PG&E, Edison & Hawaiian Electric: How Wildfire Funds Pay

Once a utility wildfire case actually resolves, “the settlement” turns out to mean something different almost every time. Three of the most extensively documented recent examples — PG&E, Southern California Edison, and Hawaiian Electric — use three genuinely different payout structures, and understanding which one applies to your situation is often more useful than any single headline dollar figure.

Quick answer: PG&E’s Fire Victim Trust, created through its Chapter 11 bankruptcy, has paid over $13.7 billion to more than 66,000 claimants at roughly 70 cents on the dollar, funded partly by PG&E stock the trust had to sell over time. Southern California Edison instead opened a voluntary compensation program for the 2025 Eaton Fire — individually negotiated offers that require giving up the right to sue in exchange. Hawaiian Electric and several co-defendants reached a $4 billion global settlement for the 2023 Maui fires, paid in four annual tranches of roughly $1 billion each, with first payments beginning in 2026. None of these structures pays a claimant the full determined amount immediately and in cash.

Three Fires, Three Structures

Full names and detail for each are below — the table above is only a quick-reference summary.

PG&E’s Fire Victim Trust: Bankruptcy, Stock and a Pro Rata Shortfall

PG&E’s 2019 Chapter 11 filing — driven substantially by wildfire liability from the 2017 North Bay fires and the 2018 Camp Fire — followed the same basic bankruptcy-to-trust mechanism our companion guide to institutional abuse settlement trusts describes in an entirely different context: an automatic stay paused individual lawsuits, and a confirmed reorganization plan channeled claims into a dedicated Fire Victim Trust.

What makes PG&E’s trust distinctive is how it was funded. Rather than cash alone, the trust received roughly 477 million shares of PG&E stock as part of its funding, on the theory that PG&E’s ongoing business — as a still-operating, reorganized utility — would eventually make those shares valuable. That introduced a real market risk on top of the settlement itself: the trust ultimately sold its full stock position over several years, completing the sale in December 2023, and that stock ended up generating about $7.25 billion — modestly ahead of its original target, but a result that was never guaranteed at the time claimants’ cases were resolved.

Combined with cash and other recoveries, the trust’s total net funding reached roughly $14.25 billion against a total of determined claims that exceeded it — which is why, as of the most recent reporting, the trust has paid claimants approximately 70 cents for every dollar of their individually determined damages, having disbursed over $13.7 billion to more than 66,000 claimants. A final distribution, dependent on proceeds from the trust’s remaining third-party recoveries, was expected later in 2026. California lawmakers have separately been considering legislation aimed at the roughly $6 billion gap between what survivors were awarded on paper and what the trust has actually been able to pay — a live illustration of how a trust’s payout percentage is not fixed at the moment a bankruptcy plan is confirmed; it can keep changing for years afterward.

Southern California Edison: A Litigation-Waiver Compensation Program

Rather than a bankruptcy trust, Southern California Edison responded to the 2025 Eaton Fire by opening a voluntary compensation program aimed at covering roughly 18,000 damaged properties — a fundamentally different mechanism than either PG&E’s trust or Hawaiian Electric’s negotiated settlement, because it operates entirely outside the court system, one claimant at a time.

The trade-off is explicit and important to understand before applying: accepting an SCE offer through this program requires giving up the right to sue SCE over the fire. In exchange, a claimant can potentially resolve their claim faster than through litigation, which — as of the most recent reporting — was described as entering its most active phase in 2026, with discovery, bellwether case selection and early settlement talks all still on the calendar rather than concluded. Sample program figures illustrate what an offer can look like: a specific worked example — a family of four who lost a 1,500-square-foot home, still own the property, intend to rebuild, and have an attorney file the claim — was cited at just over $2 million. Early participation was modest relative to the scale of the fire: several months into the program, SCE had made offers to only a small fraction of the claimants who had applied, and fire survivors have publicly objected to the litigation-waiver condition attached to the program.

The choice this program presents is a real one, not a formality: take a faster, individually negotiated offer and forgo the underlying lawsuit, or decline it and keep pursuing the claim through litigation — which may eventually produce its own global settlement, on the timeline the still-developing Eaton Fire litigation follows, or may produce an individually tried result. Which is better depends on facts a program administrator has no obligation to explain to you, which is exactly the kind of decision worth taking to an attorney before accepting anything.

Hawaiian Electric and Maui: A Multi-Defendant Global Settlement Paid in Tranches

The August 2023 Maui wildfires — the deadliest in over a century of U.S. wildfire history — produced litigation against multiple defendants at once, reflecting a genuinely more distributed set of alleged failures than a single-utility case: Hawaiian Electric Company, the State of Hawaii, Kamehameha Schools, Hawaiian Telcom, and affiliates of West Maui Land Co. and Spectrum Oceanic LLC all agreed, in August 2024, to a combined $4 billion global settlement — with Hawaiian Electric contributing roughly $2 billion, Kamehameha Schools about $873 million, the state about $808 million, and the remaining defendants contributing the balance.

Reaching that headline figure did not mean money reaching survivors right away. Finalizing distributions required resolving a separate, complex dispute among the insurance companies involved and confirming the fees available to plaintiffs’ counsel — steps that took roughly two more years to work through. The settlement is structured to pay out in four annual tranches of approximately $1 billion each, with the first tranche beginning in 2026, close to three years after the fires themselves. For a family whose claim has been determined and approved, this means the practical reality of “your settlement is finalized” is closer to “your first of several annual payments is now beginning” than to a single lump-sum check.

What These Three Examples Teach About Any Wildfire Settlement

• A headline settlement figure is not a per-claimant number. $4 billion, $14 billion and a compensation program’s individual offers are all aggregate or case-specific figures; your own recovery depends on how the total is divided, over what timeline, and under what reduction.
• The form of payment matters, not just the amount. Cash, stock, and multi-year tranches carry different risks and different practical value even when the nominal dollar figures look comparable.
• Accepting an individual settlement program can foreclose better options later. SCE’s litigation-waiver condition is the clearest example on this page, but it is a common feature of individual compensation programs generally, and it deserves the same scrutiny a release in any personal injury settlement gets.
• “Finalized” and “money received” are different milestones, sometimes by years, exactly as our guide to filing a claim in a class action or mass tort settlement explains for mass settlements generally — claims administration, deficiency review and staged distributions apply here just as they do in a product-liability mass tort.
• A settlement that isn’t finalized yet — like the still-developing Palisades Fire litigation — hasn’t chosen its structure yet. Whether that case eventually resolves through a global settlement, individual trials, or something closer to PG&E’s or SCE’s model is a live, unresolved question, not something this guide can predict.
• None of this replaces your own homeowners insurance claim. A utility settlement, once one exists, is separate from what your own policy already owes you under its own contract terms — see our guide to what your homeowners insurer actually owes after a wildfire for the actual-cash-value, living-expense and FAIR Plan rules that apply regardless of any utility case’s outcome.

Practical Steps

1. Identify which structure actually applies to your specific fire and defendant — a bankruptcy trust, an individual compensation program, or a multi-defendant negotiated settlement each have different rules, different deadlines and different trade-offs.
2. Never assume a settlement’s headline total translates directly into your own payout — confirm the reduction, tranche schedule, or individualized calculation that actually applies to your claim.
3. Before accepting any individual compensation-program offer, understand exactly what you are giving up — most require waiving the right to sue over the same fire.
4. Expect staged payments, not a lump sum, particularly in a large multi-defendant or bankruptcy-trust settlement, and plan your own finances accordingly.
5. Track any legislative or court developments addressing shortfalls — as with the gap between PG&E claimants’ determined and actually-received amounts, these can change the ultimate percentage paid even after a plan is confirmed.
6. Consult an attorney before signing any release or program agreement, particularly one that trades a faster payment for giving up the right to sue.

Sources & Further Reading

• Fire Victim Trust (California) — trust status updates, stock-sale history and cumulative distribution reporting; PG&E Chapter 11 reorganization plan, U.S. Bankruptcy Court, Northern District of California
• Southern California Edison Eaton Fire compensation program terms and published sample settlement figures; Los Angeles County litigation and coordinated Eaton Fire case filings
• Hawaii wildfire global settlement agreement (August 2024) and related mediated agreements resolving insurer disputes and attorneys’ fee allocation, Hawaii state courts
• Assembly Bill 1054 (2019) and the California Wildfire Fund, discussed in more detail in our companion guide to wildfire liability claims against a utility
• See our guides to Boy Scouts and Catholic diocese abuse settlement trusts for the general bankruptcy-to-trust mechanism this guide’s PG&E section applies to a different context, filing a claim in a class action or mass tort settlement for the claims-administration and pro rata concepts used throughout, and wrongful death settlement amounts for how a death claim arising from the same fire is valued within any of these structures