Every Reported Meta Settlement Total Is Different — $16.7B, $17.1B, $18B. The Signed Court Document Has Two Tables That Explain All Three, and a State List Where Texas and Florida Have No Number at All.

In the week after Meta settled the states' social-media case, the headline number moved depending on where you read it. CNBC reported $16.7 billion. The New York and Alaska attorneys general said up to $17.1 billion. Variety wrote up to $18 billion. None of these outlets was careless; they were describing different parts of the same deal.

The document that settles the question is the fully executed agreement itself, filed on August 26, 2026 as Document 572-1 in Case No. 4:23-cv-05448-YGR in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California, and published by the California Attorney General. It runs 404 pages, and the money lives in two of its exhibits.

Exhibit B is headed “Guaranteed Installment Payments & Contingency Installment Payments.” It lists 51 states and territories with three numbers each, and it carries its own total: $16,680,647,753.21. That is the $16.7 billion figure.

Exhibit E is headed “Cambridge Payment Amounts” and covers the older Cambridge Analytica data-privacy matter. It lists 47 jurisdictions and totals $459,293,017.80.

$16,680,647,753.21 plus $459,293,017.80 is $17,139,940,771.01. That is the “up to $17.1 billion” in the press releases, to the dollar. The two exhibits are the whole arithmetic.

Exhibit B splits each jurisdiction's money into a Guaranteed Installment Payment and a Contingency Installment Payment, and a footnote on the table warns that these are “the payment amounts per installment, not the total amounts over the full payment term.” Section VI.C.1 sets the term: “Meta shall make payments to each Settling State in ten installments.” The first is due within 30 days of the Effective Date, and the rest “on January 15 in each subsequent calendar year of the Agreement Term beginning with January 15, 2027.”

Ten times the guaranteed column ($1,165,662,174.56) is $11,656,621,745.60. Ten times the contingency column ($502,402,600.77) is $5,024,026,007.70. The guaranteed part is roughly 70% of the total; the contingency part is roughly 30%.

That 30% is not Meta's to decide, and it is not the states' either. The agreement defines a “Contingent Monetary Payment Trigger” that requires, first, industry-wide adoption of the time-management obligations by all “Core Industry Members” — and the definitions section says plainly what that means: “‘Core Industry Members’ shall mean Snap, TikTok, and YouTube, for so long as the product or service is available to US Teen Users.” Snap belongs in that sentence; much of the coverage named only YouTube and TikTok. Second, it requires that every Core Industry Member with annual profits above $10 billion take on a monetary obligation to the state at least equal to that state's contingency payments.

If that never happens, the consequence is explicit: “the Contingency Installment Payments shall be permanently forfeited by such Settling State and retained by Meta.” On the numbers in Exhibit B, that is just over $5 billion that may never be paid — which is why every careful press release says “up to.”

The most interesting page in the document is the one with no dollar signs on it. Exhibit D, “Eligible States,” lists 55 jurisdictions. Exhibit B, the payment table, lists 51. Comparing the two line by line, four names appear on the eligibility list and nowhere in the money: Florida, Texas, Guam and the U.S. Virgin Islands.

The agreement anticipates this. Section VI.A.2: “In the event that any state or territory becomes a Settling State following the Effective Date, Exhibit B will be amended to add such additional states and their respective Guaranteed Installment Payment and Contingency Installment Payment.” Being an Eligible State is the door; a line in Exhibit B is the payment. A jurisdiction can walk through the door later.

For Texas the practical answer is already public: news coverage in the same week described a federal judge approving a Meta settlement sending over $1 billion to Texas — a separate track, not a line in this table. For Florida, Guam and the Virgin Islands, this document simply does not say, and we are not going to guess. If those jurisdictions settle, the amendment mechanism above is where their numbers will appear.

One further thing the document declines to explain is how the 51 numbers were set. Section VI.A.3 states that “the negotiations that led to this Agreement are intended to be confidential” and that the parties “agree to not disclose the details of those negotiations.” There is no published formula — no population weighting, no user-count basis, nothing. That matters when you look at the table, because the ordering is not the one you would predict. Tennessee ($739.5 million) is allocated more than Pennsylvania ($705.2 million) and more than North Carolina ($646.4 million). Kentucky ($512.5 million) is allocated more than Ohio ($456.8 million). Georgia, one of the largest states in the country, is allocated $137.1 million — in the same range as Montana ($127.3 million), Vermont ($127.0 million) and the District of Columbia ($129.4 million). Whether that reflects when a state joined, what claims it brought, or something else entirely, the agreement does not say.

Below is Exhibit B in full, sorted from largest to smallest maximum payment. The guaranteed and contingency columns are per-installment amounts, exactly as printed in the document; the third column is the maximum across all ten installments, also as printed. We extracted the table mechanically from the filed PDF and checked it three ways: the row count is 51, both per-installment columns sum to the totals the document itself prints, and every row satisfies maximum = 10 × (guaranteed + contingency).

Source: Exhibit B, Guaranteed Installment Payments & Contingency Installment Payments, in the Settlement Agreement attached as Exhibit A to the Consent Judgment, Case No. 4:23-cv-05448-YGR, Document 572-1, filed 08/26/26, pages 98–99 of the exhibit (PDF pages 110–111 of 130).

Every figure on this page is money that flows to state governments, not to households. There is no consumer claim form attached to this settlement, no fund for parents, and no eligibility check to run. Exhibit C of the consent judgment sets out, jurisdiction by jurisdiction, where each payment is deposited and who directs it — for Georgia, for example, “payments … shall be deposited as directed by the Georgia Attorney General, to be used for any lawful purpose.” Several states direct their share to specified youth mental-health or remediation uses; others leave it to the attorney general's discretion.

The hundreds of individual, family and school-district lawsuits against Meta are a separate track that this agreement does not resolve, and Meta has not admitted liability in it. If you arrived here looking for a payment you can claim, this is not that settlement — our open-claims tracker lists the ones that are actually claimable right now.