The FTC's all-time record COPPA penalty has grown 275x since 2006, climbing from Xanga.com's $1 million settlement to Epic Games' $275 million penalty in December 2022, the largest civil fine the agency has ever obtained for violating one of its own rules. That growth did not happen smoothly. The record sat untouched for 12 years, then broke four times in less than four years.
What is the largest COPPA penalty ever recorded?
Epic Games' $275 million payment, announced December 19, 2022, is the largest confirmed COPPA penalty on record and, per the FTC's own release, the largest civil penalty the agency has ever obtained for violating any of its rules. The complaint alleged Epic collected personal information from Fortnite players under 13 without parental notice or consent, and that default settings enabled voice and text chat between children and strangers.
Figure 1: The record COPPA penalty has grown 275 times larger since Xanga's 2006 settlement. Source: FTC press releases, 2006 and 2022.
That single case sits at the top of a ranked list built from every major COPPA settlement regulators have disclosed since 2006, the same population covered in our full ranked list of COPPA fines and settlements.
How has the record COPPA penalty grown since 2006?
Xanga.com's $1 million settlement in September 2006, described by the FTC at the time as the largest penalty obtained under COPPA, held that record for 12 years before any case surpassed it. The New York Attorney General broke it first with a $4.95 million settlement against Oath, AOL's successor, in December 2018. Three more record-breaking fines followed within four years.
Figure 2: The all-time record COPPA penalty, plotted by the year it was set. Source: FTC and New York Attorney General press releases, 2006 to 2022.
Every step on that line represents a case regulators explicitly called a new record at the time it was announced, not simply a large fine among many.
How do the top COPPA penalties rank by size?
Ranking every confirmed COPPA-related penalty since 2006 by dollar amount puts Epic Games' $275 million case first, more than 60% larger than the next entry, Google and YouTube's $170 million settlement. After those two, the list drops sharply: the third-largest confirmed penalty, Amazon's 2023 Alexa settlement, is $25 million, less than a tenth the size of the record.
Figure 3: The 10 largest confirmed COPPA penalties, ranked by size. Source: FTC, Department of Justice, and New York Attorney General press releases, 2018 to 2025.
Businesses that collect data from anyone under 13 face the same knowledge-and-consent test in every case on this list, whether the eventual fine lands at $1.5 million or $275 million; a privacy policy generator built around COPPA's disclosure requirements keeps parental consent, data retention, and deletion language current without waiting for a regulator to flag the gap.
How much of total COPPA penalty money comes from record-setting fines?
The 4 fines that set a new all-time record when they were announced, Oath, Musical.ly, Google/YouTube, and Epic Games, account for 84.7% of the roughly $538 million collected across the 10 largest confirmed COPPA penalties. The other 6 settlements in that top 10, including Amazon's $25 million Alexa case and Microsoft's $20 million Xbox case, together make up the remaining 15.3%.
Figure 4: Share of the 10 largest confirmed COPPA penalties held by record-setting fines versus every other case. Source: PrivacyTerms.io tally of FTC, DOJ, and New York Attorney General press releases.
That concentration means the running total is unusually sensitive to a single new mega-case, the same dynamic our breakdown of children's online privacy numbers finds behind the industry's other headline enforcement figures.
By how much did each record-breaking fine beat the one before it?
The size of each jump varies enormously. Google and YouTube's $170 million settlement in September 2019 was 29.8 times larger than the $5.7 million record Musical.ly had set just seven months earlier, the single biggest leap in COPPA enforcement history. Epic Games' 2022 record, by contrast, beat the prior record by a smaller 1.62 times, or 62%.
Figure 5: How many times larger each record-breaking COPPA fine was than the record it replaced. Source: FTC and New York Attorney General press releases, 2018 to 2022.
Part of why the largest settlements keep climbing is the statutory ceiling behind them. The FTC's maximum civil penalty per COPPA violation is adjusted for inflation every year and now stands at $53,088, per the Federal Register's January 2025 notice, up from $51,744 the year before. Multiplied across millions of affected child accounts, that per-violation cap is what turns a single case into a nine-figure settlement.
The COPPA record ladder, 2006 to 2022
| Year | Company | New record penalty | Growth vs. prior record |
|---|---|---|---|
| 2006 | Xanga | $1,000,000 | Sets the first record |
| 2018 | Oath (AOL) | $4,950,000 | 4.95x |
| 2019 | Musical.ly | $5,700,000 | 1.15x |
| 2019 | Google / YouTube | $170,000,000 | 29.8x |
| 2022 | Epic Games | $275,000,000 | 1.62x |
| 2006 to 2022 | Total growth | $275,000,000 | 275x |
Source: FTC and New York Attorney General press releases and consent orders, 2006 to 2022. Epic Games' $275 million penalty remains the current record.
The Bottom Line
275x growth in 16 years is not a steady climb. It is a 12-year plateau at $1 million followed by four record-breaking fines packed into a four-year stretch from 2018 to 2022, each one larger than the last except for Musical.ly's narrow 15% edge over Oath. The pattern says less about any single company's conduct and more about regulators applying a growing per-violation penalty cap to platforms with ever-larger under-13 user bases. That math does not favor waiting for an FTC letter before fixing a gap: the disclosure, consent, and deletion language a service publishes for users under 13 is the first thing investigators check once a knowledge question is raised.
Frequently Asked Questions
How much has the record COPPA penalty grown since 2006? 275x. The FTC's largest confirmed COPPA-related penalty has climbed from Xanga.com's $1 million settlement in September 2006 to Epic Games' $275 million penalty in December 2022, according to FTC press releases and consent orders covering both cases.
How many times has the all-time COPPA penalty record been broken? 4 times since Xanga set the first record at $1 million in 2006: the New York Attorney General's $4.95 million settlement with Oath in December 2018, Musical.ly's $5.7 million FTC settlement in February 2019, Google and YouTube's $170 million settlement in September 2019, and Epic Games' $275 million settlement in December 2022.
What is the biggest single jump between two record COPPA penalties? Google and YouTube's $170 million settlement in September 2019, which was 29.8 times larger than the $5.7 million record Musical.ly had set just seven months earlier, according to FTC press releases from both cases.
What is the maximum penalty regulators can charge per COPPA violation? $53,088 per violation as of the FTC's 2025 inflation adjustment, published in the Federal Register on January 17, 2025, up from $51,744 the year before. Large settlements reach eight and nine figures because regulators can multiply that per-violation cap across millions of affected accounts.
Where the Numbers Come From
- Federal Trade Commission. (2006). "Xanga.com to Pay $1 Million for Violating Children's Online Privacy Protection Rule." The first COPPA record, September 7, 2006.
- New York Attorney General. (2018). "AG Underwood Announces Record COPPA Settlement With Oath, Formerly AOL." $4.95 million penalty, announced December 4, 2018, described by the office as the largest COPPA penalty in U.S. history at the time.
- Federal Trade Commission. (2019). "Largest FTC COPPA Settlement Requires Musical.ly to Change Its Tune." $5.7 million penalty, announced February 27, 2019.
- Federal Trade Commission. (2019). "Google and YouTube Will Pay Record $170 Million." $136 million to the FTC, $34 million to New York, announced September 4, 2019.
- Federal Trade Commission. (2022). "Fortnite Video Game Maker Epic Games to Pay More Than Half a Billion Dollars." $275 million COPPA penalty, the current record, announced December 19, 2022.
- Federal Register. (2025). "Adjustments to Civil Penalty Amounts." FTC's inflation-adjusted maximum civil penalty of $53,088 per violation of Section 5(m)(1)(A), covering COPPA, published January 17, 2025.
Note: All figures verified as of October 2026. The 275x growth figure, the 4-time record-break count, and the individual record-to-record multiples in this post are PrivacyTerms.io's own calculations, run on the five record-setting settlements individually sourced above. This page will be updated if a future settlement sets a new record.
