Lemonade’s Quote Tool Pre-Filled 190,644 Licence Numbers; the $10.5 Million Settlement Is Final

A federal judge in Manhattan granted final approval on 10 September 2026 to a $10.5 million class settlement over Lemonade Inc.’s auto-quote platform, which between April 2023 and 18 September 2024 pre-filled driver’s licence numbers by matching visitor-entered names, birth dates and addresses against data-broker records. Unauthorised parties used the feature to harvest about 190,644 licence numbers, including those of people who never sought a Lemonade policy. Reporting of the approval followed on 18 September.

Lemonade discovered the exposure in March 2025 and notified in April. The settlement pays documented losses up to $10,000 or a pro-rata share, provides three years of identity protection, and sends a third of the fund to class counsel. The sources do not report an admission of liability.

The corpus opened the quote-form thread at 12-1206, where Nationwide’s form was breached in 2012, and followed it through GEICO at 21-0419, Elephant at 22-0527b and the New York penalties at 24-1125b. Lemonade’s version is the most explicit: the form did not leak a stored number, it looked the number up from a broker and displayed it, so that a person with no policy and no account was included the moment somebody typed their name. New York fined eight other insurers more than $19 million for the same design in 2025.

Pre-filling a licence number is a conversion feature. Every field a prospect must type is a reason to abandon the quote, and the number is the one field they may not have to hand. The broker feed exists to remove that friction. What it also creates is a lookup service for anyone with a name and a birth date, and the sector has now been told so by a regulator, by four courts and by fourteen years of files. The settlement is the cost of one more instance.