John Deere's $99 Million Is the Small Part of This Settlement. The Piece Valued at Up to $648 Million Requires No Claim Form — and Older Coverage Lists Deadlines That Are No Longer the Deadlines.

This settlement was preliminarily approved in the spring, and a good deal of the analysis published at that time carries a claims deadline of October 15, 2026 and an opt-out deadline of September 15, 2026. Those were the proposed dates. They are not the operative ones, and a farmer working from that older material would believe the window is nearly shut.

The court-authorized settlement website states the current dates plainly. From the claims page: “Claims must be submitted on or before December 31, 2026” and “That claim form must be submitted on or before December 31, 2026 for you to be eligible to receive payment from the Net Settlement Fund.” The dates panel lists an Opt-Out Deadline of December 4, 2026, an Objection Deadline of December 4, 2026, and a Final Approval Hearing on January 19, 2027 — at 10:00 a.m. Central, in Courtroom 5200 of the Stanley J. Roszkowski U.S. Courthouse, 327 South Church Street, Rockford, Illinois, per the administrator's notice. Where dated commentary and the settlement administrator disagree, the administrator is the one running the claims process.

Almost every account of this case leads with $99 million. The official notice leads with something else. In its own words: “Plaintiffs and John Deere have reached a proposed settlement (the ‘Settlement’) consisting of $99 million in cash, plus interest accruing since January 15, 2026, and injunctive relief requiring Deere to make repair capabilities and tools available to farmers and IRPs.” And then it prices both halves: “At the time of this Notice, the total value of the Settlement is estimated by Plaintiffs' expert to be between $392.9 million and $747 million (including injunctive relief valued between $293.9 million and $648 million).”

Read that ratio again. On the plaintiffs' own expert valuation, the cash is between 13% and 25% of what the deal is said to be worth. The rest is the repair access — and the notice is emphatic that you get it for free: “The injunctive relief provided by the Settlement applies uniformly to you and all members of the Settlement Class, regardless of whether you file a claim form.”

What Deere agreed to do is described as providing customers and independent repair providers “access, on fair and reasonable terms, to digital tools required for the maintenance, diagnosis, and repair of Deere Large Agricultural Equipment, and without which such equipment cannot be operated in the manner for which it was designed,” including new repair tools as Deere releases them. The court keeps its hand on it: “The Court in this case will have jurisdiction to enforce the injunctive relief in the Settlement Agreement for ten years.”

The notice also flags a parallel track that pays nobody: “the Federal Trade Commission and the attorneys general of five states … has entered into an independent settlement with Deere … for injunctive relief, for which you will be receiving a separate notice.” The administrator's announcement adds that the FTC settlement “does not provide monetary recovery to individual Settlement Class members.” Two settlements, one set of repair obligations, one pot of money — and only this case has the pot.

The Plan of Allocation defines the money that actually reaches claimants as the Net Settlement Fund: “the Settlement Fund Amount—$99 million, plus interest accruing since January 15, 2026—less any award of attorneys' fees, service awards for the Settlement Class Representatives, reimbursement of expenses or litigation fund costs, and less applicable taxes, tax preparation expenses, and costs of Class Notice and Settlement administration.”

The notice states the requests: “attorneys' fees not to exceed $45 million, reimbursement of litigation costs and expenses not to exceed $6 million, and $25,000 service awards to each of the Named Plaintiffs, which will be paid from the Settlement Fund Amount if approved by the Court.” There are seven named plaintiffs, so the service awards come to $175,000.

At the caps, that is $51,175,000 off a $99 million fund — before notice costs, administration and taxes, which the definition also subtracts. In the maximum-deduction case, slightly less than half the cash fund would remain for the class. These are ceilings, not awards; the judge sets the actual figures at the January 19 hearing, and fee requests are routinely trimmed. But the ceilings are the ones written into the notice, and a class member deciding whether to file should be working from the net figure rather than the headline.

The class is “All persons and entities who purchased Repair Services for Deere Large Agricultural Equipment from John Deere or its authorized Dealers in the United States between January 10, 2018 and May 18, 2026.” “Large Agricultural Equipment” is defined by machine type: “tractors (all 6000, 7000, 8000 and 9000 Series models); combines; cotton pickers; cotton strippers; sugarcane harvesters; tillage, seeding (including planters), and application equipment and sprayers.” Entities count, so farm businesses and custom operators are in as well as individuals.

There are no fixed payment tiers here. The Plan of Allocation ties each share to how much repair work you actually bought: a “Qualifying Claim” is “the total labor hours spent on repairs of an Eligible Claimant's Large Ag Equipment during the Class Period,” and the administrator computes each share by multiplying the Net Settlement Fund “by a fraction, for which (a) the numerator is the Qualifying Claim for the Eligible Claimant; and (b) the denominator is the sum of all Qualifying Claims by all Eligible Claimants.” The size of any individual payment therefore depends on total participation and cannot be known before claims close. Leftovers are redistributed to people who cashed their checks, repeatedly, “until the balance remaining in the Net Settlement Fund is no longer economically feasible to distribute.”

On paperwork, the notice draws a line most claimants will welcome: if you received a notice with a Notice ID and Confirmation Code, Deere's own service records are doing the work for you. Documentation becomes your job only in the gaps — “if you do not receive a notice with a Notice ID and Confirmation Code—or you believe the data from John Deere does not include all of your qualifying Repair Services, you will need to provide records or documentation of the Repair Services for which you seek compensation.” If you had work done at a dealer that you suspect is missing from Deere's data, invoices are worth digging out before the end of the year.

Doing nothing has a price beyond the missed check. Under the Plan of Allocation, a class member who does not file “shall be deemed to have waived his, her, or its right to share in the Net Settlement Fund” and is still “bound by … the releases provided for therein, whether favorable or unfavorable.” The injunctive relief still reaches you; the money does not, and the claims are gone either way unless you opt out by December 4.