Equifax Agreed to Pay $100 Million Last Week — and There Is No Claim Form. The Equifax Settlement You Could Actually File Closed September 1.

If you searched “Equifax settlement” this week you probably landed on a number that you cannot do anything about. There are three distinct Equifax matters in circulation right now, and they are at three completely different stages:

1. The $100 million credit-score coding case — settlement filed August 12, 2026, preliminarily approved August 17, 2026 (corrected September 26, 2026). No claim form, no website when this was written. This is the one generating the search wave.
2. The duplicate-account FCRA case (Bradberry) — was open when this was written, pays up to $600, and had a claim deadline of September 1, 2026 — now closed (updated September 2, 2026).
3. The 2017 data breach — the one most people remember. Closed. The FTC-supervised claims process ended years ago.

The practical consequence is blunt: the settlement everyone is reading about pays nothing yet, and the settlement that pays this month is the one almost nobody is searching for. If you only have five minutes, spend them on number two.

The case is In re: Equifax Fair Credit Reporting Act Litigation, No. 1:22-cv-03072, in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Georgia, Atlanta Division, before Chief Judge Leigh Martin May. The docket was opened August 3, 2022; the settlement motion landed almost exactly four years later.

It is not a hacking case. For a three-week window — March 17 through April 8, 2022 — a coding error on an Equifax server caused the company to send credit scores and credit attributes to lenders, insurers and other third parties that differed from what correct calculations would have produced. Those weeks fell in the middle of an unusually hot lending market, which is why the alleged harm is concrete: a score that arrived a few points low could mean a denied auto loan or mortgage, or a higher interest rate on one that was approved.

Equifax's own statement, issued the day after the filing, confirms the window and the mechanism while denying the legal claim. The coding issue, it said, “impacted how some credit scores and credit attributes were calculated” between those dates, but “did not impact any information in consumer credit reports.” The company denies violating the law, and the court has made no finding of wrongdoing.

One detail deserves to be quoted rather than buried, because it cuts against the plaintiffs' framing: an Equifax spokesperson told Law360 that most affected scores did not actually change, and that a substantial number of those that did move shifted upward. If your score went up during those three weeks, you are still in the class — class membership turns on inaccurate reporting, not on being harmed by it.

Class counsel call the $100 million “by far the largest class-action settlement ever achieved under the Fair Credit Reporting Act,” covering roughly 4 million people nationwide. The fund is nonreversionary: whatever is not claimed does not go back to Equifax.

Correction, September 26, 2026: an earlier version of this section said Judge May had not ruled. She granted preliminary approval on August 17, 2026 — five days after the filing and one day before this article was published — and set the final fairness hearing for January 22, 2027.

This is the part the aggregator posts skip. Preliminary approval is not a claim form. Until the class notice goes out there is nothing to file, and when this was written there was no settlement website of any kind. As the Atlanta Journal-Constitution put it, “If the settlement is approved, a public website will be created for consumers to get information and file claims.” Future tense.

The parties proposed Verita Global as settlement administrator. With preliminary approval granted on August 17, the reported sequence runs like this: notices go out 42 days after approval (on that schedule, around September 28, 2026), which starts two clocks — 60 days to opt out or object, and 90 days to file a claim.

Add it up and, on that schedule, the claim window runs from about late September to late December 2026, with payments only after final approval and any appeals. There is no way to get in line early, no pre-registration, and nothing legitimate to sign up for today.

Which brings up the obvious risk: a search wave with no official destination is exactly the condition scammers wait for. Any site currently offering to “file your Equifax $100 million claim,” collect your Social Security number for it, or charge a fee to secure your spot is not the settlement administrator. The real website is named in the court-approved notice, and filing a claim never costs money.

Press coverage has settled on an estimated payment of $95 to $280 per person, a figure that comes from plaintiffs' counsel, not from the court. It is not a promise, and the reason matters.

Both the AJC and the settlement motion describe payments as pro rata: claimants receive “a proportional cut of what's left in the fund once attorney fees, litigation costs, and administrative expenses are subtracted.” A pro rata fund has no fixed per-person amount. What each person gets depends entirely on how many people file.

So run the numbers. Class counsel are requesting fees of up to $33,333,333 — which, as with the O'Reilly settlement we covered on Saturday, is exactly one third of the headline number ($33,333,333 × 3 = $99,999,999). That leaves at most $66,666,667 before litigation costs, administration and any service awards, none of which are yet public.

• If all 4 million class members filed: $66,666,667 ÷ 4,000,000 = about $16.67 each.
• To reach the low estimate of $95: only about 702,000 claims — roughly 17.5% of the class.
• To reach the high estimate of $280: only about 238,000 claims — roughly 6% of the class.

In other words, the widely quoted range quietly assumes that between about 6% and 18% of eligible people will claim. That is a normal assumption — consumer class claim rates are usually in the low single digits to low teens — but it is an assumption, not an entitlement. And because litigation costs and administration also come out of the fund, the true net is lower than $66.7 million, which means the real implied claim rate is lower still.

The honest summary: $100 million divided by 4 million people is $25, not $280. The larger figures exist only because most people never file. If this settlement gets unusually broad publicity, the per-person checks shrink accordingly.

Update, September 2, 2026: the Bradberry claim window closed on September 1, 2026. The final approval hearing is set for October 6, 2026; payments follow approval. The section below is preserved as written on August 18.

While the $100 million case waited for its claim process, a different Equifax settlement was open and closing in two weeks. This was the one worth your attention that week.

The case is Bradberry v. Equifax Information Services LLC, No. 1:22-cv-04754-MLB, also in the Northern District of Georgia. It concerns the reporting of duplicate collection accounts — the same debt appearing more than once on a credit file, dragging the score down twice for one obligation. Payments run up to $600.

From the court-authorized settlement website, duplicateaccountfcrasettlement.com, the dates are:

• Claim deadline: September 1, 2026
• Opt-out deadline: September 1, 2026 (the same day — unusually, there is no grace period after claims close)
• Objection deadline: October 6, 2026

The filing requirement is the catch. You log in “using the Notice ID (which begins with EQB) and the PIN printed on your notice.” That means this settlement is effectively notice-gated: without the mailed or emailed notice, you cannot simply self-identify and file. If you received something from Equifax with a code starting EQB and set it aside as junk, that is the document — find it before September 1.

Note the structural contrast with the $100 million case, which is worth internalizing as a general rule: the settlement with the enormous headline number has no deadline you can miss, and the small one has a deadline two weeks out. Urgency and size are not correlated.

If you want the $600 one: search your physical mail and your email — including spam — for a notice with an ID beginning EQB. The filing window at duplicateaccountfcrasettlement.com closed on September 1, 2026 (updated September 2). If you filed, the next date is the October 6, 2026 final approval hearing; if you believe you belonged in the class and never got a notice, the administrator through the official site is still the only place to ask.

If you want the $100 million one: there is nothing to do yet, and that is the whole point. Do not hand your Social Security number to any site claiming otherwise. Watch for the court-approved notice — the real one comes from the court-appointed administrator, and it names the real website.

If you are thinking about the 2017 breach: that process closed. The FTC's own page remains the reference point for what that settlement did and did not cover, and no one can enroll you in it today.

One practical aside worth more than any of these checks: if a duplicate collection account or a bad score is still on your file, the settlement money is the smaller half of the remedy. Disputing the entry directly with the bureau costs nothing and fixes the thing that actually affects your borrowing costs.