Good morning. If your shop took a Visa or Mastercard in the United States any time from 2004 to January 2019, you are probably in a class action you may not have thought about in years. The court-authorized settlement site said its second payout would go out on a rolling basis in September, for approved claims in that tranche. If you filed a claim, that makes now a good time to check where yours stands — and to understand why much of the money is still held back.
Top story — a second tranche, and what it is set to pay
The court-authorized settlement site says the administrator, Epiq, has been cleared to make a second initial partial distribution. Class counsel filed for it on 26 May 2026; the site says the court approved it on 15 June 2026 and that payments "will be issued on a rolling basis in September 2026 for approved claims in the second initial partial distribution." That is a schedule, not a receipt: nothing we read says how many of these claims have actually been paid.
The size, as of the sworn declaration in May: 84,174 claims, carrying $15,490,351,138.00 in associated interchange fees, to share "at least $182,000,000.00."
Do that division, because it is the number that matters. For the claims in this tranche it works out to about 1.17% of the fees they represent — roughly $11.75 for every $1,000 of interchange those claims recorded. Averaged across all 84,174, that is near $2,160 a claim — an average across two groups of very different size, so treat it as a scale, not a forecast.
That is a partial payment, not a final one. The word "initial" is in the filings for a reason: money is being held back while two appeals run. The administrator recommended it start no sooner than 90 days after approval, and asked for discretion to delay it and fold it into a later distribution if the appeals become final.
Quick hits
Who is in this one. The memorandum limits it to merchants who accepted the administrator's estimate of their fees and "whose claims are not subject to appeals, ownership or valuation disputes, takedown-related issues, name variance issues, or future audits and whose partial payment would be at least $5.00." Read "not subject to" as resolved: the two groups in this tranche are takedown and name-variance claims Epiq has since cleared that otherwise meet the criteria. Claims outside that description are not in this tranche. The first distribution, approved in October 2025, had sent more than $414 million to more than 597,900 claimants as of 22 May 2026 — roughly $690 apiece.
The larger group was held up by a name. The larger of the two groups here is claims that were parked because the business name filed did not match the name sitting against that tax ID in the administrator's records. Epiq's own example in the declaration: its records say "Joe's Pizza Shop," the claim says "Suzy's Hardware Store." The fix was documentation from a federal or state body showing both the tax ID and the name — it names an IRS SS-4 as an example. By its May declaration, Epiq had cleared 75,774 claims this way, out of a name-variance population it put at 96,852 merchants, and said it "continues to review the remaining claims in the name variance population." Those two figures count different things — claims and merchants — so the remainder is not a clean subtraction.
Why some of the rest is still parked. Two class-membership fights have been running: whether the payment facilitator or the merchant behind it was the one that "accepted" the card — the filings name Square and Intuit — and the same question between upstream oil companies and branded fuel retailers. The Second Circuit upheld the district court's determinations on 4 May 2026. Petitions for rehearing en banc followed within a fortnight, and the May filings noted certiorari was still possible. If the appeals are denied, counsel and Epiq say they plan to recommend a third initial partial distribution.
The Tip — log in before you chase anyone
One hard limit first: the claim-filing deadline was 4 February 2025, and it is stated both in the court's own order and on the settlement site's Important Dates. If you did not file, the question to put to the administrator is whether anything remains open to you — we are not telling you what you are owed. If you did file, the site says the Merchant Portal shows Authorization Status, Claim Status and Payment Status on the Account Summary page, and that response deadlines appear in the Correspondence section; the declaration said that once the distribution was approved, Epiq would email registrants with payable claims, where it had an address, asking them to elect how they want to be paid. If you were looking for a payment from this tranche, check the portal for whether your claim is included, then Correspondence for any payment election or deadline, then Payment Status. Log in and read your own record before you act on any letter, call or email about this settlement. And if the approach is from a third-party claims-filing company, know what the court has ordered its solicitations to say — see below.
Tool watch — [Not sponsored]
The court-approved site, paymentcardsettlement.com, and the portal behind it. Worth knowing: a March 2025 court order requires every third-party claims-filing company to stop signing up new class members, and to state in any solicitation — website, mail, email, contracts, phone or in person — that the deadline has elapsed, that "no-cost assistance is available from the Class Administrator and Class Counsel regarding the settlement," and that more information is at that address. The order records that since 2012 the court has found some such solicitations misleading. A pitch that arrives missing those statements is one the court has said may be deemed misleading.
That's the callout. See you next time.
The Callout — the business brief for the trades.
We label every commercial placement: [Sponsor], [Affiliate], or [Not sponsored]. Today's Tool watch is our own honest read — no one paid for it.
231J Ramparts Road, Te Anau 9600, New Zealand · Unsubscribe anytime.
Sources: Payment Card Settlement — official court-authorized website · Motion for a Second, Partial Distribution of Settlement Funds, with memorandum of law, declaration of Loree Kovach and proposed order (ECF 9869, 9870, 9869-2, 9869-3), filed 26–27 May 2026 (PDF) · Order Regarding Third-Party Claims Filing Services (ECF 9577), 18 March 2025 (PDF)