Original Research · Settlement Insight Research

87 Cents on the Dollar: Where Prop 65 Settlement Money Goes

Name: 87 Cents on the Dollar — California Proposition 65 Settlement Money, 2016–2026
Creator: Settlement Insight Research
Published: 2026-08-14
License: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/

California requires every Proposition 65 settlement to be reported to the Attorney General, and the report separates the money into penalty, other payments and attorney’s fees. We analyzed all 7,602 settlements reported from 2016 through March 2026 — $205,487,239 in total, of which $179,871,244 (87.53%) was attorney’s fees and costs. The state’s enforcement fund received about 9 cents of every dollar.

Settlement Insight Research · Reviewed by Leonard Goldberg, Editor · Published August 14, 2026

87.53%

Went to attorney's fees

$179,871,244 of $205,487,239 across 7,602 reported settlements

9.8×

Fees vs. the state's share

Attorneys $180M · state penalty fund $18M after the statutory 75/25 split

$19,000

Median settlement

Of which $17,500 is fees and $1,500 is the civil penalty

13.9 pts

Settlements vs. judgments

87.53% fees without a court judgment · 73.67% when a court enters one

Read this before quoting the number

Proposition 65 is written as a private-attorney-general statute. Health & Safety Code § 25249.7(d) lets any person sue in the public interest, and fee recovery is the deliberate mechanism that makes that possible for enforcers who collect no damages of their own. A high attorney-fee share is what the statute was designed to produce. Nothing on this page suggests these fees are unlawful — they are awarded and reported exactly as the law contemplates. What the data shows is how large that share has become, how it has drifted upward, and how it differs depending on whether a judge ever reviewed it. Both sides of California’s twenty-year argument about Prop 65 enforcement should be able to use these figures without either of them being misquoted.

Key Findings

Of every dollar a business paid, 88 cents went to the enforcer’s attorneys. About 9 cents reached the state’s Safe Drinking Water and Toxic Enforcement Fund and roughly 3 cents went to the private plaintiff as its 25% penalty share. Total attorney’s fees of $179,871,244 are 9.8× the $18,397,276 the state fund received.
The fee share is not an artifact of a few outliers — it is the normal case. In 5,487 of 7,602 settlements (72.2%), attorney’s fees were 90% or more of everything the defendant paid. Only 326 settlements (4.3%) came in below 75%.
The share has risen every few years: 78.35% in 2016 to 89.41% in 2025. The partial 2026 window (through March 13) runs at 91.27%, on 299 settlements — real, but a quarter of a year.
When one payment channel closed, the money moved to fees — not to penalties. “Other payments” — the additional settlement payments that used to be directed to third parties instead of the state — were 8.7% of settlement value in 2016 and have been essentially zero every year since (0.02% in 2025). The Attorney General’s amended enforcement regulations, effective 1 October 2016, restricted exactly that practice. The freed share did not go to the penalty fund, whose share drifted down from 12.98% to 10.58%. It went to fees.
168 enforcers, 5,168 businesses, and heavy concentration. The ten most active enforcers collected 60.4% of all attorney’s fees in the corpus. The single largest, CALSAFE RESEARCH CENTER, INC., accounts for 500 settlements and $36M in fees.
Where a court signed off, the split looks different. Court-entered judgments over the same period (2,865 with money, $253M) allocate 73.67% to fees and 17% to penalties — 13.9 points less to fees than settlements reported without a judgment. Read this as an association with judicial review, not a proven cause; see the methodology.

The fee share year by year

Every settlement reported to the California Attorney General, grouped by the year it was entered. 2026 is a partial year — it ends 2026-03-13.

Year	Settlements	Total paid	Attorney’s fees	Fee share	Penalty share	Median settlement
2016	330	$9.6M	$7.5M	78.35%	12.98%	$24,500
2017	348	$8.0M	$6.5M	82.16%	17.64%	$18,700
2018	468	$9.8M	$8.5M	87%	13%	$17,500
2019	604	$12M	$11M	88.08%	11.73%	$17,500
2020	448	$9.5M	$8.2M	86.06%	13.91%	$16,500
2021	649	$14M	$12M	86.57%	13.19%	$17,000
2022	726	$16M	$14M	88.28%	11.23%	$17,500
2023	1,070	$27M	$23M	87.87%	11.8%	$18,000
2024	1,125	$28M	$24M	87.13%	12.87%	$19,890
2025	1,535	$66M	$59M	89.41%	10.58%	$22,000
2026(partial)	299	$6.1M	$5.6M	91.27%	8.73%	$17,500

How lopsided is a typical settlement?

Each settlement placed in a band by the share of its own total that went to attorney’s fees. The distribution is tight, not skewed by a handful of cases — which is why the aggregate and the typical case tell the same story here.

Attorney-fee share of the settlement	Settlements	Share of settlements	Dollars in band
under 50%	77	1%	$3.7M
50–75%	249	3.3%	$13M
75–90%	1,785	23.5%	$55M
90–95%	3,658	48.1%	$102M
95% and up	1,829	24.1%	$31M

The most active private enforcers

Ranked by attorney’s fees recovered. Names are normalized for spelling variants in the Attorney General’s export. These are the plaintiffs of record — the fees are paid to their counsel.

#	Private enforcer	Settlements	Total paid	Fees	Fee share
1	CALSAFE RESEARCH CENTER, INC.	500	$40M	$36M	90%
2	CONSUMER ADVOCACY GROUP, INC.	271	$19M	$14M	76.6%
3	ENVIRONMENTAL HEALTH ADVOCATES, INC.	616	$13M	$12M	90.4%
4	ECOLOGICAL ALLIANCE, LLC	802	$11M	$11M	95.3%
5	EMA BELL	519	$8.3M	$7.8M	93.5%
6	GABRIEL ESPINOZA	362	$6.4M	$6.0M	93.2%
7	DENNIS JOHNSON	371	$6.5M	$5.8M	89.7%
8	KEEP AMERICA SAFE AND BEAUTIFUL	304	$6.6M	$5.8M	87.8%
9	PRECILA BALABBO	310	$5.7M	$5.3M	92.8%
10	MICHAEL DIPIRRO	116	$4.8M	$4.6M	95.8%
11	ANTHONY FERREIRO	314	$4.6M	$4.2M	92.1%
12	CA CITIZEN PROTECTION GROUP, LLC	173	$3.8M	$3.7M	96.4%
13	LAURENCE VINOCUR	254	$4.1M	$3.6M	86.8%
14	PAUL WOZNIAK	195	$4.2M	$3.5M	83.7%
15	RAMY EDEN	85	$4.7M	$3.5M	73%

The judgment gap

California receives two kinds of Prop 65 report on separate forms. A settlement is a negotiated resolution recorded without a court judgment. A judgment is entered by a court. Under Health & Safety Code § 25249.7(f), a settlement of an action that has already been filed must be submitted to the court for approval on noticed motion, and the court may approve it only if it finds — among other things — that the attorney’s fees are reasonable and the penalty amount is reasonable.

Reported settlements

87.53%

to attorney’s fees across 7,602 resolutions ($205M)

Court-entered judgments

73.67%

to attorney’s fees across 2,865 judgments ($253M)

What we can and cannot say. The gap is 13.9 percentage points and it is large. But the Attorney General’s export does not record whether a complaint had been filed when a settlement was reached, so we cannot split the settlement population into “reviewed by a court” and “not reviewed.” The two groups may also differ in case type and size: judgments carry $24M in other payments against $1.1M in settlements, so they are not simply bigger versions of the same thing. We report the association and publish both datasets so anyone can test it.

What the cases are actually about

The twelve most frequently cited chemicals. Note that the Attorney General’s export records lead under two separate labels; we leave them as reported rather than merge them silently.

Chemical	Settlements	Total paid	Fee share
Di(2-ethylhexyl)phthalate (DEHP)	2,529	$52M	88.7%
Lead	2,133	$45M	88%
Lead and lead compounds	720	$49M	87.3%
Diisononyl phthalate (DINP)	419	$9.3M	89.8%
Diethanolamine	218	$5.2M	91.8%
Bisphenol S (BPS)	174	$3.1M	92%
Bisphenol A (BPA)	139	$2.4M	92.4%
Unleaded gasoline (wholly vaporized)	119	$5.3M	72.9%
Cadmium	109	$3.1M	86.4%
Chromium (hexavalent compounds)	95	$1.6M	92.6%
Di-n-butyl phthalate (DBP)	93	$2.3M	88.4%
Acrylamide	78	$2.3M	84.8%

Cite this research

This analysis is released as an open, citable dataset. Researchers and journalists are welcome to use it with attribution.

DOI

Permanent identifier

10.5281/zenodo.21933686

APA

Goldberg, L. (2026). 87 Cents on the Dollar — Where California Proposition 65 Settlement Money Goes: 7,602 Reported Private Settlements, 2016–2026 [Data set]. Settlement Insight Research. Zenodo. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.21933686

BibTeX

@dataset{goldberg_2026_prop65,
  author    = {Goldberg, Leonard},
  title     = {87 Cents on the Dollar — Where California Proposition 65
               Settlement Money Goes, 2016--2026},
  year      = {2026},
  publisher = {Zenodo},
  doi       = {10.5281/zenodo.21933686},
  url       = {https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.21933686}
}

Download the data

Aggregated CSV files — CC BY 4.0. Free to use with attribution.

Methodology

Source. The California Attorney General’s public Proposition 65 enforcement reporting export, covering settlements and judgments reported under Health & Safety Code § 25249.7(f) from 1 January 2016 to 2026-03-13. Public record. We did not estimate or scrape any dollar figure: the AG’s export carries civil penalty, other payments and attorney’s fees as separate columns, and total = penalty + other + fees holds for every one of the 7,602 rows. That identity is asserted on import and again on export; if it ever breaks, the export refuses to run.

Unit of analysis. One row is one resolution as reported to the Attorney General — not one defendant and not one 60-day notice. A single notice number can produce several reported resolutions, and 168 enforcers appear against 5,168 distinct businesses.

Cleaning. The AG export ships 74 exact duplicate rows; they are dropped on import. Leaving them in would move the headline fee share from 87.53% to 87.57% — a small difference, but the deduplicated figure is the correct one. Plaintiff names are normalized (trim and case-fold) before aggregation: the raw export carries 190 spellings for 168 distinct enforcers. The AG’s internal settlement ID is reused across years and is not a stable key; the 60-day notice number is, and it is what we publish.

The state’s share is a statutory calculation, not a reported field. Health & Safety Code § 25249.12(c) directs 75% of civil penalties to the Safe Drinking Water and Toxic Enforcement Fund and 25% to the party that brought the action. We apply that split to the reported penalty column; the AG’s export does not report the two halves separately.

Limits. 2026 covers only 1 January to 2026-03-13 (299 resolutions) and is flagged partial everywhere it appears. The settlement-versus-judgment comparison is an association, not a causal estimate, because the export does not record whether a complaint was on file. And the window opens in 2016, which means the one pre-reform year available for the “other payments” finding is 2016 — the amended AG regulations took effect on 1 October of that year, so 2016 itself straddles both regimes.

The underlying settlement-level data is published as open CSVs under CC BY 4.0. Analysis by Settlement Insight Research.

Frequently asked questions

How much of a Prop 65 settlement goes to attorney's fees?

Across all 7,602 settlements reported to the California Attorney General from 2016 through March 2026, 87.53% of the money was attorney's fees and costs — $179,871,244 of $205,487,239. Civil penalties were 11.94% and other payments 0.53%. In 72.2% of individual settlements, fees were 90% or more of the total.

Is it legal for attorney's fees to be most of a Prop 65 settlement?

Yes. Proposition 65 is a private-attorney-general statute: Health & Safety Code § 25249.7(d) lets any person sue in the public interest, and fee recovery is the deliberate mechanism that makes that possible for enforcers who collect no damages themselves. A high fee share is what the statute was designed to produce. What this study measures is the size of that share and how it has changed — not whether the fees are lawful.

How much does the State of California actually receive from Prop 65 settlements?

By statute, 75% of every civil penalty goes to the state's Safe Drinking Water and Toxic Enforcement Fund and 25% to the private plaintiff (Health & Safety Code § 25249.12(c)). Applying that split to the reported penalties, the state's share of the $205,487,239 in settlements is about $18,397,276 — roughly 9 cents of every dollar, and 9.8× less than what went to attorneys.

What is the average Prop 65 settlement amount?

The median reported settlement is $19,000, of which $17,500 is attorney's fees and $1,500 is the civil penalty. These are small, high-volume resolutions: 90% of settlements come in at or below $50,000, and the largest in the corpus is $745,000. 168 private enforcers brought all 7,602 of them against 5,168 different businesses.

Do Prop 65 cases pay attorneys more when no judge reviews the settlement?

The two populations differ by 13.9 percentage points. Settlements reported without a court judgment pay 87.53% in fees; court-entered judgments pay 73.67%. Under § 25249.7(f) a settlement of an action already filed must go to the court for approval, and the court may approve only if it finds the attorney's fees reasonable. The Attorney General's export does not record whether a complaint was on file, so this is a documented association with the difference in judicial oversight, not proof that oversight caused it.

Which chemicals drive the most Prop 65 settlements?

Two families account for most of the volume: the phthalate DEHP (2,529 settlements, $52M) and lead, which appears under two separate labels in the AG's export — "Lead" (2,133) and "Lead and lead compounds" (720). The fee share barely moves between chemicals; it sits near 87.53% across all of them.

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Original Research · Settlement Insight Research

87 Cents on the Dollar: Where Prop 65 Settlement Money Goes

Settlement Insight Research · Reviewed by Leonard Goldberg, Editor · Published August 14, 2026

87.53%

Went to attorney's fees

$179,871,244 of $205,487,239 across 7,602 reported settlements

9.8×

Fees vs. the state's share

Attorneys $180M · state penalty fund $18M after the statutory 75/25 split

$19,000

Median settlement

Of which $17,500 is fees and $1,500 is the civil penalty

13.9 pts

Settlements vs. judgments

87.53% fees without a court judgment · 73.67% when a court enters one

Read this before quoting the number

Key Findings

Of every dollar a business paid, 88 cents went to the enforcer’s attorneys. About 9 cents reached the state’s Safe Drinking Water and Toxic Enforcement Fund and roughly 3 cents went to the private plaintiff as its 25% penalty share. Total attorney’s fees of $179,871,244 are 9.8× the $18,397,276 the state fund received.
The fee share is not an artifact of a few outliers — it is the normal case. In 5,487 of 7,602 settlements (72.2%), attorney’s fees were 90% or more of everything the defendant paid. Only 326 settlements (4.3%) came in below 75%.
The share has risen every few years: 78.35% in 2016 to 89.41% in 2025. The partial 2026 window (through March 13) runs at 91.27%, on 299 settlements — real, but a quarter of a year.
When one payment channel closed, the money moved to fees — not to penalties. “Other payments” — the additional settlement payments that used to be directed to third parties instead of the state — were 8.7% of settlement value in 2016 and have been essentially zero every year since (0.02% in 2025). The Attorney General’s amended enforcement regulations, effective 1 October 2016, restricted exactly that practice. The freed share did not go to the penalty fund, whose share drifted down from 12.98% to 10.58%. It went to fees.
168 enforcers, 5,168 businesses, and heavy concentration. The ten most active enforcers collected 60.4% of all attorney’s fees in the corpus. The single largest, CALSAFE RESEARCH CENTER, INC., accounts for 500 settlements and $36M in fees.
Where a court signed off, the split looks different. Court-entered judgments over the same period (2,865 with money, $253M) allocate 73.67% to fees and 17% to penalties — 13.9 points less to fees than settlements reported without a judgment. Read this as an association with judicial review, not a proven cause; see the methodology.

The fee share year by year

Every settlement reported to the California Attorney General, grouped by the year it was entered. 2026 is a partial year — it ends 2026-03-13.

Year	Settlements	Total paid	Attorney’s fees	Fee share	Penalty share	Median settlement
2016	330	$9.6M	$7.5M	78.35%	12.98%	$24,500
2017	348	$8.0M	$6.5M	82.16%	17.64%	$18,700
2018	468	$9.8M	$8.5M	87%	13%	$17,500
2019	604	$12M	$11M	88.08%	11.73%	$17,500
2020	448	$9.5M	$8.2M	86.06%	13.91%	$16,500
2021	649	$14M	$12M	86.57%	13.19%	$17,000
2022	726	$16M	$14M	88.28%	11.23%	$17,500
2023	1,070	$27M	$23M	87.87%	11.8%	$18,000
2024	1,125	$28M	$24M	87.13%	12.87%	$19,890
2025	1,535	$66M	$59M	89.41%	10.58%	$22,000
2026(partial)	299	$6.1M	$5.6M	91.27%	8.73%	$17,500

How lopsided is a typical settlement?

Attorney-fee share of the settlement	Settlements	Share of settlements	Dollars in band
under 50%	77	1%	$3.7M
50–75%	249	3.3%	$13M
75–90%	1,785	23.5%	$55M
90–95%	3,658	48.1%	$102M
95% and up	1,829	24.1%	$31M

The most active private enforcers

Ranked by attorney’s fees recovered. Names are normalized for spelling variants in the Attorney General’s export. These are the plaintiffs of record — the fees are paid to their counsel.

#	Private enforcer	Settlements	Total paid	Fees	Fee share
1	CALSAFE RESEARCH CENTER, INC.	500	$40M	$36M	90%
2	CONSUMER ADVOCACY GROUP, INC.	271	$19M	$14M	76.6%
3	ENVIRONMENTAL HEALTH ADVOCATES, INC.	616	$13M	$12M	90.4%
4	ECOLOGICAL ALLIANCE, LLC	802	$11M	$11M	95.3%
5	EMA BELL	519	$8.3M	$7.8M	93.5%
6	GABRIEL ESPINOZA	362	$6.4M	$6.0M	93.2%
7	DENNIS JOHNSON	371	$6.5M	$5.8M	89.7%
8	KEEP AMERICA SAFE AND BEAUTIFUL	304	$6.6M	$5.8M	87.8%
9	PRECILA BALABBO	310	$5.7M	$5.3M	92.8%
10	MICHAEL DIPIRRO	116	$4.8M	$4.6M	95.8%
11	ANTHONY FERREIRO	314	$4.6M	$4.2M	92.1%
12	CA CITIZEN PROTECTION GROUP, LLC	173	$3.8M	$3.7M	96.4%
13	LAURENCE VINOCUR	254	$4.1M	$3.6M	86.8%
14	PAUL WOZNIAK	195	$4.2M	$3.5M	83.7%
15	RAMY EDEN	85	$4.7M	$3.5M	73%

The judgment gap

Reported settlements

87.53%

to attorney’s fees across 7,602 resolutions ($205M)

Court-entered judgments

73.67%

to attorney’s fees across 2,865 judgments ($253M)

What the cases are actually about

The twelve most frequently cited chemicals. Note that the Attorney General’s export records lead under two separate labels; we leave them as reported rather than merge them silently.

Chemical	Settlements	Total paid	Fee share
Di(2-ethylhexyl)phthalate (DEHP)	2,529	$52M	88.7%
Lead	2,133	$45M	88%
Lead and lead compounds	720	$49M	87.3%
Diisononyl phthalate (DINP)	419	$9.3M	89.8%
Diethanolamine	218	$5.2M	91.8%
Bisphenol S (BPS)	174	$3.1M	92%
Bisphenol A (BPA)	139	$2.4M	92.4%
Unleaded gasoline (wholly vaporized)	119	$5.3M	72.9%
Cadmium	109	$3.1M	86.4%
Chromium (hexavalent compounds)	95	$1.6M	92.6%
Di-n-butyl phthalate (DBP)	93	$2.3M	88.4%
Acrylamide	78	$2.3M	84.8%

Cite this research

This analysis is released as an open, citable dataset. Researchers and journalists are welcome to use it with attribution.

DOI

Permanent identifier

10.5281/zenodo.21933686

APA

BibTeX

@dataset{goldberg_2026_prop65,
  author    = {Goldberg, Leonard},
  title     = {87 Cents on the Dollar — Where California Proposition 65
               Settlement Money Goes, 2016--2026},
  year      = {2026},
  publisher = {Zenodo},
  doi       = {10.5281/zenodo.21933686},
  url       = {https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.21933686}
}

Download the data

Aggregated CSV files — CC BY 4.0. Free to use with attribution.

Methodology

The underlying settlement-level data is published as open CSVs under CC BY 4.0. Analysis by Settlement Insight Research.

Frequently asked questions

How much of a Prop 65 settlement goes to attorney's fees?

Is it legal for attorney's fees to be most of a Prop 65 settlement?

How much does the State of California actually receive from Prop 65 settlements?

What is the average Prop 65 settlement amount?

Do Prop 65 cases pay attorneys more when no judge reviews the settlement?

Which chemicals drive the most Prop 65 settlements?

Related research

Attorney Fee Awards

Court-approved fee percentages across class actions

Wage Theft Enforcement

$4.79B recovered from 367K employers — who steals wages

EEOC Discrimination Settlements

What 2,386 announced resolutions actually paid