State Farm Will Pay Louisiana Drivers Exactly $28.39 Over Totaled Cars — Two of the Three Deadlines Already Passed, and the One That Pays Runs to October 19

Most settlement coverage has to hedge the payout, because most settlements divide a fund by however many people file. This one does not. The official settlement website states it as an obligation: “State Farm shall pay Settlement Class Members $28.39 in satisfaction of applicable Purchasing Fees to eligible Settlement Class Members who timely submit a valid claim.”

So the honest headline number is $28.39 — not “up to”, not “estimated”, not adjusted by claim volume. It is a small amount, and we are not going to inflate it. It is also, for a two-minute claim form on a car you no longer own, an unusually clean transaction.

The case is Deborah Robin v. State Farm Mutual Automobile Insurance Company, Case No. 24-391-SDD-RLB, in the United States District Court for the Middle District of Louisiana.

When an insurer totals a vehicle, the payment is supposed to cover more than the car's value. It also has to cover what it costs to actually replace it — the unavoidable government and transaction charges on the next vehicle. The settlement documents call these “Purchasing Fees” and define them precisely: (i) sales tax; and (ii) title fees (including transfer handling fees), notary fees, registration and license plate transfer fees, and tag fees.

The plaintiff alleges State Farm “breached its insurance policies by failing to pay” Louisiana insureds the full recovery for those fees on physical damage claims that ended in a total loss payment.

State Farm denies it. The settlement website records that the company “maintains that it complied with the terms of the insurance policies and applicable law, has numerous merits and class defenses, and denies that it acted wrongfully or unlawfully and continues to deny all material allegations.” Settling is not an admission, and the notice says so in the company's own words.

The class period is May 17, 2022 through May 21, 2026. It covers Louisiana insureds who submitted a physical damage claim for their vehicle during that window which resulted in a total loss claim payment that did not include the full purchasing fees.

Three things follow from that, and they are the ones readers get wrong. The car has to have been declared a total loss — a repaired vehicle is not in this class. The claim has to be a Louisiana one; State Farm has faced near-identical fee cases in other states, and each has its own class, its own dates and its own money. And you do not need to still own anything, prove a loss, or produce the old paperwork: eligibility turns on a payment State Farm's own records already contain.

If a notice arrived in the mail, it came with a pre-filled claim form — the settlement site says class members can claim by signing it, tearing at the perforation and mailing it back. Anyone who did not get one, or threw it out, can request a form through the Contact Us page on the official site.

This settlement has three dates and they are not close together, which is exactly how people lose money on cases like this one.

The opt-out deadline and the objection deadline both fell on Tuesday, August 18, 2026. Both have passed. In practice that means the decision left to Louisiana class members now is binary: file a claim, or receive nothing while still being bound by the settlement's release. The window in which anyone could have kept their own right to sue closed ten days ago.

The claim deadline is Monday, October 19, 2026 — submitted online by that date, or mailed so that it is postmarked no later than that date. That is roughly seven and a half weeks from today.

Between the two sits the final approval hearing on Thursday, September 17, 2026 at 10:00 a.m. CST, when the court decides whether the settlement is fair. Note the ordering, because it is unusual and it confuses people: the hearing happens a month before claims close. Filing before the hearing is normal here, not premature.

In most class settlements the fee award reduces what class members receive — the fund is one pot and everything comes out of it. Here the settlement website says the opposite in plain terms.

Class counsel will ask the court for attorneys' fees and costs of up to $205,000, plus a $5,000 service award for the class representative. The site then states: “These payments will not reduce the amount of money available to Settlement Class Members as they will be paid separately by State Farm.”

That is why the $28.39 can be a fixed obligation rather than a share of a shrinking pot, and it is the single most reader-relevant fact in the documents: the number does not get smaller if more people file. If anything, this is a case where telling other eligible drivers costs you nothing.

The claims administrator for this settlement is Kroll, whose branding sits at the top of the official settlement site, and the official address for the case is louisianafeessettlement.com.

We flag this because “why did I get a letter from Kroll” is one of the most common questions we see, and the honest answer is that Kroll Settlement Administration is a court-appointed administrator for a great many unrelated cases at once. A Kroll envelope is not evidence of a scam and it is also not evidence that any particular settlement applies to you — it only means some court approved Kroll to send notices in some case. The way to tell which one is the case name and number printed on the notice. For this settlement they are Deborah Robin v. State Farm Mutual Automobile Insurance Company, No. 24-391-SDD-RLB.

The site also carries the standard court-ordered line worth repeating: “The Court authorized this Settlement website. This is not a solicitation from a lawyer. You are not being sued.”