Report ID: ATR-2026-Q1 · Data as of: March 31, 2026 · Published: April 1, 2026 · Issue: Q1 2026
Editor's note (July 28, 2026). This is a retrospective issue, backfilled to complete the series archive. It was reconstructed from the dataset's documented changes log and contemporaneous primary sources, and its analysis is limited to information documented as of March 31, 2026. The first issue of the series produced in real time is ATR-2026-Q3.
Methodology note. This report follows the source-confidence and aggregation rules documented on the site's Methodology page. Every figure carries an inline tag: (a) filed court document (annual report, quarterly filing, or payment-percentage notice); (b) secondary source citing a primary document; (c) estimate or inference. Class-(c) figures are excluded from point sums and appear only in ranges, per the methodology. All underlying data: client/src/data/trust-figures.json in this repository. No untagged figures are used. Nothing here is legal or financial advice.
How to cite: Asbestos Trust Tracker, State of the Asbestos Trust System — Q1 2026 (ATR-2026-Q1), data as of March 31, 2026, asbestostrusts.org.
Comparability note. The reporting window is January 1 – March 31, 2026; the prior issue is ATR-2025-Q4 (2025 Year in Review, data as of December 31, 2025). Quarter-over-quarter movement is reconstructed from the dataset's documented changes log.
The documented floor closes Q1 at approximately $17.0B, with composition unchanged from year-end 2025: exactly $13,076,231,337 across 32 secondary-carried trusts (28 at FY2022 vintages, 4 at FY2021) (b), plus approximately $4.0B across the nine publicly filing trusts at FY2024 filed values (a, as a class; exact filed arithmetic is preserved in the dataset only from the FY2025 cycle forward — flagged, not reconstructed).
No annual reports land in Q1 — the system's filing season opens in April — so the quarter's only fresh filed data points are Manville's quarterly filings, the highest-frequency class-(a) source in the system (a). The estimated high end of the working range remains $22.5B (c), on the anchors documented in prior issues: ILR's ~$25B plus ~$2B in deferred obligations at year-end 2016 (b), more than $1.5B of deferred obligations since funded — Honeywell's $1.325B into NARCO in January 2023 (a), the Western deferred contribution completed in 2024 (b) — against net depletion of roughly $0.5B per year since 2016 (c). Roughly 19 of ~60 active trusts still publish no retrievable figure.
The floor story of Q1 is therefore not arithmetic but anticipation: everything about the floor's quality now depends on the April season, when the nine public filers post FY2025 reports and the PACER-only queue reveals its size. That upgrade lands in next quarter's ledger.
No documented cuts, raises, or new reconsideration notices landed in Q1 2026. After a 2025 that produced four cuts and a deferral (ATR-2025-Q4, Section B), the silence is worth recording precisely: it is a pause in the cadence, not a reversal of direction. The trailing documented record since January 2023 stands at six cuts and zero raises within the tracked set: Celotex (June 2023), Pittsburgh Corning (November 2024), Kaiser (February 2025), W.R. Grace (April 2025), Quigley (October 2025), and Motors Liquidation (December 2025). The most recent documented increase anywhere in the tracked set remains Manville's 4.3% → 5.1% raise of February 2021 with its ~$5.6M retroactive true-up (a).
Held this quarter (documented): NARCO at 100% (a — now under DCPF administration, Section D), DII Industries at 60% (a), Thorpe Insulation at 58.6% (a), Western at 51.1% (a), Plant at 20% (a), Manville at 5.1% (a). Pittsburgh Corning remains at its reconsidered 19%, the consent process now in its seventeenth month with the true-up rider still live (a). Celotex holds 7% in the second year of its Deferral Period (a).
Forward look (hedged). The documented pattern of this cycle is that percentage actions cluster after the April filings, when trustees and advisory committees have fresh audited numbers in hand (b, pattern inference). With 28 of the 32 secondary-carried trusts still resting on FY2022 asset data, the FY2025 reports — once filed — are the most likely trigger for the next round of reconsideration notices. Nothing in Q1's silence changes the direction of travel documented since 2023.
Q1 is the system's quiet quarter for payout documentation — FY2025 claims-expense figures arrive with the April annual reports. The documented anchors stand as previously reported: the eight-trust subset (Pittsburgh Corning, W.R. Grace, Manville, GAF, Western, Plant, API, Combustion Engineering) paid ~$591.9M in 2022 and ~$561.2M in 2024 (a); the hard cumulative floor is the GAO's $17.5B paid on 3.3M claims, 1988–2010 (a); the working point estimate for cumulative payouts through Q1 is ~$24B (c), order-of-magnitude; and estimated systemwide net depletion runs ~$0.5B/yr (c) — below the subset's gross run-rate, implying that returns and residual funding offset a large share of gross payouts (c, inference, to be quoted as such). Claimant mortality's quarterly contribution remains unquantified in any public dataset — flagged, as before, rather than estimated.
Administration. NARCO resumed claims intake on January 12, 2026 under DCPF administration (a), completing the transition that paused intake on December 31, 2025. DCPF now administers 10 named trusts — Armstrong, B&W, Celotex, Federal-Mogul, Flintkote, NARCO, Owens Corning/Fibreboard, Pittsburgh Corning, USG, and W.R. Grace (b, site methodology) — accounting for roughly $8.7B, about 51% of the documented floor (derived from (a)/(b) figures with mixed as-of dates). The governance programs documented in December — the Cross-Trust Audit Program and the TDP §5.5 eligibility amendments — now operate across that entire block.
Appellate. On February 11, 2026, the Fourth Circuit affirmed the denial of stay relief in Herlihy v. DBMP (a, appellate opinion), leaving roughly 60,000 stayed lawsuits channelled toward an eventual §524(g) trust for CertainTeed's successor (b). The decision removes a procedural uncertainty that had hung over the DBMP case and moves the system's most-watched formation pipeline entry closer to a plan process. Meanwhile, the Bestwall fight escalated: in February 2026 the Official Committee of Asbestos Claimants petitioned the U.S. Supreme Court for certiorari (No. 25-1013) from the Fourth Circuit's August 2025 jurisdictional ruling and the 8–6 en banc denial (a, docket). The solvent-debtor question this series flagged as "not over" is now formally before the Court.
Governance programs, first quarter in operation. The Cross-Trust Audit Program ran its first monthly random-audit cycles in Q1 (a, per the December 10–11, 2025 notices establishing the monthly cadence; results not yet published — flagged as a gap, not estimated). TDP §5.5 completed its first full quarter in effect across the DCPF trusts (a, effective November 14, 2025). No spread of the verbatim §5.5 text beyond the DCPF block has been documented — worth watching, since verbatim propagation is how this administrator's policies have historically travelled (b, pattern).
Formations. No new §524(g) trust was funded in the window. The pipeline stands at three: Bestwall (in Chapter 11 since 2017, now at the Supreme Court docket), DBMP (post-Herlihy, plan process ahead), and Trane's Aldrich Pump/Murray Boiler units (in Chapter 11 since June 2020, no trust confirmed) (a/b as noted above). None carries a figure in the dataset; none should be counted until funding is documented. Kaiser Gypsum, its confirmation affirmed in April 2025, shows no docketed effective-date steps as of quarter close (c, gap).
| Class | Trusts | Assets carried | Share of documented floor |
|---|---|---|---|
| (a) Filed court document | ~9 | ≈$4.0B (FY2024 vintages + Manville quarterlies) | ~23% |
| (b) Secondary citing primary | 32 | $13,076,231,337 | ~77% |
| (c) Estimate/inference | 0 | excluded from point sum | — |
Upgraded this quarter: none — tier membership is static until the April filings. Staleness deepening: the 32 class-(b) figures (28 FY2022, 4 FY2021) are now three-plus years past their as-of dates in the oldest cases, every one beyond the 18-month threshold; Q1's unchanged floor is the least current aggregate this series will print, and the gap between the documented floor and current truth is at its widest just before the filing season. Known gaps: ~19 of ~60 active trusts publish no retrievable figure; four annual reports remain PACER-only (W.R. Grace FY2024, Pittsburgh Corning FY2024, Celotex FY2024, B&W FY2024); the Delticus/Bendix trust publishes no public financials; the Cross-Trust Audit Program has published no findings. Items verified during backfill, queued for the changes log: Quigley's October 2025 cut (a), H.K. Porter's January 2025 resumption (a). Aggregate-level class-(c) figures in use: the $22.5B high, the ~$24B cumulative-payout point, the ~$0.5B/yr net-depletion rate.
Next issue: ATR-2026-Q2, expected July 2026. Corrections and sourcing disputes: open an issue on this repository. Figures marked (c) must not be cited as primary evidence.