An accounting the Federal Trade Commission released in 2025 closes the books on a specific slice of 2024: the refund programs the agency wound down that year. Twenty-five cases closed, more than $148 million went out the door, and the agency’s own math puts the average payment at $127.58 per person. That average is accurate, but it describes the middle of a distribution that runs from a few dollars to tens of thousands, shaped by rules about who gets paid, who gets paid a second time, and who gets nothing once a check goes stale. Every figure in this article comes from the FTC’s own refund-program pages and its 2024 Annual Report on Refunds to Consumers.
How 25 Closed Cases Produced a $127.58 Average
The FTC’s Office of Claims and Refunds tracks each refund program from the day a court orders a defendant to pay until the last dollar is either mailed to a consumer or forwarded to the U.S. Treasury. The agency’s page on how it provides refunds states that in 2024 it closed refund programs for 25 different cases, together returning more than $148 million to consumers, at an average of $127.58 per person and an average administrative cost of $5.79 per person. The FTC’s 2024 Annual Report on Refunds to Consumers puts an exact figure on it: those 25 cases returned $148,337,472.49 to 1,770,214 people who were sent a payment, drawn from $163.9 million collected across the group, with $6.7 million spent on administrative costs and roughly $8.8 million left unused once the programs closed.
Chris Mufarrige, Director of the FTC’s Bureau of Consumer Protection, said when the agency published the report that “getting money back for people across the country is a top priority for the FTC” and that the agency “will relentlessly pursue refunds for Americans who lost money to unlawful practices,” a comment tied to the same March 2025 announcement that released the 2024 figures.
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Why the Per-Person Average Hides a Wide Spread
A mean built from 25 cases that behaved nothing alike is not a promise of what any one person actually received. Of the 1,770,214 people the FTC sent a payment to across those closed cases, 1,162,743 — about 65.7% — had cashed at least one payment by the time the program closed, according to the case-by-case table in the annual report. The spread inside that number is wide. In the Reckitt Benckiser/Indivior Suboxone case, the FTC sent payments to 54,658 people and 97.1% of them cashed one. In the Age of Learning case, tied to the ABCmouse subscription service, 206,814 people were sent a payment and 137,591 — 66.5% — cashed it. In the Vast Tech case, 127,129 people were sent a payment and only 48,155, or 37.9%, ever cashed it; Kushly’s closed case paid 576 people and just 43.9% cashed. Most FTC refund money is split on a pro rata basis, meaning each recipient gets an equal percentage of what they are calculated to have lost, a method the agency explains on its refund FAQ page. When a case instead requires a claims process because the FTC lacks a reliable list of customers, the agency says it typically hears from just 5% to 50% of the people who qualify — meaning a chunk of any settlement fund can go unclaimed simply because eligible people never applied.
The Void Date and the Cashed-Check Rule Behind a Discarded Payment
Every check the FTC mails carries a void date, and the agency’s refund explainer describes what happens next: when a check is returned as undeliverable or goes uncashed past that date, staff runs an address search and, if a better one turns up, reissues a new check to the updated address. That safety net depends on the agency noticing the check never cleared and finding the person again — neither is automatic, especially years after a case closes. The FTC also imposes a floor: it generally does not mail a check for less than $10, so a small pro rata share can be dropped from a distribution entirely rather than mailed. The larger reason a thrown-away or ignored check is not simply replaceable involves the next round of money. The FTC’s refund FAQ states that to be eligible for an additional payment, a consumer generally must have cashed the previous one — so skipping the first check does not just forfeit that amount, it can remove that person from the pool for any second or third distribution the agency later sends from the same settlement fund. The agency currently pays by check, prepaid debit card, PayPal and Zelle, but the void-date and reissue mechanics apply specifically to mailed checks.
The Treasury’s Under-$42-Million Share and the Bigger Five-Year Total
Money that cannot be distributed does not stay with the FTC. The agency’s refund explainer states that over the five years from 2020 through 2024, it returned $2 billion to consumers while sending less than $42 million to the U.S. Treasury — under 5% of the amount collected in that span. For scale, in 2024 alone, separate from the 25 closed cases above, the agency sent first-round payments in 33 cases totaling nearly $315 million ($314,837,561.91, per the annual report) to 4,350,411 eligible consumers, of whom 64.2% had cashed a payment as of the report’s cutoff. The FTC’s refunds data page lists annual reports on refunds back to 2017, and as of this writing its most recent full-year edition still covers 2024 — there is no 2025 annual refunds report yet, so every dollar figure above stays labeled to the year the FTC itself assigned it rather than read as current.
How Federal Refund Programs Reach a Household
The FTC’s own case table shows that in some 2024 programs, as many as three in five people who were mailed a payment never cashed it, and nothing on ftc.gov walks a household through checking whether an unfamiliar case name, a state unclaimed-property listing, or another agency’s settlement already has money sitting under their name. The gap is not the size of any single payment; it is knowing where to look before a check goes past its void date.
The Settlement & Refund Recovery System is a 36-page guide paired with a 5-tab Excel tracker pre-filled with all 51 state unclaimed-property offices and a source vault of 12 official places money sits.
See the four-date rule for reading a settlement notice in The Settlement & Refund Recovery System.
This article was researched and drafted with the assistance of AI and reviewed by an editor.
Warren Cohen is a finance writer based in Phoenix, Arizona, covering personal finance topics including credit, banking, and beginner investing. He earned his degree in business administration from Arizona State University and began his career working in consumer finance, where he gained direct experience with lending and credit systems. He now writes for personal finance websites and fintech platforms, focusing on clear, practical content that helps readers make informed financial decisions.
