640,038 Grubhub Refunds Went Out. Most Came as a Paper Check.

If you delivered food for Grubhub, or had a Grubhub account locked while it still held gift-card money, there may be a payment with your name on it sitting in a pile of mail you have not opened.

On August 12 the Federal Trade Commission announced that it was sending 640,038 payments totaling more than $23.8 million to Grubhub drivers and diners. The same release says what most of them look like: “Most consumers will receive a check in the mail.”

Checks are to be cashed within 90 days, as printed on the check. PayPal payments were to be redeemed within 30 days.

The thing to check

The FTC’s refund page describes the alleged conduct behind these payments as deceiving drivers about the earnings they could expect, and blocking diners from their accounts so they could not redeem gift cards. If either of those was you, this is ten minutes well spent:

1. Go through your mail from mid-August onward. Look for a check that mentions the FTC and Grubhub. According to the FTC’s refund FAQ, a payment sent as part of one of its settlements “will include an explanation and details about the case.” The cash-by date is on the check itself. Read it before you put the envelope back down.
2. Search your email for the PayPal route. The same FAQ says that when the FTC pays by PayPal, it first sends an email from an address ending in .gov, and PayPal sends another once the payment is issued. Search your inbox and spam for “FTC” and “Grubhub” since August.
3. If you find it too late, call anyway. The FAQ says that if a check has expired and there is still money in the settlement fund, the payment may be reissued. The refund administrator, Analytics Consulting LLC, is at 1-888-446-4992. Type ftc.gov/refunds into your browser to confirm that number rather than clicking a link in an email; the FTC says it will never ask you to pay money or hand over account information to receive a refund.

Divide the total by the number of payments and you get about $37 on average. That is the size of check that gets set aside on the kitchen counter, meant to be dealt with later. Later is the part with a date on it.

Why this money exists at all

It comes from a case the FTC and the Illinois Attorney General filed on December 17, 2024. Grubhub agreed to pay $25 million, nearly all of it for refunds.

The diners’ part of the complaint is specific. It alleged that Grubhub blocked accounts holding large gift-card balances without warning, that diners who complained were not told their account was blocked or, if they were told, were given no meaningful way to contest it, and that in one month 97% of locked accounts were never unlocked. The settlement order requires Grubhub to tell people when their account is blocked, give them a way to challenge the block, and restore access to their funds quickly if the block is lifted.

The FAQ also answers what happens to the money nobody collects: it is sent to the U.S. Treasury. A check that expires in a drawer does not go back to the other diners. It simply stops being yours.

A gift-card balance is a strange kind of money. It exists only as a number inside someone else’s app, and when the app locks you out, the number goes with it. The only independent record of how much was there is the one you kept yourself — which is also the record that tells you, two years on, that the envelope on the counter is worth opening.