The Federal Trade Commission is sending more than $23.8 million to Grubhub drivers and diners, and recipients are being asked to move quickly: cash a check within 90 days, or accept a PayPal payment within 30. The agency counts 640,038 payments in the distribution, announced August 12, 2026. The payments go out on their own, and the FTC’s materials describe no claim form.
The unusual feature is the clock. Two payment types, two windows, and no published date on which either one begins for any given recipient.
Two payment types and two different windows
The FTC’s Grubhub refunds page puts the instruction in plain terms: anyone who gets a check should cash it within 90 days, and anyone who gets a PayPal payment should accept it within 30 days. The wording is a request. Nothing on the page says a check becomes void on day 91 or that an unaccepted PayPal payment is withdrawn on day 31, and nothing says what happens to money that is not used.
The gap between 90 days and 30 follows the delivery method. The PayPal window is a third as long as the check window, and the page offers no explanation for the difference.
Timing matters more than usual because the distribution is already weeks old. The FTC’s August 12 announcement opened the distribution, so the earliest PayPal payments could already be past 30 days as of this week. The pages read for this article do not give an issue date for any payment, so no recipient can work backward from a calendar date on the FTC’s site; recipients have only the payment itself to go by.
Who the payments are for, and what the FTC says they cover
The FTC describes the recipients as drivers harmed by Grubhub’s deceptive earnings claims and diners harmed by the company’s misleading and unlawful conduct. On the refund page, the agency says Grubhub allegedly misled delivery drivers about the earnings they could expect from delivering food, and blocked diners from accounts in a way that kept them from redeeming gift cards. Those are the FTC’s allegations, resolved by a settlement rather than a trial.
The count is of payments, not people. The FTC’s 640,038 figure is a tally of payments, and the page does not say how many individuals are behind it or whether anyone received more than one. The $23.8 million is likewise a floor: the agency says “more than.” Dividing one number by the other would produce an average that no FTC page states, so no per-person amount is reported here.
Where the money came from: a $140 million judgment, mostly suspended
The refunds trace to an order entered December 31, 2024 in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Illinois, in a case the FTC brought with the Illinois Attorney General. The stipulated order sets a $140 million monetary judgment. Of that, $24.8 million was due immediately and held in escrow by the defendants’ counsel, and the remaining $115.2 million was suspended.
The suspension is conditional. The order says it rests on the truthfulness, accuracy and completeness of financial statements Grubhub submitted on October 3, 2024, and that it will be lifted if the court finds a defendant failed to disclose a material asset. In that event the full judgment becomes due, with interest from the date of the order. The order also directs $200,000 to the State of Illinois.
How a legitimate payment looks, and who to call
The refund administrator is Analytics Consulting, LLC, and the FTC lists 1-888-446-4992 as its number on both the Grubhub page and the agency’s refunds index, which dates the program to August 2026. The press release adds a rule worth repeating: the Commission never requires people to pay money or provide account information to get a payment. A message that asks for a fee or a bank login in exchange for a Grubhub refund does not match how the FTC describes the program.
The Grubhub wording also differs from another FTC distribution. On its Amazon refunds page, the FTC states flatly that payments expire 60 days after the issue date. The Grubhub page asks recipients to act within 90 or 30 days without stating that consequence, so the two should not be read as the same rule.
Keeping a check and a PayPal notice on separate clocks
The Grubhub distribution mixes mailed checks and PayPal payments, each with its own window and neither with a published start date. A household with several drivers or diners, or one person with more than one payment, is left with the practical job of logging what arrived, when, and what has been cashed or accepted.
The Settlement & Refund Recovery System includes a claim log and payment tracker for recording each payment as it arrives, plus a section on how to get an expired or uncashed settlement check reissued.
Get The Settlement & Refund Recovery System here →
This piece was drafted with AI assistance; the figures were checked against the FTC’s Grubhub refund page, its August 12, 2026 announcement and the December 2024 stipulated order.
