrolled through one of the challenged sign-up flows during that window and used no more than three Prime benefits, things like fast shipping, Prime Video, or Prime Music, in any 12-month period. If that describes you, Amazon and the administrator already sent your payment automatically by late December 2025. You did not need to file anything, and there is nothing to file now. If you believe you fit this group and never received a payment, check your bank or card statement for a deposit from Amazon around that time before assuming you were skipped.

Claims Process Payment Group. You fall here if you were unintentionally enrolled through one of the challenged sign-up methods, or you tried to cancel Prime through Amazon's online cancellation process but could not, AND you used fewer than ten Prime benefits in a 12-month period, AND you did not already receive an automatic payment. This is the group the claims window was for. Its deadline was July 27, 2026 and it has passed, so no new claims can be submitted. The official settlement site is where people who filed can check the status of a claim.

How much you can realistically expect

The Claims Process Payment Group payout is a cash amount of up to $51 per eligible person, paid from the $1.5 billion consumer-refund portion of the settlement. That $51 figure is a ceiling, not a promise. As of September 9, 2026, the FTC states the refund is capped at $51 and no minimum or typical payment amount has been published, so do not assume every valid claim results in the full $51; treat it as the most a claimant could receive rather than the expected outcome.

What proof you need to file

None was required. Filing a claim in the Claims Process Payment Group did not require receipts, screenshots, or other documentation of Prime usage. Claimants attested to their own eligibility, based on enrollment dates and how many Prime benefits they used during the window described above.

How filing works

Filing happened only on the official settlement site, administered by Verita on the FTC's behalf; the link renders below this article. Filing was free, and the same site is where a filed claim can be checked. The FTC will never ask you to pay a fee to release your own refund, and no legitimate part of this process happens by unsolicited phone call or text message. The official domain is subscriptionmembershipsettlement.com; some look-alike or unrelated sites have circulated online using the Amazon name, so check the web address carefully before entering any personal information, and go directly to the official page rather than clicking a link you were not expecting.

If you already have your money, or the record doesn't answer your question

If a payment from Amazon already showed up in your account by around late December 2025, you were in the Automatic Payment Group, and there is nothing left to file. If nothing has arrived and you believe you meet the Claims Process Payment Group criteria above, the July 27, 2026 filing deadline has passed; the official settlement site is the place to check whether a claim was recorded in your name.

The FTC says Amazon expects to send payments in late 2026. That is a stated expectation rather than a court-ordered date, so there is still no exact day on which a check or deposit will arrive. This settlement is about Amazon's Prime sign-up and cancellation practices, not a data breach; no customer database is alleged to have been exposed here, so the usual credit-freeze and identity-monitoring steps for a breach do not apply to this matter.

For other open, currently verified consumer settlements, including actual data-breach cases with their own claim windows, see RecordingLaw's data breach and privacy settlement tracker.