Opioid Settlement Expenditures, 2022-2023
Opioid Settlement Funds provide a critical opportunity for decision-makers to invest in life-saving strategies to abate the harms of the opioid crisis. As these funds are disbursed, governments should provide the public with clear, accessible information about policies, activities, and decision-making related to their use. Decision-makers have a responsibility to be good stewards of restitution dollars through fair processes and transparent public reporting of all settlement expenditures.
Between 2022 – 2023, state and local governments received an estimated $6 Billion in Opioid Settlement Funds. In 2024, over $6.5 Billion were received. To date, reporting and transparency requirements vary drastically state by state, and understanding the full scope of settlement fund usage can be challenging. To increase transparency, KFF Health News, the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, and Shatterproof are co-leading an effort to collect, organize, and categorize all publicly available settlement fund expenditures and commitments. Data from two consecutive project years have been published: 2022-2023 (project year one) and 2024 (project year two). This website provides users with an opportunity to explore summaries of expenditure spending nationally and within each state across these project years. To best understand the findings, a review of this glossary is recommended for explanations about how key terms are defined.
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National Insights | 2022-2023
Use of Settlement Funds Nationally
Governments spent or committed about one-third of settlement funds. An additional third of funds have not yet been earmarked for use. For the remaining third, no publicly available reports on the dollars or their uses were available so these funds were marked as unknown.
Main “Buckets” of Spending | 2022-2023
Most experts agree on 4 Buckets for opioid abatement: prevention, treatment, recovery, and harm reduction. Additional buckets were added for clarity when expenditures did not fit into the buckets. A full description of the buckets can be found in the project methodology.
9 Core Strategies | 2022-2023
Exhibit E of many of the national settlement agreements includes a set of core strategies for opioid abatement. The “other” category includes expenditures that may encompass multiple categories or ones that were outside the listed categories.
Percent of Opioid Settlement Funds Committed by State
Funds Committed*
*Source: Data collection by KFF Health News, Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, Shatterproof. Full database of expenditures can be found at https://kffhealthnews.org/news/article/opioid-settlement-funds-detailed-database-state-county-city-spending
^States in which 100% of funds were expended or committed spent more than the total funds received in the project year’s reporting period.
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