10 November 2026, St. Louis, US: Bayer expects a Missouri state court to clear the way for its proposed $7.25 billion settlement of Roundup cancer lawsuits before the end of the year, with the company’s chief executive saying approval could come within weeks.
Speaking on a call with investors this week, Bayer CEO Bill Anderson said resolution of the long-running litigation could arrive “any week now,” and that the number of individual cases still working through the courts would fall sharply once the deal is finalized. The settlement, which Bayer first put forward earlier this year, received preliminary approval from the court in March, went through a further review process over the summer, and is now back before the state court judge in St. Louis, Missouri, for final sign-off.
The case centers on claims that Roundup, whose active ingredient is the herbicide glyphosate, causes non-Hodgkin lymphoma and other cancers in people who used it on farms, in gardens, or in landscaping and grounds work. Bayer inherited the litigation when it acquired Monsanto, the product’s original manufacturer, in 2018. The company maintains that decades of scientific review have found glyphosate safe and that it does not cause cancer, a position regulators including the US Environmental Protection Agency have also taken in prior registration reviews.
Roughly 65,000 claims remain pending in state and federal courts across the country. The $7.25 billion figure is intended to resolve the large majority of those cases in a single settlement rather than through continued individual trials, a number of which have produced large jury verdicts against the company in recent years. Bayer previously reached a separate, roughly $10 billion settlement in 2020 covering about 100,000 claims pending at that time, but new lawsuits filed by farmers, groundskeepers and other glyphosate users in the years since kept the litigation active and costly.
The settlement push follows a Supreme Court ruling in June that narrowed the grounds on which plaintiffs can bring failure to warn claims against pesticide manufacturers under federal law. Bayer has described the ruling as a significant legal win and used it as the basis to reorganize its glyphosate herbicide business into a separate unit named Ruveon, a structure intended to isolate the litigation’s financial exposure from the rest of the company’s crop science and pharmaceutical operations.
Glyphosate remains the most widely used herbicide in global agriculture, applied across row crops, orchards and non-crop land for weed control ahead of planting and, in some markets, as a pre-harvest desiccant. Its regulatory and legal status in the United States has drawn close attention from growers, input distributors and competing herbicide manufacturers, given how central the chemical remains to no-till and reduced-tillage farming systems that depend on reliable, low-cost burndown options.
A final court-approved settlement would mark the most significant step yet toward closing out litigation that has run for close to a decade and cost Bayer tens of billions of dollars in verdicts, settlements and legal expenses since the Monsanto acquisition. It would also let the company shift more of its crop science investment toward new active ingredients and formulation technology rather than ongoing litigation reserves, a point analysts have raised as a reason Bayer’s stock has reacted to news of settlement progress. Anderson’s comments this week were the clearest signal yet from company leadership that a resolution is close, though the Missouri court has not set a firm date for a final ruling, and the exact terms of individual claimant payouts under the settlement have not been made public.
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