Pine-Sol Settlement: A $4.46 Virtual Prepaid Card Was Reported on September 19, 2026 — More Than Two Years After Final Approval — and the Official Site Still Says the Court Has to Decide

The Pine-Sol settlement appears to be paying again — at least one claimant says so. OpenClassActions, a site that tracks settlement payouts, reported that a claimant received an email on September 19, 2026 reading “You've Received a Virtual Prepaid Card! $4.46”, for a claim that covered one bottle and had no receipt. That is one report, relayed by a third party. We could not open the page itself (it returned an error to us and we read it through search excerpts), and the administrator has published nothing that confirms the amount or the date. Treat $4.46 as what one claimant reports being paid, not as the settlement's rate.

The official site does not help. As of September 30, 2026, PSSettlement.com still carries its pre-approval text — “The Court in charge of this case still has to decide whether to approve the Settlement” — although Judge Philip M. Halpern signed the final approval order on May 22, 2024, noting that “There have been no objections to the Settlement or any of its terms.” There is no payment notice, no distribution date and no answer about prepaid cards. September 2026 is also not the first money out of this fund. In a roundup published November 25, 2024, Top Class Actions wrote that readers reported receiving Pine-Sol payments: “Our viewers reportedly received $223.99 on Aug. 28.” That can only mean August 28, 2024, the one August 28 between final approval and the article, and a payment that size can only come from a claim with receipts, because the no-receipt award stops at two bottles.

So what is the September 2026 card? The documents we read leave it open. Section 5.7 of the settlement agreement required payments to begin “within thirty (30) days after the Effective Date, or as otherwise ordered by the Court.” Section 5.8 says money left over after the first round “will be distributed to Class Members who cashed the initial payment, on a pro rata basis” if a second round is economical, and otherwise goes to the nonprofit Equal Justice Works. A card in 2026 could be such a second distribution, a reissued payment, or a first payment that was held up; the administrator has not said which. What it means for you: if you filed a claim by February 7, 2024 and chose the prepaid card, look in the inbox and the spam folder of the email address you gave on the form.

The payment method is real. The official claim form's “Payment Selection” offered four choices: “Prepaid Mastercard – Enter the email address where you will receive the Prepaid Mastercard”, Venmo, Zelle, or a “Physical Check” mailed to the claim address. An emailed virtual card is exactly what a claimant who picked the Prepaid Mastercard should expect. The administrator is Angeion Group, named by the court in its preliminary approval order of November 15, 2023: “Angeion Group is hereby appointed by the Court as the Claim Administrator.”

What nobody outside the administrator can confirm is an individual email. Our checklist: a genuine notice refers to the Pine-Sol settlement or Swetz v. Clorox, matches the payment option you chose on your claim, and does not ask for a fee, a bank login or your Social Security number to release the money. If you picked Venmo, Zelle or a check and received a card email instead, or if anything looks wrong, do not click through. Contact the administrator with the details from the official site: Info@PSSettlement.com, toll-free 1-888-339-9884, or Pine-Sol Settlement, c/o Class Administrator, 1650 Arch Street, Suite 2210, Philadelphia, PA 19103. The agreement also notes, in section 5.9, that “Any person who receives a Cash Award will be solely responsible for any taxes or tax-related expenses owed or incurred by that person.”

The no-receipt award was small by design. Section 5.2 of the settlement agreement gave each approved claim without proof of purchase “a total of $3.57 USD per Class Product purchased, which reflects the average retail price of the Class Products during the Class Period, up to a maximum of two (2) Class Products,” with one claim per household. Claims with receipts were entitled to “a full refund of the amount of money he or she spent on the Class Products that is documented by Proof of Purchase.” Bottles already refunded through the 2022 recall did not count. Then every award was scaled together: “the amounts of the cash payments will be reduced or increased pro rata, as necessary, to use all funds available for distribution to Class Members.”

By our arithmetic, $4.46 is 125 percent of $3.57 almost to the cent (3.57 × 1.25 = 4.4625) — what a one-bottle claim would get if the pro rata adjustment raised awards by a quarter. That fits the claim described in the report, but it is our calculation, not a published rate. Counsel's projection before approval pointed to a larger uplift. Their final-approval brief of May 3, 2024 counted 287,790 approved claims — 581 with proof of purchase and 287,209 without — and, citing the administrator, estimated average recoveries of $44.65 with receipts and $10.36 without. A no-receipt claim could list at most two bottles, $7.14 before adjustment, so that estimate implied an uplift of at least 45 percent, not 25. The final rate depends on administration costs that are not in any document we read.

Part of where the $5.65 million went is on the record. The notice told class members that counsel could ask for fees and costs “up to 1/3 of the Settlement Fund,” and Judge Halpern's fee order of May 22, 2024 states: “I hereby award $1,883,145.00 in attorneys' fees to Class Counsel” — 33.33 percent of the fund by our arithmetic — for about 1,460.25 hours with a lodestar of $1,068,298. He added $29,175.16 in litigation costs and $1,000 for each of the five class representatives. That leaves $3,732,679.84 before the cost of notice and claims administration, again by our arithmetic. The fund was created “with no right of reversion”, so nothing goes back to Clorox.

First, the hard part. The claim window closed on February 7, 2024, online or by postmark, and the final approval order binds every class member who did not opt out, “whether or not such Settlement Class Member executed and delivered a Claim Form.” Only 21 people asked to be excluded. If you did not file, there is nothing to claim now.

If you did file, search the email address on your claim form, including spam and promotions folders; a virtual card arrives by email, not in the mail. Check which payment method you chose. If you moved or changed email since 2024, tell the administrator — the claim form warned, “You must notify the Class Administrator if your contact information changes. If you do not, you may not receive your payment.” Silence can also mean a rejection. Under section 5.5 the administrator has “sole discretion in accepting or rejecting claims and shall have no obligation to notify Class Members of rejected claims unless otherwise ordered by the Court.” The only way to find out is to ask, at Info@PSSettlement.com or 1-888-339-9884, with your name and the email and postal address you used on the claim.

On expiry, the agreement is blunt: “Those Class Members whose payments are not cleared within one hundred and eighty (180) days after issuance will be ineligible to receive a cash settlement benefit.” If that rule applies to the cards the way it applies to checks, a card issued on September 19, 2026 would have to be used by about March 18, 2027. That date is our arithmetic; the terms that come with the card notice are the ones to go by. Unclaimed money does not go back to Clorox. It goes to a pro rata second round for people who cashed their first payment, if that is economical, and otherwise to Equal Justice Works.

The settlement grew out of the recall that Clorox and the U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission announced on October 25, 2022 (recall 23-022). The CPSC recall notice says the products may contain bacteria, including Pseudomonas aeruginosa, that testing identified bacteria in products made between January 2021 and September 2022, and that “Clorox produced approximately 37 million recalled products in that period.” It covered scented Pine-Sol Multi-Surface Cleaners (Lavender Clean, Sparkling Wave, Lemon Fresh), CloroxPro Pine-Sol All Purpose Cleaners and Clorox Professional Pine-Sol Lemon Fresh with date codes starting “A4” and first five digits below 22249, from the Forest Park, Georgia plant, in bottles of 28 to 175 fluid ounces sold for $2.50 to $12.50. Original Pine-Sol in the pine scent was not part of the recall or the settlement. The CPSC warned that “People with weakened immune systems or external medical devices who are exposed to Pseudomonas aeruginosa face a risk of serious infection that may require medical treatment”; its notice lists no reported incidents. The recall offered its own refunds, and by May 2024 Clorox had paid “approximately $65,000 in refunds to approximately 71,000 claimants,” according to class counsel's brief.

Two other threads are easy to confuse with this payout. On January 27, 2026 the CPSC announced that Clorox agreed to a $14.15 million civil penalty, provisionally accepted and subject to public comment, resolving the agency's charges that Clorox “knowingly failed to immediately report” the hazard; according to the CPSC, Clorox microbiologists wrote a report in early 2019 on contamination they described as “possibly a Pseudomonad.” That is a government enforcement matter, and the release describes compliance obligations, not payments to consumers. And the Pine-Sol settlement covered economic losses only: it releases claims “other than claims for alleged physical or bodily injuries arising from any Class Member's use of or exposure to the Class Products,” and, according to class counsel's brief, the Kossel plaintiffs' injury claims are being litigated separately. Clorox denies the allegations in the class actions.

Finally, the new recall. On September 3, 2026 the CPSC and Clorox Puerto Rico recalled about 6.3 million scented Mistolin and Lestoil cleaners — “This recall only includes Mistolin and Lestoil products sold in Puerto Rico and the U.S. Virgin Islands” — made between April 1, 2025 and June 17, 2026 (date codes starting “PR01” followed by a number from 25091 to 26168), again over possible Pseudomonas aeruginosa. Refunds for those bottles run through that recall, not through the Pine-Sol settlement, whose class period ended November 15, 2023. ClassAction.org reported on September 29, 2026 that a class action has been filed over the Mistolin and Lestoil recall; we have seen no settlement in that case.