Babcock & Wilcox Asbestos Trust Claims

If you or someone in your family worked around Babcock & Wilcox boilers and later developed mesothelioma or another asbestos disease, the company left behind a trust built to pay exactly these claims.

For most of the twentieth century, Babcock & Wilcox built the boilers and steam generators that powered Navy ships, power plants, oil refineries, and sugar mills, and those boilers were wrapped and sealed in asbestos: block and pipe insulation on the outside, gaskets and packing at every joint and valve, and heat-resistant lining within. The volume of asbestos sickness eventually drove the company into bankruptcy in 2000, and its reorganization required it to set aside $1.845 billion in a trust that's been paying mesothelioma and other asbestos claims since 2006. That trust is still open, and it's still paying.

You don't need to have kept your old records, and you don't need to remember the model of the boiler or which products were on it. The trust pays on documented exposure to Babcock & Wilcox equipment at a qualifying worksite, and reconstructing that, from work history, military records, and the trust's own site lists, is our job, not yours. If you can tell us where you worked and when, we have a place to start.

What the Babcock & Wilcox trust pays by disease level

Mesothelioma sits at the top of the trust's schedule, at Level VIII. Its scheduled value (the trust's preset amount) is $90,000, but its maximum value runs to $400,000, and that gap is the whole reason the filing track matters: for mesothelioma we always do a thorough exposure-history investigation to determine whether filing Individual Review is warranted, because Individual Review is what opens the higher figure your evidence can support. Every amount below is then reduced by the trust's payment percentage, explained further down the page.

A dash in the scheduled column (Lung cancer 2, Level VI) means that level has no fixed fast-track amount; it's paid through review against the average and maximum instead. A dash in the average and maximum columns (Levels III, II, and I) means those levels are paid a single set amount with no higher tier above them.

These are one trust's values, not your family's whole recovery. The amounts above are what a single trust, Babcock & Wilcox's, assigns to each disease before its payment percentage comes off, and almost everyone exposed to B&W asbestos was exposed to other companies' products too, each with its own trust or lawsuit. What the Babcock & Wilcox claim is worth on its own matters far less than what the whole set of claims comes to, and we come back to that below.

How Babcock & Wilcox boilers exposed workers to asbestos

Babcock & Wilcox built boilers. From the late 1800s on, the company was one of the country's largest makers of the big water-tube boilers and steam generators that raised steam for Navy ships, electric power plants, oil refineries, paper mills, and sugar mills. A boiler that runs that hot has to be sealed and insulated, and for most of the twentieth century the material the industry used to do that was asbestos.

It wasn't one product. The asbestos was anywhere heat had to be held in or sealed off:

• Insulation and lagging on the outside. The boiler shell, the steam drums, and the connected piping were covered in asbestos block and pipe insulation, the jacket the trade called lagging. See how asbestos pipe and block insulation caused exposure.
• Gaskets and packing at the joints. Every flanged connection had an asbestos gasket, and every valve and access door was sealed with asbestos packing or rope. See how asbestos gaskets and packing caused exposure.
• Cement and refractory inside and out. Asbestos insulating cement was troweled over fittings, and asbestos-bearing refractory (the heat-resistant lining) and millboard sat inside the firebox. See how asbestos insulating cement caused exposure.

None of it released much fiber sitting still. It got into the air when the equipment was built, and then again every time it was serviced: cutting insulation to fit, scraping baked-on gaskets off a flange, tearing out old, friable (crumbly and dusty) lagging to reach a leak. The men doing that work breathed it directly, and so did everyone working near them in the boiler room.

That's why a Babcock & Wilcox claim reaches across several trades. The boilermakers who erected and repaired the boilers, the pipefitters and plumbers who ran the connected lines, and the insulators who lagged them all worked in the same dust, alongside the Navy sailors and the power generation crews who tended the boilers for a living. Shipyard and maritime work carried especially heavy exposure, because boiler and engine rooms packed all of it into tight, unventilated spaces.

How the Babcock & Wilcox bankruptcy created the asbestos trust

By the late 1990s, asbestos lawsuits against Babcock & Wilcox were coming in faster than the company could resolve them. In 2000, it filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection, the kind that lets a business reorganize instead of shutting down. Filing didn't erase the claims. It moved them into a process built to handle them all at once.

That process runs on a part of the bankruptcy law written specifically for asbestos cases, Section 524(g). It lets a court set up a trust to take over a company's asbestos liability, then issue a channeling injunction, a court order that routes every asbestos claim, the ones already filed and the ones that haven't happened yet, away from the company and into the trust. From that point on, the trust pays the claims in the company's place. The trade the law strikes is straightforward: the company funds the trust up front, and in return it's protected from being sued over asbestos again.

After several years of negotiation, the Babcock & Wilcox Asbestos Personal Injury Settlement Trust was established in early 2006 and began accepting claims that July. The company funded it with $1.845 billion to pay current and future claimants. That trust is what you file against today; the company itself can no longer be sued for the asbestos in its old products.

The company is still in business today. The bankruptcy didn't shut Babcock & Wilcox down. The channeling injunction that created the trust did something specific: it moved all of the company's asbestos liability into the trust, which let the business reorganize and keep operating. Babcock & Wilcox is still a publicly traded company today (NYSE: BW), headquartered in Akron, Ohio, with around 1,650 employees and more than half a billion dollars in annual revenue, still building and servicing power-generation equipment, including newer work tied to rising electricity demand. That matters for two reasons. It shows that an asbestos bankruptcy didn't mean the company vanished, so the records and history behind your exposure still exist. And because the trust, not the operating company, pays these claims, filing yours doesn't take a dollar from anyone working there today.

Why the Babcock & Wilcox trust pays a percentage, not the full amount

The trust pays set amounts based on your diagnosis, scaled to how serious the disease is, with mesothelioma valued at the top of the schedule and the non-malignant conditions like asbestosis lower down. The full breakdown by disease is in the table near the top of this page.

How you file decides which of those amounts is within reach, because the trust offers two tracks:

• Expedited Review is the fast track. If your diagnosis and exposure fit the trust's preset criteria, the claim is paid the fixed scheduled value (the trust's set amount) for your disease level, with no negotiation and a quicker turnaround. It's the simplest path when the standard amount is the right amount.
• Individual Review is the evidence-based track. Instead of the fixed figure, the trust weighs the specifics of your case, your age, your work history, your dependents, and the strength of the exposure proof, and it can pay up to the much higher maximum value. It takes longer and asks for more, but for a serious diagnosis it's usually worth it. For mesothelioma we always do a thorough exposure-history investigation to determine whether filing Individual Review is warranted, because the gap between the scheduled and the maximum value is large enough to matter to your family.

Whichever track you file, the trust doesn't pay the full value of the claim. It pays a percentage of it, currently 4.3%, a little over four cents on each dollar of a claim's value

That number surprises people, so here's why it's there. It's the same principle behind every bankruptcy: when a company can't cover everything it owes, the law shares what there is across everyone it harmed, so that everyone gets a fair portion instead of a lucky few collecting in full and everyone else collecting nothing. An asbestos trust has to do that across time as well, because these diseases can take thirty to fifty years to surface, so the trust has to hold back enough for the family that won't be diagnosed until 2045.

The arithmetic shows why a percentage is the only way that works. Babcock & Wilcox funded the trust with $1.845 billion. If the trust paid every mesothelioma claim at its full top-tier value of $400,000, that entire fund would be gone after about 4,600 people, and everyone after them, of every disease, would get nothing. Instead, by paying a set fraction of each claim, the trust has already compensated tens of thousands of families and is still open and paying today. The percentage is what keeps its promise to the people who haven't gotten sick yet.

The percentage isn't fixed forever. The trust reviews it on a schedule, and in June 2026 it dropped to 4.3%, so it can change again over time. We work from whatever the trust is paying when your claim is filed, and we confirm it against the trust's current notice rather than any figure that might be out of date.

Is the Babcock & Wilcox trust still able to pay?

Yes. A trust that's two decades old and pays a small percentage can leave people wondering whether there's anything left, so here's the picture from its most recent annual report.

• About $295 million on hand. At the end of 2025 the trust held roughly $295 million in net assets, and it grew slightly that year, because its investment returns ran ahead of what it paid out.
• Almost $20 million paid in 2025 alone. In that single year the trust paid out close to $20 million across more than 18,000 claims.
• More than $2 billion paid since 2006. Over its history the trust has paid more than 430,000 claims totaling over $2 billion, which is more than it was originally funded with, because the fund keeps earning investment returns while it operates.

None of that means the money is unlimited, and it's exactly why the trust pays a set percentage rather than the full value of each claim: it's holding reserves against a long line of claims still to come. But the trust is open, funded, and paying right now, and a claim filed today is paid on the current schedule.

Who qualifies for a Babcock & Wilcox trust claim

A trust claim rests on two things: a qualifying asbestos diagnosis, and proof that you were exposed to Babcock & Wilcox asbestos during the period the trust covers. The diagnosis side is medical. The exposure side is where the trust's specific rules come in, and where most of our work happens.

The exposure has to fall before the end of 1982. Like most asbestos trusts, the B&W trust pays on exposure from before December 31, 1982. The reasoning traces back to when the danger became widely known and warnings went up, and we lay out that full logic, along with your options if your exposure came later, in our guide to how asbestos trust claims work. For B&W, the practical point is that most careers around these boilers ran straight through that window, so the date is rarely the obstacle people fear.

For mesothelioma, you don't need heavy exposure. Mesothelioma can come from brief, limited exposure, and the trust recognizes that, so a meso claim doesn't have to meet the higher dose threshold that applies to some other diseases. That threshold, Significant Occupational Exposure (SOE), is about five years of total asbestos exposure with at least two of those years before the 1982 cutoff. It applies to lung cancer and other cancers, and to the more serious asbestosis claims: the higher-paying severe level depends on how much lung function you've lost, measured by a breathing test (a pulmonary function test). The base asbestosis and pleural-disease levels pay their set amounts without it. SOE can add up across different employers, and it can come from working near the dust, not only from handling the material yourself. For this purpose the trust treats the core boiler trades as qualifying: boilermakers, pipefitters, machinists, welders, electricians, and shipyard, Navy, and power-plant work.

Family members can qualify too. If a B&W worker brought the dust home, a spouse who laundered the work clothes or a child in the household can file on the worker's exposure history, the same history that supports the worker's own claim. Learn more about take-home or secondary asbestos exposure.

How the B&W trust's approved site list works

Babcock & Wilcox sold big, expensive industrial boilers, the kind a shipyard or power plant buys one of and runs for decades. Equipment like that comes with a paper trail, so the company knew exactly where its boilers were delivered. The trust built those delivery records into an Approved Site List, over forty thousand worksites and ships, spanning all fifty states and the District of Columbia, that it already accepts as places where B&W asbestos was present. If you worked at a listed site during the covered period, that part is straightforward. But finding your site on it is the starting point of a claim, not the whole of it.

Being at a site where a B&W boiler was installed isn't the same as being exposed to the asbestos on it, and the trust asks both questions: whether B&W asbestos was present, and whether the work you did would have put its fiber in your air. A B&W boiler was a big steel machine, but the asbestos was in the insulation and block lagging wrapped around it, the refractory brick and castable lining the firebox, and the gaskets and packing at its doors and fittings. That material released fiber when it was cut and fitted during installation and, most of all, when old, heat-degraded insulation and lining were torn out during repair, re-bricking, and teardown, turning friable (crumbly and dusty) material into airborne dust. Whether you did that work yourself or worked alongside the boilermakers, insulators, and pipefitters who did, we use the exposure record on those materials, together with your work history, to connect your tasks to exposure from the B&W equipment. The list puts the boiler at your site; the task evidence is what ties it to you.

The list isn't the whole story either, and this is where people wrongly count themselves out. A boiler B&W delivered to one plant in 1968 might have been sold secondhand and reinstalled somewhere else, or run for forty years at a site that changed hands and names along the way. Plenty of workers breathed B&W asbestos at locations that never show up in the original delivery records. Not appearing on the list doesn't disqualify you; it means the claim goes through Individual Review, where product identification carries it, proof that you worked around identified B&W equipment, documented with work history, equipment records, and coworkers' accounts rather than the list alone. We check the Approved Site List first, but we don't stop there, because the list captures where the boilers were sent, not everywhere they ended up or everyone who worked around them. You can also search our directory of asbestos exposure sites to see whether the place you worked is already documented.

How a Babcock & Wilcox claim gets filed

A trust claim isn't a lawsuit, and that surprises people who expect a courtroom. There's no judge, no jury, no deposition, and no defense lawyer arguing the other side. You're not suing anyone. You're submitting a documented claim to a fund that already exists to pay it, and the trust reviews it against its written rules and pays on its schedule.

What the claim needs is proof of two things: your diagnosis, and your exposure to Babcock & Wilcox asbestos during the covered period. Putting that together is our job, not yours. We gather the medical records, reconstruct the work history, match it against the trust's Approved Site List and its own records, and choose the track, Expedited or Individual Review, that fits your situation. You don't need to have kept paperwork or remember product names to start.

The Babcock & Wilcox trust has been open and paying since 2006 and is still accepting claims today, so the door isn't closed. The fuller mechanics of how trust claims are prepared, filed, and paid are laid out in our guide to how asbestos trust claims work. When you call, we'll tell you what your specific claim is likely to involve and how the timeline tends to run.

A Babcock & Wilcox claim is rarely the only one

Here's the part that changes the math for most families: the B&W trust is usually one claim out of several, and the others come from the very same work.

Start with a single boiler. Babcock & Wilcox built it, but the company didn't make everything on it. The insulation wrapped around it came from one manufacturer, the gaskets at its joints from another, the packing in its valves from a third, the cement troweled over its fittings from a fourth. Several of those makers went bankrupt too, and each one left its own trust. So even the boiler at the center of your B&W claim was usually covered in other companies' asbestos, and each of those products can be a separate claim against a separate trust.

Now stretch that across a career. A working life around boilers meant different jobs, different plants, and different equipment, every one of them adding manufacturers and trusts to the list. The same history that supports your Babcock & Wilcox claim usually supports a stack of others, and because each trust reviews and pays independently, the claims don't compete with each other. They add up.

This is why the thorough exposure investigation is worth so much. Each trust pays its own fraction, and most pay modestly on their own, but a work history that turns up eight trusts instead of three can change the total on a mesothelioma claim by a wide margin. We walk through a full worked example, several trusts totaled across one career, in our guide to mesothelioma trust settlement values.

Even stacked across many trusts, trust claims are still only one part of a Babcock & Wilcox recovery, and some of the other parts can be larger. The full set of channels, including the lawsuits and benefits that run alongside the trusts, is laid out in the recovery options on this page.

Sources of compensation beyond the Babcock & Wilcox trust

A Babcock & Wilcox claim usually sits inside a larger recovery, and the channels run in parallel without canceling one another out. We file across all of them that apply.

• Asbestos bankruptcy trusts. The B&W trust is one, and a boiler career almost always reaches several others, the makers of the insulation, gaskets, packing, and cement on the same equipment. They review and pay independently, so they stack. Learn more about asbestos trust claims.
• Lawsuits against solvent manufacturers. Not every asbestos maker went bankrupt. Many, especially in the gasket and packing world, are still in business and can be sued directly for selling a product they knew was dangerous, and a lawsuit can recover more than a trust claim, though it takes longer. Learn more about asbestos product liability lawsuits.
• Premises liability against the site owners. The shipyards, power plants, refineries, and mills that ran B&W boilers can be held responsible for the conditions in their boiler and engine rooms, separate from the companies that made the products. Learn more about premises liability lawsuits.
• Federal and disability benefits. These depend on where and how the work was done, and they're paid on top of the trust and lawsuit recovery. Navy service can support VA disability benefits; civilian shipyard work can support Longshore benefits (LHWCA, the federal program for maritime and harbor workers); civilian work at a federal facility can support FECA benefits (the Federal Employees' Compensation Act); and Social Security disability is available to anyone whose illness stops them from working. Learn about asbestos disability and benefit claims.

Your Babcock & Wilcox trust claim has no defenses to answer. It's a paper claim: no opposing lawyer, no deposition, no courtroom, no one arguing the other side. B&W settled that question when it funded the trust, and the trust either pays the claim or it doesn't, on its written rules.

Defenses only come up on the lawsuit side, the claims that run alongside the trust against the manufacturers still in business and the site owners where you worked. Those defendants raise the same handful of arguments they raise in most asbestos cases, and none of them is new to us. The short version is that each one describes a cleaner, smaller version of the work than the one your loved one actually did, and the evidence answers it.