What Is the Roundup Lawsuit About?

The lawsuits claim Roundup causes cancer. In the first bellwether trial of the federal cases, Edwin Hardeman alleged that Monsanto's Roundup, whose active ingredient is glyphosate, caused his non-Hodgkin's lymphoma. The Ninth Circuit, affirming the judgment in his favor in May 2021, noted that thousands of people had sued Monsanto in state and federal court since 2015, and that the jury's $75 million punitive award had been reduced by the district court to $20 million.

Bayer, which owns Monsanto, has tried to settle. It announced in June 2020 that it would pay $8.8 billion to $9.6 billion to resolve then-current Roundup litigation, saying the agreements contain no admission of liability or wrongdoing. In February 2026 Monsanto announced a proposed nationwide class settlement of current and future claims alleging non-Hodgkin lymphoma, to be funded by capped annual payments over up to 21 years totaling up to $7.25 billion following court approval. Then on June 25, 2026, the US Supreme Court held in Monsanto v. Durnell that federal pesticide law expressly preempts a state-law failure-to-warn claim that would require a cancer warning on Roundup's label, reversing the Missouri Court of Appeals and sending the case back.

Regulators disagree on the science. The EPA says its 2017 assessment concluded that glyphosate is not likely to be carcinogenic to humans, a different conclusion from IARC, and that it is updating its evaluation of glyphosate's cancer potential as part of registration review. IARC classified glyphosate as probably carcinogenic to humans, its Group 2A, in March 2015.