SCE Has Paid Nearly $450 Million to More Than 3,000 Eaton Fire Claimants — Its Own Example Shows the Average Total-Loss Homeowner Getting $754,204 From the Program After $946,423 From Insurance. Claims Close November 30.

On September 1, 2026 the queries SCE lawsuit payout and SCE settlement calculator spiked on Google Trends in the United States. The trigger is not a new court ruling. It is a deadline coming into view: Southern California Edison's Wildfire Recovery Compensation Program — the utility's direct-pay alternative to suing over the January 2025 Eaton Fire — stops accepting claims on November 30, 2026, and SCE has spent August pushing that date into the Altadena and Pasadena communities with in-person events and a community meeting scheduled for September 10 in Pasadena.

There is no calculator, because the program does not work like a class-action fund with a fixed pot divided among claimants. Each claim is valued individually. But SCE has published enough of the machinery — formulas, offsets, a fixed premium table and anonymized real payouts — that you can get a serious sense of what an offer looks like before you file. That is what this page does.

Two numbers frame everything. In its August 14, 2026 release SCE reported “nearly 2,800 claimants paid, totaling more than $410 million.” Five days later, on August 19, the figures were “more than 3,000 claimants paid, totaling nearly $450 million.” Offers extended rose from more than 2,350 (to over 5,800 claimants, more than $820 million) to more than 2,450 (to over 6,000 claimants, more than $830 million). Claims submitted went from more than 4,250 to more than 4,350, representing nearly 13,300 individuals, trusts and legal entities.

Divide those figures and the average paid claimant has received roughly $150,000 and the average offer per claimant is roughly $138,000 — our arithmetic, not SCE's, and averages across a program whose offers, in SCE's own words, “have ranged from $15.1 million for a claimant with multiple properties to $15,000 for a tenant with non-burn damage.”

The program page, last updated August 28, 2026, publishes real, anonymized outcomes as of June 2026. The headline example is the one most people are searching for:

Read the first three lines together: for the average total-loss homeowner, the program paid about 44% of the total and insurance paid the rest. That is not an accident; it is how the offer is built. Under the program's Fast Pay track, as the FAQ explains, a destroyed residence is valued in three categories and each is reduced by the owner's insurance: “Estimated rebuild costs minus applicable insurance. Personal property minus applicable insurance. Loss of use minus applicable insurance.” Two of the formulas are fixed. Personal property is set at “40% of the estimated rebuild costs,” and loss of use at “42 months of the fair rental value” — both then offset by the relevant insurance limits. The FAQ is explicit that the offset uses policy limits, not what the insurer actually paid: the reduction “equals the total amount of insurance coverage limits that you have in your policy.” You can still pursue your carrier for what it has not paid.

Three components are not offset by insurance: non-economic damages, attorney fees, and the Direct Claim Premium — a fixed bonus that exists only inside the program (“not available in litigation”). SCE publishes the table:

SCE's published single-family example puts the pieces together: real property about $1.0 million, personal property about $802,000, loss of use about $257,000, business interruption about $198,000, non-economic damages $115,000, attorney fees about $477,000, Direct Claim Premium $200,000 — total payout about $3.06 million. Its tenant example runs to about $726,000, of which $420,000 is non-economic damages, $96,000 attorney fees and $150,000 premium. SCE notes that these are rounded, that not every claim includes every category, and that claimants may also have received insurance money on top.

You do not need a lawyer to file. SCE's releases say so and the FAQ repeats it. But the program has a rule that changes the math for people who already have one: “Claimants represented by counsel at the time they submit the claim form will receive additional compensation equal to 20% of their net damages (not including the Direct Claims Premium) to offset attorney fees.” That is the “attorney fees” line in the examples above — $477,000 on the $3.06 million single-family payout, $96,000 on the $726,000 tenant payout. It is SCE money added to the offer, not money taken out of it, and like the premium it is “not available in litigation.”

The share of claimants using that route is substantial and slowly falling: 39% of claims had been submitted by attorneys or authorized representatives as of August 14, 38% as of August 19. If you are represented, note the FAQ's procedural rule: “per California law, your attorney must submit the claim and facilitate communications.”

Two sentences that appear in both August releases matter more than any number: “Filing a claim does not waive a claimant's rights. Receiving and evaluating an offer does not waive rights either.” The rights question arrives at the end, not the beginning. The FAQ: “If accepted, all claimants must sign and notarize the Settlement Agreement and Release,” and the release covers the future too — “This includes waiving future claims that may arise.” Where a property has several owners, every one of them must sign an allocation form and, in the FAQ's words, “a notarized full release of liability.” Payment follows “approximately 30 days after SCE's receipt of every required claimants' executed and notarized agreement,” and SCE says many claimants are paid in two to three weeks.

SCE's pitch against litigation is blunt. Its August 14 release: “There's no assurance that a claimant will receive more through a lawsuit,” and “A January 2027 trial date would cover only five to 10 households out of more than 10,000 in the pending litigation.” Whether an individual offer is fair is a question for the claimant and, if they have one, their lawyer; SCE says independent experts Kenneth Feinberg and Camille Biros were consulted on the program's design and that RAND reviewed the property-valuation method built by Compass Lexecon. Offers, it says, are arriving in 35 days on average against a 90-day commitment, and a claim takes about two hours to submit.

The Eaton Fire began on the evening of January 7, 2025 in Eaton Canyon and killed at least 19 people, destroying more than 9,000 structures in and around Altadena. On August 4, 2026 the Los Angeles County Fire Department released its investigation, concluding that “the cause of this fire is ELECTRICAL in nature” — arcing near an SCE transmission tower. SCE's response, as reported by LAist, was that it “believes it is likely that its equipment was associated with the ignition of the Eaton Fire.” The compensation program predates that finding and does not depend on it; the release you sign when you accept an offer does.

The other thing claimants are weighing is tax. SCE's August 14 release pointed to H.R. 5366, the Doug LaMalfa Federal Disaster Tax Relief Certainty Act, which “extends the exclusion of qualified wildfire relief payments from gross income, including certain payments received after the prior exemption expired on Dec. 31, 2025.” The legislative record is clear on how far it has got: introduced September 15, 2025 by Rep. Gregory Steube; passed the House on April 27, 2026 by voice vote; passed the Senate on August 7, 2026 by unanimous consent; enrolled on August 11, 2026. As of September 1, 2026, GovTrack lists its status as “Passed House & Senate (President next),” and we found no record of a signature. SCE's CEO Pedro Pizarro framed it conditionally: “Once signed, this legislation can provide greater certainty as people consider their options.” SCE says that once it is law it would leave the covered categories — real and personal property, physical injury or loss of life, non-economic loss, business interruption and lost rental income — off 1099-MISC reporting, and it adds the standard caveat that this is not tax advice.

Claims go in at sce.com/directclaims (the program lives at energized.edison.com/wildfire-recovery-compensation-program), or by phone at 888-912-8528 with multilingual one-on-one help and in-person appointments. Eligible claimants include owners and tenants of properties in the Eligibility Area (SCE's FAQ addresses renters who moved in less than a month before the fire, sold properties and second claims for a business), plus physical-injury and death claims. The deadline is November 30, 2026; SCE's own phrasing on August 14 was “less than four months remain to submit a claim.”

Filing costs nothing and, per SCE, waives nothing. The decision point is the offer. If you are weighing one, the numbers above are the ones to hold it against — and the release is the document to read before you sign.