Celotex Asbestos Trust Claims

If you or someone in your family worked around the Celotex or Philip Carey line of asbestos products, or the chrysotile fiber from Carey Canada, and later developed mesothelioma or another asbestos disease, the Celotex trust was built to pay exactly these claims.

The Celotex Corporation sold one of the broadest ranges of asbestos products in American industry. Through the old Philip Carey product line it carried, Celotex made asbestos pipe and block insulation, insulating cements, asbestos board and paper, and dozens of related products, and its affiliate Carey Canada mined the raw chrysotile asbestos fiber that went into many of them. The weight of the resulting sickness drove both companies into bankruptcy, and the reorganization created a trust to pay the people their products harmed. That trust has been paying mesothelioma and other asbestos claims since the 1990s, and it's still open and still paying, with more than $1.4 billion paid to over half a million claimants over its life.

You don't need to have kept your old records, and you don't need to remember which Carey or Celotex product you worked around or that Celotex made it. The trust pays on documented exposure to a Celotex or Carey Canada asbestos product, and reconstructing that, from work history, military records, and the trust's own documentation, is our job, not yours. If you can tell us where you worked and when, we have a place to start.

What the Celotex trust pays by disease category

The Celotex trust uses its own system, a little different from most asbestos trusts. Instead of numbered disease "levels," it sorts claims into seven disease categories, with malignant mesothelioma as Category VII at the top of the schedule. Each category has a scheduled value (the trust's preset amount) and a higher maximum value. Mesothelioma's scheduled value is $130,000 and its maximum is $325,000.

The categories follow the trust's own numbering, which doesn't run in strict dollar order: it values disabling interstitial lung disease (Category III) above the other-cancer category (Category IV), reflecting how disabling that lung disease is. Mesothelioma sits at the top either way.

How you file decides which figure is in reach. You can take a discounted cash payment, a flat, fast amount the trust pays without a detailed review, or you can elect individual review, where the trust weighs your specific evidence and can pay up to the higher maximum. Either way, the amount is then set by the trust's payment percentage, explained further down. In practice, with the current percentage, a mesothelioma claim's discounted cash payment is $8,880, while individual review can reach roughly $22,750.

These are one trust's values, not your family's whole recovery. The amounts above are what a single trust, Celotex's, assigns to each disease, and many people exposed to Celotex products were exposed to other companies' asbestos too, each with its own trust or lawsuit. What the Celotex 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 Celotex and Philip Carey asbestos products exposed workers

Most asbestos trusts cover a handful of products. Celotex is different, because the Philip Carey product line it carried was enormous, one of the broadest catalogs of asbestos products any company made, and it reached almost every corner of industrial and commercial work.

Rather than list dozens of products, it helps to see them in families:

• Pipe and block insulation. This was the core of the line, sold under names like Careytemp, along with 85% magnesia and calcium silicate pipe covering and block. It wrapped steam lines, boilers, and process piping, and it shed fiber when it was cut and fitted on the way in and torn off on the way out. Careytemp in particular shows up again and again in the work histories we see.
• Insulating and finishing cements. Troweled onto fittings, valves, and equipment, and mixed from dry powder on site, these released dust both in the mixing and in the later removal.
• Asbestos board, paper, and felt. Wallboard, millboard, corrugated sheets, panels, roll board, and asbestos paper and felts, cut and fitted across construction and industry.
• Raw asbestos fiber from Carey Canada. Behind many of these products was Carey Canada, which mined raw chrysotile asbestos in Quebec, exposing the workers who handled the fiber itself, and supplying the material that made the finished products dangerous.

See how asbestos pipe and block insulation caused exposure.

Across all of it, the pattern was the same: the dust came off when the material was worked, cutting, sawing, mixing, sanding, and especially tearing out old, friable (crumbly and dusty) insulation and board during repairs and demolition. The workers doing it breathed it directly, and so did everyone working nearby. That enormous product range is the first sign of why a Celotex claim is rarely the only one, and often involves several of these products at once.

How the Celotex and Carey Canada bankruptcy created the asbestos trust

By 1990, Celotex and its affiliate Carey Canada faced asbestos claims on a scale neither could resolve one lawsuit at a time, and both filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection, the kind that lets a business reorganize instead of shutting down. The litigation had already established what the companies long knew and didn't warn about: that their products exposed workers and the public to asbestos. Filing didn't erase the claims; it moved them into a process built to handle them all at once.

That process runs on the part of the bankruptcy law written for asbestos cases, the trust mechanism that lets a court take a company's asbestos liability and place it in a dedicated trust, then route every asbestos claim, the ones already filed and the ones still to come, into that trust instead of the company. The trust pays the claims in the company's place, in exchange for the company funding it up front. When the Celotex trust was established in 1997, it was funded with about $1.25 billion, drawn from the companies' cash, their insurance coverage, stock in the reorganized businesses, and other contributions, to pay current and future claimants.

The companies that made these products are gone. Unlike some asbestos defendants that reorganized and kept operating, Celotex didn't survive as a maker of these products. After it emerged from bankruptcy, its operating businesses were sold off piece by piece around 2000 and 2001, and the corporate entity itself was wound down and dissolved over the following years, with the last of its affairs completed in 2019. What remains to answer for the asbestos is the trust. The "Celotex" brand name is used today by an unrelated modern company on current building products; it has nothing to do with the old asbestos products or with this trust. For a claimant, the practical point is simple: you're dealing with a funded trust created for exactly this purpose, not chasing a company that no longer exists.

Why the Celotex trust pays a percentage, not the full amount

The trust offers two ways to be paid, and which you choose decides how the value works:

• A discounted cash payment is the fast track: a flat, fixed amount for your disease, paid without a detailed review. For mesothelioma that amount is currently $8,880. It's quick and certain, and many claimants choose it.
• Individual review is the evidence-based track: the trust weighs the specifics of your claim and can value it up to the higher maximum, then applies the payment percentage. For a serious diagnosis it can be worth more than the flat payment, though it takes longer.

Either way, the trust doesn't pay the full face value of a claim. It pays a percentage of it, currently 7%. That figure was recently adjusted: in June 2023 the trust reduced it from 8% to 7%.

That a trust pays only a fraction surprises people, so here's why. 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 nothing. An asbestos trust has to do that across time too, because these diseases can take decades to surface, so it has to hold back enough for the people who won't be diagnosed for years. A mature trust like Celotex's, which has already paid more than half a million claims, adjusts its percentage as it goes to keep that promise to the claimants still ahead, and a downward adjustment reflects the careful management of a finite fund, not a fund in trouble.

A percentage this size is exactly why the rest of your claim matters so much. Any single trust pays only its own fraction, and on its own that fraction is modest. What changes the picture for a family is the full set of claims a single exposure history can support, which for Celotex, given how many products it made, is often a long one. We work from whatever the trust is paying when your claim is filed and confirm it against the trust's current notice rather than any figure that might be out of date.

Is the Celotex trust still able to pay?

Yes. Celotex's is one of the older asbestos trusts, so for anyone wondering whether a decades-old trust still has money, the most recent annual report answers it.

• About $370 million on hand. At the end of 2025 the trust held roughly $370 million in net assets. It drew down modestly over the year, by about $6 million, which is a mature trust paying steadily from a managed fund.
• About $38 million paid to claimants in 2025. In that single year the trust paid out roughly $38 million across more than twelve thousand claims.
• More than $1.4 billion paid since inception, more than it was funded with. Over its life the trust has paid more than $1.4 billion to over half a million claimants, more than the roughly $1.25 billion 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, and recently lowered it, rather than the full value of each claim: it's a mature fund pacing itself against the claims still to come. But the trust is open and paying right now, and a claim filed today is paid on the current schedule. We track the annual reporting and can walk through the full financial picture with you when you call.

Who qualifies for a Celotex trust claim

A Celotex claim rests on two things: a qualifying asbestos diagnosis, and proof that you were exposed to a Celotex or Carey Canada asbestos product. The diagnosis side is medical. The exposure side is where Celotex's rules are more specific than most, and where most of our work happens.

Every claim needs a ten-year latency. Across all seven categories, the trust requires at least ten years between your first asbestos exposure and your diagnosis, the well-established lag between exposure and asbestos disease. For the careers these claims come from, that gap is almost always there.

For mesothelioma, the exposure requirement is lightest. A mesothelioma claim needs the diagnosis confirmed by pathology, the ten-year latency, and documented exposure to a Celotex or Carey Canada product. It doesn't carry the added years-of-exposure thresholds that the trust attaches to the other diseases, a recognition that mesothelioma can come from limited exposure. The non-cancer and other-cancer categories ask for more: the lung-cancer categories, for example, can require many years of occupational exposure in visible asbestos dust, and the interstitial-lung-disease categories require specific breathing-test or imaging proof. We match your records to the category that fits and document what it needs.

How you prove the exposure depends on your industry and era. Celotex doesn't keep an approved list of worksites the way some trusts do. Instead, it recognizes exposure through product identification, evidence that you worked around a Celotex or Carey Canada product, supported by affidavits and records, and it scales what it asks for to where and when you worked:

• If your first exposure was before 1975 in one of the industries where these products were everywhere, shipyards, insulation work, utilities, or petrochemical, the path is most direct.
• If your first exposure was before 1975 in some other industry, the trust asks for stronger proof that the product was actually present where you worked.
• If your first exposure was after 1975, it generally looks for work that involved maintenance, rip-out, renovation, or repair, the activities that disturbed older Celotex material and put its fiber back in the air.

None of that is something you need to sort out yourself. A coworker's account, employment and union records, and the kind of work you did and where are what establish it, and assembling that is our job.

Family members can qualify too. If a worker brought Celotex 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. How take-home asbestos exposure works.

How a Celotex 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 a Celotex or Carey Canada product. Putting that together is our job, not yours. We gather the medical records, reconstruct the work history, document the products you worked around and the industry and era rules that apply to it, and choose the route, the flat discounted cash payment or individual review, that fits your situation. You don't need to have kept paperwork or remember product names to start.

The Celotex trust has been open and paying since the 1990s 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 Celotex claim is rarely the only one

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

Celotex is almost a category of its own here, because it made so many different products. A single insulation worker or pipefitter might have handled Celotex pipe covering, Celotex cement, and Celotex board across one career, and around all of it were other companies' products too, the pipe covering from one maker, the gaskets and packing from another, the block from a third. Many of those companies went bankrupt as well, and each one left its own trust.

So the same work history that supports your Celotex 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. How asbestos trust claims work.

This is why the thorough exposure investigation is worth so much, and it matters more here than almost anywhere, because Celotex's own low payment percentage means the single claim is modest on its own. Each trust pays its own fraction, 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 Celotex 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 Celotex trust

A Celotex 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 Celotex trust is one, and a career around insulation and construction products almost always reaches several others. They review and pay independently, so they stack. How asbestos trust claims work.
• Lawsuits against solvent manufacturers. Not every asbestos maker went bankrupt. Some 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. How asbestos product liability lawsuits work.
• Premises liability against the site owners. The shipyards, refineries, power plants, and other sites where Celotex products were installed and removed can be held responsible for the conditions there, separate from the companies that made the products. How premises liability claims work.
• 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. Because Celotex products were heavy in shipyards and aboard ships, Navy service can support VA disability benefits and 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. How asbestos disability and benefit claims work.

Your Celotex 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. The liability was settled when the trust was funded, 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.