GAF Asbestos Trust Claims

If you or someone in your family worked with GAF or Ruberoid roofing, siding, or other building materials, or around those who did, and later developed mesothelioma or another asbestos disease, the company left behind a large trust built to pay these claims.

For decades GAF was one of the country's major makers of roofing and building products, and many of them, the roofing felts and shingles, the siding, the flooring, and the insulation, were loaded with asbestos. The volume of asbestos disease drove the company's successor into bankruptcy, and the reorganization set aside more than $700 million in a trust that's been paying mesothelioma and other asbestos claims since 2009. That trust is still open and still paying.

You don't need to have kept your old records, and you don't need to remember the brand on the bundle or the box. The trust pays on documented exposure to GAF asbestos products before 1983, and reconstructing that from your work history is our job, not yours. If you can tell us the kind of work you did and roughly when, we have a place to start.

What the GAF trust pays by disease

Mesothelioma sits at the top of the GAF schedule (Level VIII): a scheduled value of $155,000, and up to $450,000 through the trust's evidence-based Individual Review track. Because that gap is wide, we always do a thorough exposure-history investigation to determine whether filing Individual Review is warranted. These are the trust's set values before its payment percentage is applied, and as explained below that percentage is low, so the amount that reaches a family is a share of these figures and is usually one part of a larger recovery.

Lung cancer is split into two levels by exposure and smoking history, and lung cancer 2 (Level VI) is paid only through Individual Review, so it carries no scheduled value. The lowest levels pay a fixed amount with no separate average or maximum. The trust adjusts these values for inflation each year, with the annual increase capped at 3% for 2024 and 2025.

A trust's schedule shows what one trust assigns to a diagnosis, not what a whole case is worth. Most people exposed to GAF products handled other companies' building materials too, which usually means other trusts and often lawsuits on top of this one. We explain below why a GAF claim is rarely the only one.

How GAF products exposed workers to asbestos

GAF's asbestos history runs through Ruberoid, the roofing company it absorbed in the 1960s. Ruberoid made roofing and building materials and ran its own asbestos mine, and after the acquisition GAF carried on both. From then into the early 1980s, many GAF and Ruberoid products were heavily asbestos: the roofing felts and shingles, the siding, the vinyl flooring and tile, the roof coatings, and the block insulation and pipe covering. The roofing felts ran especially high in asbestos content.

The exposure came from how the products were made, installed, and removed:

• Roofing work. Tearing off old built-up roofing, cutting and fitting felts and shingles, and hot-mopping asphalt-and-asbestos roofing all released fiber. Roofers handled it day in and day out. See how asbestos roofing felts caused exposure.
• Siding and flooring. Cutting and fitting asbestos siding, and cutting and laying asbestos floor tile, released fiber on countless residential and commercial jobs. See how asbestos floor tile caused exposure.
• Block insulation and pipe covering. GAF's insulation products were cut, fitted, and torn out like any other, raising dust each time. See how asbestos pipe and block insulation caused exposure.
• Mining and milling. At the company's asbestos mine, workers mined and milled the raw fiber that went into the products, among the most direct asbestos exposures there is.
• Breathing a neighbor's dust, and carrying it home. The tradesmen working nearby breathed the same air, and the dust came home on work clothes to the families who laundered them.

Because GAF was one of the country's major building-products makers, the exposure reached a wide range of workers: roofers, siding and flooring installers, carpenters and general construction workers, the company's own factory and mine workers, and the families who laundered their clothes. The measurements that document how much fiber these products released live on the product pages linked above.

How the GAF bankruptcy created the asbestos trust

GAF and Ruberoid made asbestos roofing and building materials into the early 1980s, and the lawsuits over that history eventually reached six figures. The asbestos liability had been gathered into a successor holding company, G-I Holdings, and in January 2001 G-I Holdings filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy, the kind that lets a business reorganize rather than shut down. The case was a long one. A plan of reorganization was confirmed in November 2009, and the trust took effect that month.

Asbestos bankruptcies are resolved through a part of the law written for exactly this problem, Section 524(g) of the Bankruptcy Code. It lets a court set up a trust to take over a company's asbestos liability, then issue a channeling injunction, a court order routing every asbestos claim, the ones already filed and the ones not yet brought, into the trust instead of the company. The company funds the trust up front, and in return it's protected from being sued over asbestos again. The trust was funded with more than $700 million, made up of cash and a large note that the company later paid off early. That trust is what you file against today.

One point of confusion is worth clearing up, because GAF is still a household name. The asbestos liability sits in this trust, which stands on its own under court supervision. The roofing company that carries the GAF name today is a separate, thriving business, in fact the largest roofing manufacturer in North America, and its products contain no asbestos and have no connection to the old liability or the trust. The claims here concern the asbestos roofing and building materials GAF and Ruberoid made decades ago, and they're paid by the trust.

What the GAF trust pays, and why it's a percentage

The trust offers two filing tracks. Expedited Review is the fast path: if your diagnosis and exposure fit the trust's preset criteria, the claim is paid the fixed scheduled value for your disease level. Individual Review is the evidence-based path: the trust weighs the specifics of your case and can pay up to the higher maximum value. For mesothelioma the gap between the scheduled and maximum values is large, which is why we always do a thorough exposure-history investigation to determine whether filing Individual Review is warranted.

Whichever track you file, the trust doesn't pay the full value of a claim. It pays a percentage of it, currently 5.0%.

That figure is low, and it's worth understanding why rather than being scared off by it. Every bankruptcy works on the same principle: when a company can't cover everything it owes, the law spreads what exists across everyone it harmed, so a few don't collect in full while everyone else gets nothing. An asbestos trust has to do that across decades, holding back enough for the families who won't be diagnosed for years. GAF's products reached an enormous number of people, the trust faced well over a hundred thousand claims, and even a fund of several hundred million dollars can't pay all of them in full and still have anything left for the future.

The percentage isn't fixed forever, and here it has come down. It started higher and was reduced over time, most recently to 5.0% at the end of 2023, so the remaining fund would stretch across the claims still to come. That's the trust protecting future claimants, but it does mean the per-claim figure is modest, and it's the main reason a GAF claim is almost never filed alone. 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 GAF trust still able to pay?

Yes. It's a mature trust that's working through a large claim population, and it's managing its remaining funds to keep paying. Here's the picture from its most recent annual report.

• About $255 million on hand. At the end of 2025 the trust held roughly $255 million in net assets, most of it invested.
• About $33 million paid in 2025. The trust paid roughly $33 million to claimants over the year.
• It's managing for the long haul. The fund draws down somewhat year to year as it pays claims, and the trust reduced its payment percentage at the end of 2023, both to keep money available for the claims still coming.

A fund this size isn't unlimited, and the lower percentage is exactly how the trust keeps its promise to the people who haven't been diagnosed yet. But the trust is open, funded, and paying right now, and a claim filed today is paid at the current percentage. We track the annual reporting and can walk through the full financial picture with you when you call.

Who qualifies for a GAF trust claim

A claim rests on two things: a qualifying asbestos diagnosis, and documented exposure to a GAF asbestos product during the period the trust covers. The diagnosis side is medical. The exposure side is where the trust's rules come in, and where most of our work happens.

The exposure has to fall before the end of 1982. The trust pays on exposure before December 31, 1982, the period when these products carried asbestos. Most careers around roofing, construction, and building materials of that era ran through that window, so the date is rarely the obstacle people fear. We explain your options if your exposure came later in our guide to how asbestos trust claims work.

For mesothelioma, you don't need heavy exposure. Mesothelioma can come from brief, limited exposure, and the trust recognizes that, so a meso claim isn't held to the higher-dose threshold that applies to the other disease levels. Those higher levels, the lung cancer and severe asbestosis levels, ask for about six months of GAF exposure plus Significant Occupational Exposure, roughly five years of asbestos work (with at least two of them before the end of 1982) that can add up across different jobs. That includes time spent working in close proximity to others doing the dusty work, not only doing it yourself.

You can qualify two ways, and you only need one. The trust recognizes that GAF's asbestos was present two ways. The first is its approved site list: more than 1,500 worksites across 43 states and the District of Columbia that the trust already accepts as places GAF asbestos was present, so if you worked at a listed site during the covered period, that part is straightforward. The second matters just as much for a company like GAF, because its products didn't stay in one place. The roofing, siding, flooring, and insulation traveled through distributors into far more buildings and job sites than any list could name, so the trust also accepts product identification: credible evidence that you worked around a GAF product, even at a site the list never names, by your account, a coworker's, or a family member's. People rarely tracked which company made the roofing or tile they handled decades ago, and the claim doesn't depend on your having done so. Being placed at a listed site, or around an identified GAF product, isn't quite the same as being exposed to it; the task evidence, how the work cut, tore off, or ripped out that material and put fiber in your air, is what ties it to you, and reconstructing that from your work history is our job. You can also search our directory of asbestos exposure sites to see whether a place you worked is already documented.

Family members can qualify too. If a worker brought GAF dust home, a spouse who laundered the work clothes or a child in the household may file on the same exposure history.

How a GAF claim gets filed

A trust claim isn't a lawsuit. There's no judge, no jury, no deposition, and no defense lawyer on the other side. You submit a documented claim to a fund that 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 GAF asbestos product before the cutoff, and putting that together is our work, not yours. We gather the medical records, reconstruct the work history, and choose the track that fits.

The trust is open and still accepting claims, so the door isn't closed. The fuller mechanics of how trust claims are prepared, filed, and paid are in our guide to how asbestos trust claims work. When you call, we'll tell you what your specific claim is likely to involve.

A GAF claim is rarely the only one

For a roofing or construction exposure history, this is the part that changes the math, because the per-claim figure here is modest and it almost never stands alone.

A roofer or a construction crew didn't use one company's materials for a whole career; they used whatever was on the job, across different brands, sites, and years. The same buildings held other companies' roofing, flooring, siding, and insulation, and a worker moved among jobs over the decades, adding more. Several of those makers went bankrupt too and left their own trusts, and others are still in business and can be sued directly. The same exposure history that supports your GAF claim usually supports a stack of others, and because each trust reviews and pays independently, the claims add up rather than compete.

That's why the thorough exposure investigation is worth so much here. A work history that turns up several building-materials trusts, plus lawsuits against the makers still in business, can carry a mesothelioma case well past what any single trust pays. We walk through a worked example, several trusts totaled across one career, in our guide to mesothelioma trust settlement values.

Sources of compensation beyond the GAF trust

A GAF 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 GAF trust is one, and a roofing or construction career almost always reaches several others, the makers of the other roofing, flooring, siding, and insulation on the same jobs. They review and pay independently, so they stack. how asbestos trust claims work.
• Lawsuits against solvent manufacturers. Not every asbestos maker went bankrupt. Many 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 general contractors and building owners who controlled the jobsites 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 rest. Social Security disability is available to anyone whose illness stops them from working, and work that reached a shipyard or military setting can add Longshore benefits (LHWCA, the federal program for maritime and harbor workers) or VA disability benefits. how asbestos disability and benefit claims work.

Your GAF trust claim has no defenses to answer. It's a paper claim: no opposing lawyer, no deposition, no courtroom. 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 makers still in business and the site owners. Those defendants raise the same handful of arguments they raise in most asbestos cases, and none of them is new to us.