Is There a Class Action Lawsuit Against McDonald's in 2026?

Last verified 10 August 2026 · by Class Action Buddy

The one live class action: Quarter Pounders and E. coli

Williams v. McDonald's USA, LLC and Taylor Fresh Foods, Inc., No. 1:24-cv-11275 in the Northern District of Illinois before Judge Jeremy C. Daniel, is the only consumer class action currently pending against McDonald's that we can verify. It was filed on 31 October 2024, days after the outbreak became public, and a consolidated class action complaint was filed on 4 August 2025 on behalf of two named plaintiffs, Tammy Williams and Trevor Keene.

The allegation, taken from the complaint itself: McDonald's buys slivered onions from Taylor Farms and puts them on Quarter Pounder burgers, with and without cheese. On 25 October 2024 Taylor Farms recalled those onions after finding they were, or might be, contaminated with E. coli. The plaintiffs say McDonald's advertising for the burgers never disclosed that they contained, or risked containing, the bacterium.

The thing most coverage gets wrong is what the case is claiming. It is not a personal-injury case. The injury alleged is economic — that customers paid for a product they would not have bought at that price had the risk been disclosed, and so lost the benefit of the bargain. The counts are brought under the Illinois Consumer Fraud and Deceptive Business Practices Act and California's Unfair Competition Law, with negligence and unjust enrichment claims alongside them, plus state-specific counts under Nevada's Deceptive Trade Practices Act and New Mexico's Unfair Practices Act.

The proposed class is everyone in the United States who bought the burgers during the class period, with separate subclasses for Nevada and New Mexico. McDonald's and Taylor Farms both moved to dismiss and to strike the class allegations. The court ruled on those motions on 13 March 2026 and set fresh deadlines rather than closing the case; a further order followed on 5 June 2026, a protective order was entered on 8 July 2026, and the parties were still filing discovery motions on 24 July 2026. We could not read the March order itself — it is not in the free record — so we do not characterise what survived, only that the case did.

What that means for you: nothing yet. A class action reaches a claim form only after a court approves a settlement and appoints an administrator. This case has not been certified as a class action, let alone settled. There is no fund, no administrator, no deadline and no form.

The case McDonald's lost — and how it actually ended

If you searched for whether McDonald's lost a lawsuit, this is the one. Every McDonald's franchise agreement used to contain an anti-poach clause barring one franchise from hiring a worker from another franchise, or from McDonald's itself, until six months after that person's last shift. Two franchise employees sued under the Sherman Act, arguing the clause held down their wages.

The district court threw the case out twice. On 25 August 2023 the Seventh Circuit, in an opinion by Judge Easterbrook (Nos. 22-2333 & 22-2334), vacated that judgment and sent the case back, with costs awarded to the workers. The court agreed with McDonald's that there is no separate labour market consisting of "workers at McDonald's" — people move between fast-food chains freely — which killed the Rule of Reason theory. But it held the judge had rejected the per se theory too early: a horizontal agreement among competitors is not automatically lawful just because it sits inside a franchise contract.

Back in the district court, the parties reopened discovery and set a schedule for a renewed class-certification motion. It never got decided. A settlement conference was held on 15 December 2025; a stipulation of dismissal with prejudice was filed on 24 December; and on 5 January 2026 Judge Jorge L. Alonso dismissed both Deslandes and Turner with prejudice and terminated the cases.

The distinction matters. No class was ever certified, and there was no court-approved class settlement — no notice to franchise workers, no fairness hearing, no fund. Whatever the named plaintiffs resolved, they resolved for themselves, and the terms are not public. A nine-year case that McDonald's lost on appeal ended without a single franchise worker being able to claim anything.

Why there is no McDonald's settlement to claim

McDonald's is one of the most-litigated companies in America, so the absence of a claimable settlement surprises people. Two checks explain it.

First, McDonald's annual report for 2025 and its quarterly report for the period ending 30 June 2026 name no specific litigation at all. Both carry only the standard contingencies note saying the company faces proceedings in the ordinary course of business, and that it does not believe any matter under review will have a material effect. A public company facing a settlement large enough to pay a nationwide class would have to say so.

Second, the McDonald's cases that do reach settlement tend to be against franchise operators, not the corporation, and they are small and local. The only one we have tracked is a $3.55 million settlement with UTB Enterprises and Goldenband LLC over unpaid short meal breaks — a wage case for employees of those specific franchisees, and its claim deadline of 8 March 2026 has passed.

So if a page offers you a "McDonald's settlement claim form" today, it is not describing a real claims process. A genuine settlement always has a court-appointed administrator, a named case, and a free official website. It is worth checking any notice against the administrator's real address before entering anything. In the meantime, the settlements you can actually file are on our open settlements list, and many of them pay without a receipt.

If the 2024 outbreak made you ill

This is worth separating clearly, because the live class action does not cover it. Williams asks for the purchase price of a burger. It does not seek damages for anyone who was made sick, and being a member of that class would not compensate you for an illness.

A food-poisoning claim is an individual personal-injury case. It turns on your own medical records, your own losses and your own state's deadline for suing, and it is not something you file on a settlement claim form. If you were hospitalised or lost income after eating at McDonald's in late 2024, that is a matter to take to your own lawyer. Class Action Buddy cannot help with it, and neither can any claim form.

What we removed, and why

An earlier version of this page listed three "recent class actions against McDonald's" with no case number, court or link. Checked against the federal docket and McDonald's SEC filings, none of them survived:

• A "Quarter Pounder weight false-advertising class action" — no such case could be found. There is a real Quarter Pounder class action, but it is about E. coli, not the weight of the beef.
• A "McDonald's app loyalty point devaluation case" — not found in any primary source.
• A "California worker AB1228 wage compliance suit" — AB 1228 is a statute, California's fast-food wage law, not a lawsuit. No case matching this description exists.

Sources for what replaced them: the dockets in Williams, Deslandes and Turner and the consolidated complaint in Williams (ECF 24), all linked above; the Seventh Circuit's 2023 opinion; and McDonald's own Form 10-K. Where the free record stops — the March 2026 ruling — we say so rather than guess.

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