The Equifax Payout Most People Are Googling Closed in 2024. The One Still Open Pays Up to $600 — to Roughly 37,000 People Holding a Letter From 2022

This month's mainstream coverage of a “$2.2 million Equifax settlement” — Yahoo Finance among others — sent a wave of people searching for “Equifax class action payout.” The problem: that phrase matches two completely different cases, separated by eight years and more than two orders of magnitude in size.

The 2017 data-breach settlement — the one that made “Equifax settlement” a household phrase, covering roughly 147 million people — is closed. The case that's open, Bradberry v. Equifax Information Services LLC, has nothing to do with the breach. It's about credit-report errors, it covers roughly 37,000 people, and it pays up to $600 — real money, but only if you're actually in the class.

The FTC settlement over the 2017 breach — at least $575 million, potentially up to $700 million — stopped accepting claims when its extended claims window closed in January 2024. Cash payments went out in stages; the administrator even sent a supplemental round of prepaid cards in November 2024 to people who had already been paid. If you never filed, there is no Equifax breach check coming — and anyone who tells you otherwise, especially by phone, is running a scam.

Two benefits do survive the cash window: free identity-restoration services for affected consumers run through January 2029 via the official site, equifaxbreachsettlement.com (1-833-759-2982), and U.S. consumers can pull up to seven free Equifax credit reports per year through 2026 at annualcreditreport.com — a settlement term, not a marketing offer.

Bradberry, in federal court in Georgia (No. 1:22-cv-04754-MLB), alleges Equifax violated the Fair Credit Reporting Act by reporting the same collection account more than once on consumers' credit files — duplicate tradelines that can ding a score twice for one debt. Equifax denies wrongdoing; the $2.2 million settlement received preliminary approval in May 2026.

The class is unusually concrete: people to whom Equifax mailed a “Duplicate Reporting Letter” in August or September 2022 — roughly 37,000. Filing requires the Notice ID (it starts with “EQB”) and PIN from the mailed settlement notice, entered at DuplicateAccountFCRASettlement.com by September 1, 2026. Payments scale with participation, up to $600 each; case trackers put payment timing at roughly 75 days after final approval, and the approval hearing is October 6 — so checks land in late 2026 at the earliest. Class members who don't file get six months of Equifax's credit-monitoring product instead. Our full breakdown: the Equifax FCRA settlement tracker.

The test is a letter, not a memory of the breach. Did Equifax mail you a Duplicate Reporting Letter in late summer 2022 — or a settlement notice with an EQB code this year? Then you're in the 37,000, and the $600 ceiling is worth twenty minutes before September 1. If what you remember is filing (or meaning to file) a breach claim back in 2019, that train has left: the money was distributed, and the deadline passed in early 2024.

A calibration note on the $600: it's a ceiling, not an expected check. If a large share of a 37,000-person class files against $2.2 million minus fees and costs, pro-rata math pulls individual payments down. It's still among the higher per-person figures on any open settlement this quarter — precisely because the class is small.