Costco Is Paying $14 Million Over Its Sale Emails. The “$500” Everyone Quotes Is a Statute, Not Your Check — and Claim, Opt-Out and Objection All Expire August 24

Washington's Commercial Electronic Mail Act lets a resident seek $500 per email with a false or misleading subject line. That statutory number is doing all the work in this month's headlines — Fortune's is literally “Who qualifies for an up-to $500 payment.” The settlement itself works differently, and the court-authorized administrator says so in plain terms. From the official FAQ, read today:

The Settlement payments will be equally distributed to all Settlement Class Members who submit timely and valid Claim Forms, after the deduction of settlement costs, attorneys’ fees and expenses awarded by the Court, and any Service Award granted to the Class Representative.

And one sentence later, the line no aggregator quotes:

Given that the number of class members who timely submit valid Claim Forms is unknown, it is impossible to determine the final estimated payment per claimant at this point.

Two more official rules flatten the $500 framing completely. Each person may file exactly one claim, “regardless of the number of commercial electronic mail messages they received” — duplicates are rejected. And the split is equal per claimant, not weighted by how many sale emails landed in your inbox over five years. The case is Michael Aaland v. Costco Wholesale Corporation, Case No. 25-2-16392-0, Superior Court of Washington for King County; the administrator is Verita.

The official membership test has three parts, all from the FAQ: you (1) received a commercial email sent by or on behalf of Costco between June 2, 2021 and July 7, 2026, (2) were a Washington resident at the time you received it, and (3) received it at an email address appearing in Costco's data. The administrator's own examples of qualifying subject lines are almost charmingly familiar: “Today is the last day to access Member-Only Saving” and “Hot Buys available for 5 Days Only.” If you shopped at Costco from a Washington address in the last five years, you almost certainly received dozens of these.

Two practical details matter. If you got an email notice about the settlement, your Claim ID and PIN sit at the top of that email. But the FAQ is explicit that people without any notice may still be class members — the claim form asks for your Claim ID only “if they have one,” and otherwise wants the email address(es) where you received Costco's marketing plus an attestation of the three points above. No receipts, no proof of purchase, no membership number.

Filing is online at the settlement site or by mail (Aaland v. Costco Wholesale Corporation, Settlement Administrator, P.O. Box 301134, Los Angeles, CA 90030-1134), postmarked by August 24. You can choose to be paid by paper check, Venmo or PayPal — the FAQ names all three.

The official numbers: a $14,000,000 fund; a fee request of up to one-third — $4,620,000; litigation expenses “currently estimated to be $16,500.00”; and a service award of no more than $2,500 for the class representative, Michael Aaland. Settlement administration costs also come out of the fund, and the administrator does not publish an estimate for them.

What follows is our arithmetic, not the administrator's. If the court awards the full requests, roughly $9.36 million remains before administration costs. Divided equally, that is about $94 per person at 100,000 claims, $37 at 250,000, $19 at 500,000, and $9 at one million claims. For calibration: Costco is headquartered in Washington, and the class window covers five years of marketing email to every Washington resident in its data — the eligible population plausibly runs into the millions, which is exactly why the administrator refuses to estimate a per-person figure. A high-participation outcome here looks like a modest double-digit check, not $500.

One detail cuts the other way: money from uncashed or undeliverable payments doesn't revert to Costco. The FAQ commits it to “a pro rata second distribution to those Settlement Class Members who cashed/received their initial Settlement payments (if there are sufficient residual funds…); and/or… distribution to the Legal Foundation of Washington.”

Most settlements stagger their dates; this one stacks them. Claim filing, exclusion (opt-out) and objection are all due August 24, 2026. That compresses the usual decision sequence into a single day: if you want to preserve your right to sue Costco individually — including a genuine CEMA claim for $500 per email, which is what an individual suit could seek — August 24 is also your last day to opt out. Stay in and do nothing, and you release those claims and receive nothing; stay in and file, and you get the equal split.

The Final Approval Hearing is October 2, 2026 at 3:30 p.m. before Judge Janet Helson in King County Superior Court (Courtroom W728, 516 Third Ave., Seattle). Payments only follow final approval and the resolution of any appeals — not the claim deadline. The administrator's phone line is 888-808-6247.

The pattern here is one we keep documenting: a statutory or headline number ($2,500 caps that pay $10, deadlines that aren't the real deadlines) circulates because it is quotable, while the governing document says something quieter. The governing document is the one that pays.