The '$425 Farmers Settlement' Closed July 24. A Second One, in the Same Missouri Courtroom, Pays $160 Until September 14

Search for the Farmers Insurance telemarketing settlement right now and you will find pages headlined "Claim Up to $425." That settlement is Kimberly Starling v. Farmers Insurance Exchange, et al., Case No. 26SL-CC00138, Division 17, Circuit Court of St. Louis County, Missouri. Its own court-authorized dates page, checked today, lists a claim filing deadline of July 24, 2026 and a final approval hearing held on July 31, 2026. The window is shut. Nothing filed now counts.

The settlement that is open sits in the same building, in the same division, against the same defendant, with the same administrator. It is Spencer Heckathorn v. Farmers Insurance Exchange, et al., Case No. 26SL-CC03879, Division 17, Circuit Court of St. Louis County, Missouri, administered by Atticus Administration LLC. Its claim deadline is September 14, 2026, and the cap is $160, not $425.

The two cases are not duplicates of each other, and neither is a general settlement covering "anyone who got a Farmers call." Each one targets a specific set of agents. Starling covered calls and texts from Todd Henderson Insurance Agency, Inc. and/or R. Todd Henderson between October 8, 2020 and April 28, 2026, in a class of roughly 8,039 people sharing $2,875,000, per classaction.org. Heckathorn covers seven different named agents. Same defendant, same statute, same courtroom, entirely different people.

Under the Heckathorn settlement, Farmers Insurance Exchange, Farmers Insurance Company, Inc. and Fire Insurance Exchange "will make available up to One Million Two Hundred Fifty Thousand dollars ($1,250,000) to settle this class action."

You are included if you received calls or text messages from insurance agents Nickolas Ward, Nate Esparza, Kyle Ryan Gray, Dustin Huffman, Jason Hall, Brian Shirey and/or LeNard Rhone or their agencies marketing Farmers insurance from April 19, 2020 through June 15, 2026 — and, in the settlement's own words, "your cellular phone number appeared on a list produced in the litigation."

That last clause is the gate, and it is the part the roundup posts leave out. This is not an open invitation to anyone who remembers an unwanted Farmers call. The class was built from a list of numbers produced during discovery. If your number is not on it, filing will not produce a payment.

For those who are on it, the notice is candid about what "up to $160" means: if you received more than one telemarketing call or text from those agents, "you can submit a claim to obtain a pro rata share of the Settlement Fund, up to $160, after payment of administrative expenses, attorney's fees and costs, and any service award to the named plaintiff. Your payment may be less depending on the number of claims submitted."

The dates, from the administrator's own summary: preliminary approval June 15, 2026; exclusion and objection deadlines August 27, 2026; claim filing deadline September 14, 2026; final approval hearing September 23, 2026 at 10:30 a.m. At least one large aggregator lists the final approval hearing as August 27 — the administrator's page says September 23, and the administrator is the one running the calendar.

The largest open Do-Not-Call settlement right now is Bryan v. O'Reilly Automotive, Inc., No. 2026CH000016, in the Circuit Court of LaSalle County, Illinois, administered by Kroll Settlement Administration. The aggregate cap is $18,842,577. The estimate per person is $22.00 for approved claims, subject to pro rata reduction.

The class definition explains the gap between those two numbers, and it is narrower than the headline suggests: all persons in the United States (1) whose telephone numbers were registered on the National Do-Not-Call Registry for at least 30 days, (2) who received more than one text message from or on behalf of O'Reilly Automotive within any 12-month period, (3) after the telephone number was reassigned to them. The period runs April 15, 2021 to June 29, 2026.

The reassignment requirement is the real filter. This is not a case about O'Reilly texting its own customers; it is about texts that kept arriving on numbers that had been handed to someone new — where any consent on file belonged to the previous holder.

One scheduling quirk worth flagging: claims are due at 11:59 p.m. PST on September 28, 2026 (or postmarked by that date), while the opt-out and objection deadlines fall later, on October 6, 2026. Most settlements run that order the other way. The final approval hearing is November 5, 2026, at 9:00 a.m. CT, via Zoom.

A $1.25 million settlement pays up to $160 and an $18.8 million settlement pays about $22. A $9.5 million healthcare privacy settlement — Penn Medicine's, which we covered alongside three other portal cases closing in September — pays up to $15. The fund size is not the variable that matters.

What matters is the fund divided by the number of people in the class, after fees and administration. Starling had about 8,039 class members and $2,875,000, which is how a per-person cap of $425 becomes possible. Heckathorn works from a list of numbers produced in discovery, so its class is small enough to support $160 from a $1.25 million pot. O'Reilly's class is every reassigned, Do-Not-Call-registered number in the country that got repeat texts over five years — which is why $18.8 million lands at roughly $22 each.

The reason these caps exist at all is statutory. The Telephone Consumer Protection Act sets damages of $500 per violating call or text, and up to $1,500 where a court finds the violation willful or knowing (47 U.S.C. § 227). That per-message exposure is what makes telemarketing cases expensive to lose and gets them funded; how far the money spreads is a separate question, answered by the class definition.

Two practical rules follow. First, check the case name, not the company name — "the Farmers settlement" describes two different cases with a seven-week gap between their deadlines. Second, check the deadline on the administrator's own site before you trust any roundup: the $425 figure is still circulating for a claim window that closed on July 24.