The Fire Victim Trust set up to pay people burned out by PG&E’s wildfires will make its last pro rata payment on October 14, 2026. The payment is 1.25% of each approved award, which lifts the total paid on every claim to 71.25%. Trustee Cathy Yanni says no further pro rata distributions will follow it. For survivors of the 2015 Butte, 2017 North Bay and 2018 Camp fires, the October 14 round fixes the final share of a $19.57 billion pool of awards, and the remaining 28.75% will not be paid by the trust.
What the last 1.25% adds
A pro rata payment gives every claimant the same percentage of an approved award, so the dollar amounts differ but the share does not. On a $10,000 award, the October 14 payment is $125. The trust has already paid 70%, so the final round moves that award to $7,125 and leaves $2,875 unpaid. On a $500,000 award the same arithmetic ends at $356,250. Yanni wrote in a September 10 message to claimants that “the next and final pro rata distribution will be 1.25%.”
The trust has paid in stages since it was formed on July 1, 2020, after the bankruptcy court confirmed PG&E’s reorganization plan on June 20, 2020. According to Settlement Insight’s tally of the payment history, the first round was 30% on March 15, 2021. Later totals were 45% in February 2022, 60% in January 2023, 66% in April 2024 and 70% in October 2024. Each figure is a running total, not a separate payment, and the 1.25% round is the smallest step of the six.
The people this payment is for are the claimants with an approved award, and that group is fixed: the claims period closed on September 15, 2023. The trust reports 71,787 claimants with determination notices, of whom 66,530 are classed as eligible. Of those eligible claimants, 66,171, or 99%, have been paid. The last round arrives two years after the one before it, so anyone in that group who has lost track of which earlier rounds arrived has a reason to sort it out before October 14.
Claimants who have collected payments across six rounds and five years need a record that adds up to 71.25%. The Settlement & Refund Recovery System is a paid product from RetireShield, separate from the trust, and it includes a claim log and payment tracker for noting each deposit against the running total.
Get the claim log and payment tracker for the final Fire Victim Trust round →
Why awards stop short of 100%
The trust was funded under PG&E’s bankruptcy plan, and the money never matched the awards. KRCR television in northern California reported in August that the original $13.5 billion settlement had grown to about $14.7 billion, against roughly $20 billion in approved awards. The trust’s own dashboard lists $19.57 billion awarded and $13.72 billion paid through September 30, which is 70.1% of awards. The final round adds about $245 million, and the 28.75% left over works out to roughly $5.6 billion.
Paradise Mayor Steve Crowder, whose town was hit by the Camp Fire, described the arrangement to KRCR this way: “Everybody isn’t gonna get the same dollar amount, but they’re gonna get the same percentage amount.” That is the whole mechanism of a pro rata trust. A small award and a large award both end at 71.25%, so a shortfall that looks modest as a percentage becomes a very large dollar figure on the biggest claims.
The Davey Tree money behind the final round
The last new money came from Davey Tree Services, the tree-trimming contractor that worked for PG&E. Settlement Insight reports a $208 million settlement, of which the trust received $145.08 million. After $1.93 million in costs and $31.49 million in attorney fees, about $111.66 million was left to distribute, which matches KRCR’s figure of $112 million received in late July. That net amount is what funds a payment of 1.25% rather than a larger one.
In its September 10 trustee update, the trust says all funds from the Davey Tree settlement have now been received. Its website also lists the sale of its last PG&E stock in December 2023 as the step that lifted payments to 66%. With the stock sold and the third-party recoveries collected, the trust has nothing left to sell or collect, which is why Yanni describes October 14 as the end of pro rata payments.
The counts leave a small group still unpaid. The trust lists 66,530 eligible claimants and 66,171 paid ones, a gap of 359 people. It has not said how many of them will be reached by the October 14 round, or why they have not been paid.
Checking the October 14 payment against the running total
The free route is the trust itself. The Fire Victim Trust website carries the payment dashboard and the trustee’s updates, and it lists a claimant phone line at 1-888-664-1152 and a mailing address at P.O. Box 25936, Richmond, VA 23260. Claimants who cannot match their own deposits to the trust’s figures are the ones to call, before the final round goes out on October 14.
The check itself is simple addition, because each earlier figure is a running total. Payments of 30%, 15%, 15%, 6% and 4% bring an award to 70%, and the final 1.25% brings it to 71.25%. On any award, the trust’s numbers should equal the award multiplied by 0.7125 once the last payment lands. A claimant whose records fall short of that has a specific amount to ask about.
The trust says it will keep its records for ten years after the final distribution. That gives a claimant a decade in which to question a payment, but a claimant’s own log is the only other record of what was deposited, and of when. After October 14 there will be no further rounds to wait for, and the percentage of each award that was never paid stays at 28.75%.
For claimants keeping their own record of these payments, The Settlement & Refund Recovery System includes a claim log and payment tracker, plus a walkthrough on getting an expired or uncashed settlement check reissued if a payment sits unopened past its date.
Click here to get The Settlement & Refund Recovery System for Fire Victim Trust payments →
This article was produced with AI assistance and reviewed by The Money Overview’s editorial team.
