Rideshare assault lawsuits against Uber and Lyft have grown into one of the largest mass tort actions in the United States, with more than 3,500 passengers suing Uber in a consolidated federal case and roughly 2,000 more suing Lyft in state and federal courts. The claims share a core allegation: that the companies failed to screen and monitor drivers, ignored warning signs, and put growth ahead of passenger safety.
If you were assaulted, harassed, or kidnapped during an Uber or Lyft ride, you can still bring an individual claim. The litigation is not a class action. Each survivor files a separate lawsuit, and those cases are then grouped for pretrial proceedings.
How Big the Litigation Has Become
The federal Uber cases are consolidated in In re: Uber Technologies Inc., Passenger Sexual Assault Litigation, MDL No. 3084, in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California. As of June 2026, about 3,571 lawsuits were pending in the MDL, with more than 100 new cases filed in the weeks before that count. Another 500-plus similar claims sit in California state court under a separate coordination proceeding.
The growth has been steep. San Francisco County Superior Court held about 550 plaintiffs in August 2022. The federal MDL had 1,263 cases by September 2024, 2,783 by November 2025, and crossed 3,000 by year’s end. Plaintiffs have joined from 30 states.
Lyft faces a parallel wave. Roughly 2,000 cases are pending in state courts, and the Judicial Panel on Multidistrict Litigation created In re: Lyft, Inc. Passenger Sexual Assault Litigation, MDL No. 3171, in February 2026, assigned to Judge Rita F. Lin in the Northern District of California. As of mid-2026, 54 cases were pending in the Lyft MDL, a master complaint was filed on May 29, 2026, and the judge approved a data-preservation order requiring Lyft to retain records from social media, emails, and personal devices. The first Lyft trial is expected in California state court in September 2026.
What the Early Verdicts Say
Three Uber cases have gone to trial so far, with sharply different outcomes.
In September 2025, a California state court jury found Uber negligent in a 2016 assault case but concluded that the company’s negligence was not a “substantial factor” in causing the plaintiff’s harm. No damages were awarded, effectively a defense win.
In February 2026, a federal jury in Phoenix awarded plaintiff Jaylynn Dean $8.5 million in compensatory damages. Dean alleged her Uber driver raped her during a late-night ride from a Tempe, Arizona bar in November 2023. The jury found the driver was acting as an “apparent agent” of Uber. It rejected her negligence and product-defect claims and declined to award punitive damages. Uber has said it will appeal the agency finding.
In April 2026, a second federal bellwether in Charlotte, involving an anonymous plaintiff identified as WHB 832 who alleged assault by a driver in North Carolina in 2019, produced a finding of liability but only $5,000 in damages.
No major verdicts have been reached yet in the Lyft cases.
What Plaintiffs Are Arguing
The lawsuits do not simply target the individual drivers. They try to hold Uber and Lyft themselves responsible, and several legal theories have gained traction.
Negligent hiring, supervision, and retention. Plaintiffs argue that both companies cut corners on background checks by relying on inexpensive, name-only commercial database searches instead of fingerprint-based FBI checks of the kind used by traditional taxi commissions. They also allege the companies failed to remove drivers after receiving credible complaints of harassment or assault.
Vicarious liability and apparent agency. Both companies classify drivers as independent contractors, but plaintiffs contend the level of algorithmic control makes the companies function as employers or principals. The Dean jury found Uber liable on an apparent-agency theory. In the federal MDL, Judge Charles Breyer concluded that Uber qualifies as a common carrier under California law, which imposes a duty of “utmost care and diligence” toward passengers and opens the door to vicarious liability for driver assaults.
Product defect and failure to warn. Some plaintiffs describe the Uber app itself as a defective product, arguing it lacks safety features like in-ride video recording or biometric verification. Related claims say Uber failed to warn riders about the non-professional nature of its drivers and the specific risks to solo or intoxicated passengers.
Fraud. Certain claims focus on Uber’s past marketing of itself as the “safest ride on the road” and its collection of a “Safe Ride Fee” that plaintiffs allege was funneled into profit rather than safety improvements.
Uber has pushed back. It unsuccessfully moved to transfer bellwether cases out of the Northern District of California based on forum-selection clauses in its terms of use, and it has sought to reduce potential jury awards through offsets for money plaintiffs received from insurance or other sources.
The Screening and Safety Record Behind the Claims
A central factual dispute is whether the companies’ driver-screening processes are adequate. In 2016, Uber settled a lawsuit for $25 million over allegations that its screening vendors, Hirease and Checkr, failed to catch drivers with criminal histories because the searches lacked comprehensive databases and did not look back as far as legally permitted. A 2018 CNN investigation found instances where both Uber and Lyft allowed individuals with convictions for assault and firearm possession to drive on their platforms.
Both companies have published safety transparency reports. Uber’s 2019–2020 report recorded 3,824 incidents across the five most severe categories of sexual assault, down from 5,981 in 2017–2018. In litigation, however, Uber disclosed roughly 400,000 unaudited reports of sexual assault or misconduct submitted between 2017 and 2022, though the company says the vast majority involved less serious, non-physical conduct such as inappropriate comments or staring.
Lyft’s Community Safety Report, published in October 2021, reported 4,158 sexual assaults from 2017 through 2019, of which 360 were classified as rape. The annual count rose from 1,096 in 2017 to 1,807 in 2019, though Lyft noted the rate relative to total rides declined by about 19% over that period.
Ongoing monitoring is also contested. Uber says more than 80,000 drivers have been removed through continuous background checks since 2018, and its internal Safety Risk Assessed Dispatch system, known as S-RAD, uses algorithms to match riders with drivers in ways designed to reduce conflict. Plaintiffs are challenging Uber’s admission that key internal data tied to those systems, including supply plans and S-RAD scoring metrics, was automatically deleted every 30 days. They argue this amounts to destruction of evidence relevant to how the company assessed and managed driver risk.
Why These Cases Are in Open Court at All
Until 2018, both Uber and Lyft required all users to resolve disputes through private arbitration, which kept claims confidential and out of open court. After an open letter from 14 female assault survivors and sustained public pressure, Uber dropped mandatory arbitration for sexual assault and harassment claims in May 2018 under CEO Dara Khosrowshahi. Lyft made a similar commitment.
The change did not, however, allow victims to join together in a class action. Each survivor must file individually, which is why the litigation has taken the form of a mass tort with thousands of separate lawsuits consolidated for pretrial proceedings.
Is a Settlement Coming
There is no global settlement in either the Uber or Lyft litigation. In the Uber MDL, retired Judge Gail A. Andler was appointed as Settlement Master in 2025 to facilitate resolution discussions. Court filings from March 2026 indicate that Uber deposited funds to cover settlements in an unspecified number of individual cases, though the number is not believed to be large. If the bellwether process ends without a global deal, the court expects to begin remanding individual cases back to their home districts for separate trials.
Who Can File a Claim
Passengers, and in some circumstances drivers, who experienced sexual assault, harassment, or kidnapping during or immediately around an Uber or Lyft trip in the United States may be eligible to file.
You do not need a police report. You do not need to have reported the incident to the rideshare company at the time. Survivors who were intoxicated during the assault are eligible, and so are minors. You do not need to live in or travel to California; your attorney manages the filing and transfer into the MDL. Lawyers handling these cases typically work on a contingency-fee basis, meaning you pay nothing unless compensation is recovered.
Statutes of limitations for sexual assault vary widely by state, from as short as one year for civil assault claims in New York to no time limit at all in certain states for criminal charges. Older incidents are not automatically out of reach, so it is worth speaking with an attorney before assuming a claim is too old.
State Laws Now Shifting
The litigation has spurred legislative action. Colorado enacted what sponsors called the strongest rideshare safety law in the country when Governor Jared Polis signed HB26-1424 on June 2, 2026. It requires criminal background checks on drivers every six months, mandates that companies respond to law enforcement subpoenas within 72 hours, gives both drivers and passengers the right to record rides via audio or video, and requires annual safety and discrimination data reporting to state regulators beginning in early 2027. A 2025 predecessor bill was vetoed after Uber threatened to leave the state and Lyft lobbied against it. The enacted version dropped provisions the governor considered too aggressive, including a private right of action for survivors. State Representative Jenny Willford, who had filed her own lawsuit against Lyft after an encounter with a man posing as a driver in February 2024, championed the bill.
A New Jersey bill (S-1249) advanced through the Senate Transportation Committee in May 2026, requiring rideshare companies to share driver misconduct investigation records with one another and authorizing them to ban drivers during and after investigations. A Massachusetts proposal (S1247), sponsored by State Senator Rebecca Rausch, would create a specific criminal penalty for sexual assault of a passenger by a rideshare driver and would deem passengers legally incapable of consenting to sexual contact during a ride. Florida signed a law in May 2025 making it a criminal offense to impersonate a rideshare driver.
Uber and Lyft have opposed several of these efforts, resisting mandates for fingerprint-based background checks and mandatory audio or video recording, and arguing that certain requirements are impractical or unenforceable.