When thousands of people are harmed by the same drug, device or data breach, the federal courts gather their separate lawsuits before a single judge. The Judicial Panel on Multidistrict Litigation counted 206,182 of those cases still open across 166 groups on September 1, 2026 — a caseload count only, with no fund attached and nothing to claim.
Allegations Only · Nothing to Claim Here
The lawsuits counted in this report are unproven allegations. The companies named below have not been found liable in the litigation described, no class has been certified in these MDLs, and this report creates nothing to claim. This page is informational and is not legal advice.
What the September Numbers Say
Once a month the federal judiciary publishes a headcount of the country's biggest lawsuits. The edition dated September 1, 2026 lists 166 active groupings of cases, spread across 50 federal districts and 142 judges, holding 206,182 individual lawsuits that are still open. Another 509,939 have been filed into those same groupings and since closed, for a lifetime total of 716,121.Those are big numbers attached to a document almost nobody outside the courts reads, and the single most important thing about them is what they are not. This is a caseload count. It is not a settlement announcement, it does not create a fund, and no part of it comes with a claim form, a deadline or an administrator. A count going up means more people sued last month. It does not mean anyone got paid.
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First, What Is an MDL?
An MDL is short for multidistrict litigation, and the plainest way to think about it is as a filing cabinet rather than a lawsuit.Say a hip implant is alleged to fail early, and four thousand people in forty states each hire a lawyer and sue the manufacturer. Left alone, forty different judges would each have to learn the same medical science, order the same company documents, and referee the same arguments about the same expert witnesses. That is forty times the cost and forty chances of forty different answers.
So a panel of seven federal judges — the Judicial Panel on Multidistrict Litigation, which is what the JPML in the report's title stands for — can order every one of those cases shipped to a single judge in a single courthouse. That judge does the shared groundwork once. They supervise the exchange of documents, decide which expert witnesses are allowed to testify, and usually try a small number of representative cases, called bellwether trials, so both sides can see what juries actually do with the evidence.
What the judge does not do is merge everyone into one case. Each person keeps their own lawsuit, their own medical records and their own injuries. When the shared work is finished, the cases either settle as a group or get sent back to the courts they came from for individual trials.
An MDL Is Not a Class Action
This distinction decides whether a reader has anything to do, so it is worth getting right.In a class action, one person sues on behalf of a whole group, one judgment binds everybody in that group, and people who never lifted a finger are usually still covered. That is why class actions produce the thing consumers recognize: a notice in the mail, a settlement website, a claim form and a deadline.
An MDL produces none of that automatically. Nobody is in an MDL unless they filed their own lawsuit, and filing one generally means hiring an attorney and having an individual injury to sue over. There is no class-wide claim form, no settlement site to check, and no way to opt in by filling out a page. When a mass tort does resolve, the money is typically divided case by case according to how badly each person was hurt, which is why two people in the same MDL can receive very different amounts.
The practical upshot: reading that a docket grew by 350 cases last month tells a consumer that more people are suing. It tells them nothing about whether they personally can get anything.
What Grew in September
Thirty-seven dockets grew over the month, 19 shrank, and 105 did not move. The net gain of 642 pending cases was slower than July's, and it was concentrated in a familiar handful of product cases:- Hair relaxer chemical straighteners, up 350 to 12,129 — the fastest-growing docket of the month, reversing a small drop it had posted in August. Plaintiffs allege long-term use caused uterine and ovarian cancer; the manufacturers deny it. See our hair relaxer lawsuit page.
- Talcum powder, up 336 to 69,250. Still the largest MDL in the country by an enormous margin — it holds about a third of every pending mass tort case in the United States on its own. See our talcum powder cancer lawsuit page.
- Uber passenger sexual assault claims, up 191 to 4,588.
- Depo-Provera birth control, up 109 to 6,403, its growth slowing sharply from the month before as a settlement framework takes shape. See our Depo-Provera lawsuit page.
- GLP-1 weight-loss and diabetes drugs, up 94 to 4,022, crossing 4,000 for the first time; a companion docket over vision loss added 16, to 216.
- Firefighting foam, up 18 to 15,264, where firefighters and people living near military bases allege PFAS chemicals in the foam caused cancer. See our AFFF firefighting foam lawsuit page.
What Shrank — and Why That Is Not Good News
Nineteen dockets got smaller, and the instinct is to read a falling number as people getting paid. The report does not support that reading, because it publishes counts and nothing else.A case can leave an MDL three ways. A judge can dismiss it, often because it was filed too late or the plaintiff could not produce records proving they used the product. It can settle. Or it can be sent back to the court where it started, to be tried individually — which means it is still very much alive, just counted somewhere else. The JPML never says which happened, so a shrinking docket is equally consistent with a wave of settlements and with a wave of dismissals.
The sharpest fall this month was the Zostavax shingles-vaccine litigation, which dropped from 826 pending cases to 101. Generic pharmaceutical pricing fell from 144 to 70, Taxotere from 136 to 81, and the Cook IVC filter docket shed 36, to 6,501.
Twenty-One Cases Hold Almost Everything
The monthly totals hide how lopsided the system is. Twenty-one MDLs hold 1,000 or more pending lawsuits each. Those 21 — about 13 percent of the list — account for 194,835 cases, or roughly 94.5 percent of everything pending in the entire MDL system.At the other end, 40 MDLs have ten or fewer cases left, and the median docket on the whole list holds about 30. So "166 active MDLs" describes two different things at once: a couple of dozen enormous product-injury fights that will take years to resolve, and a long tail of small, specialized disputes most people will never hear about.
What This Means if You Think You Were Harmed
Nothing on this page is a claim form, and no part of the September report creates one. A person who believes a drug, device or product injured them is in the individual-lawsuit lane, not the class-action lane, and that generally starts with a consultation with an attorney who handles that specific litigation — not with a website.Where a consumer can act is the other half of the site: the class action settlements that do have open claim windows, notices and deadlines. Those are tracked on our open settlements listing, and the mass tort dockets themselves are tracked on the mass tort hub. The complete, searchable list of all 166 active MDLs — every case name, number, judge, court and count from this same report — lives on our MDL tracker.
Questions
What is an MDL in plain English?
An MDL, or multidistrict litigation, is a filing cabinet, not a lawsuit. When thousands of people sue the same company over the same product in courts all over the country, a panel of seven federal judges can move every one of those cases to a single judge. That judge handles the shared pretrial work once — the document exchange, the expert testimony fights, a handful of test trials — instead of ninety judges each doing it separately. Every person still has their own individual case with their own facts and their own injuries.
Is an MDL the same thing as a class action?
No, and the difference decides whether a person has to do anything. In a class action, one judgment covers everybody in the class, and a member who does nothing is usually still bound by the result and can file a claim form when money is available. In an MDL, each person keeps a separate lawsuit that they had to file themselves, usually through their own attorney. Nobody is automatically in an MDL, and there is no class-wide claim form to fill out.
Can I file a claim based on this report?
No. The JPML statistics report is a caseload count — how many lawsuits are currently open in front of each judge. It is not a settlement, it does not create a fund, and it comes with no claim form, no deadline and no administrator. A case count rising or falling says nothing about whether any money will ever be paid in that litigation.
Why did some case counts go down?
Cases leave an MDL three ways: a judge dismisses them, they settle, or they are sent back to the court where they were originally filed for trial. The JPML report publishes counts only and never says which of the three happened, so a docket that shrank is not by itself evidence that anyone was paid. The Zostavax shingles-vaccine litigation fell from 826 pending cases to 101 in the September report, and the report itself gives no reason for it.
How often does the JPML publish these numbers?
Monthly. The U.S. Judicial Panel on Multidistrict Litigation publishes a pending-MDL statistics report at the start of each month showing every active MDL, the judge and district handling it, how many individual actions are open, and how many have been filed into it over its lifetime. The September 2026 edition is dated September 1, 2026.
Sources
• U.S. Judicial Panel on Multidistrict Litigation — MDL statistics report, distribution of pending MDL dockets by actions pending, September 1, 2026, jpml.uscourts.gov• U.S. Judicial Panel on Multidistrict Litigation — prior monthly statistics report, August 3, 2026, used for the month-over-month comparison, jpml.uscourts.gov
• U.S. Judicial Panel on Multidistrict Litigation — overview of how multidistrict litigation works, jpml.uscourts.gov
