The deadline is printed on the face of the check. On August 12 the Federal Trade Commission began sending 640,038 payments worth more than $23.8 million to Grubhub drivers and diners, and the instruction attached to that money is a single line: cash it within 90 days, as indicated on the check. Anyone paid through PayPal instead has 30 days to accept. The agency describes no claim step for this distribution, which means that for most recipients the first notice anything is owed will be an envelope in the mail.
The 90-day check window and the 30-day PayPal window
Two clocks run on this distribution and they are not the same length. Most people on the list will receive a paper check, and the agency’s instruction on those is to cash it within 90 days. A smaller group is being paid through PayPal, and those payments have to be accepted within 30 days. Neither window is negotiable at the mailbox, because both are set by the redress program rather than by a bank.
Ninety days is a real cutoff on the instrument itself. What happens afterward is discretionary rather than automatic. In its published answers about refund programs, the agency says that if money is still available in the settlement fund it may be able to reissue an expired payment, and that reissues are generally processed once a month after an initial distribution. Someone who wants a paper check instead of a PayPal payment waits at least 45 days from the original payment date, because the funds have to come back from PayPal before a check can be cut.
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A $140 million judgment Grubhub could not pay
The money reaching mailboxes now is the residue of an action the FTC and the Illinois Attorney General brought in December 2024. The complaint accused the delivery company of hiding the true cost of delivery behind fees that one internal message described as a pricing shell game, of blocking diners out of accounts that still held gift-card balances, of adding restaurants to the platform without their permission, and of advertising driver earnings it could not substantiate.
The settlement announced that month carried a monetary judgment of $140 million, partially suspended because of the company’s inability to pay the full amount. Grubhub was required to pay $25 million, nearly all of it earmarked for refunds, and the full judgment would become immediately due if the company were found to have misrepresented its financial condition. The $23.8 million now in transit is drawn from that payment.
The same order required operational changes rather than money alone. Grubhub had to disclose the true cost of delivery and stop adding junk fees, notify diners when an account is blocked and give them a way to appeal, provide a simple way to cancel a Grubhub+ subscription along with an annual reminder that it exists, stop listing unaffiliated restaurants, and make driver earnings claims only when it can back them up in writing.
Drivers, diners, and how the recipient list was built
Two harmed groups sit inside one distribution. Drivers were recruited with earnings claims the complaint describes as far above reality: advertisements in the New York area promised up to $40 an hour when median driver pay in the area ran around $10, and only one driver in a thousand actually earned the advertised figure. A Chicago campaign promised up to $26 an hour against a median of $11. Grubhub had received a Notice of Penalty Offenses from the FTC in 2021 warning against deceptive earnings claims, and the complaint charges that the claims continued afterward.
The diners in the second group lost access to money they had already loaded onto the platform. According to the complaint, accounts holding large gift-card balances were blocked without warning, and in one month alone 97 percent of locked accounts were never unlocked. Families who had received gift cards for food delivery were among those left without a route back to their funds.
Lists in cases like this are not assembled from applications. Court orders typically require defendants to hand over customer records, including contact details and how much each person paid, and the agency says it may also search its Consumer Sentinel Network database of consumer reports to identify people who lost money. That is why the announcement of these payments describes them as being sent rather than requested.
Analytics Consulting, and the money nobody cashes
The administrator handling this program is Analytics Consulting LLC, reachable at 1-888-446-4992, and it is one of five firms the FTC contracts with for redress work. The agency states flatly that it never requires people to pay money or provide account information to get a payment. That single sentence is the line separating a genuine refund from the impersonation attempts that tend to follow any publicized settlement, and a legitimate payment always arrives with an explanation of the case behind it.
Money left uncashed does not return to the company that paid it. Most FTC distributions are made pro rata, so each recipient receives an equal percentage of documented loss, and if funds remain after the first round the agency may send a second. Anything that cannot be distributed to consumers goes to the U.S. Treasury. By the agency’s own accounting, more than 95 percent of the money collected for refunds over the last five years has been returned to consumers, and the case page carrying these instructions was last updated on August 12, 2026.
This article was produced with AI assistance and reviewed by a human editor. Figures are linked to their primary sources; where a claim could not be verified from the public record, we say so.
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