FCA Recoveries Tick Up in First Half of FY25, Likely to Surpass Prior Year’s Total

Having reached the halfway point in the federal government’s 2025 fiscal year, we decided to dive into the U.S. Department of Justice’s (DOJ) midyear False Claims Act (FCA) recovery statistics. (Arnold & Porter tracks these statistics based on public reporting, and you can view them in more detail on our Statistics page and in our Recoveries list.) In our Blog summarizing DOJ’s final statistics for fiscal year (FY) 2024, we noted that the government’s FCA recoveries increased for a third straight year and had nearly eclipsed $3 billion, the annual mark DOJ typically hit in the decade before the pandemic. We predicted that the pandemic lull in FCA litigation would continue to reverse in FY25 and recoveries would continue to increase.

That forecast looks to be proving accurate. Through the end of March 2025, DOJ has already notched $2.1 billion in FCA recoveries, half a billion more than it recovered at this point in FY24. At this rate, DOJ is on pace to exceed last year’s $2.9 billion in recoveries. The number of recoveries so far (176) exceeds the total from the halfway point in FY24, and despite the increase, the average recovery size has stayed generally consistent ($12.1 million average in FY25 compared to a $14 million average recovery at this point in FY24).

While the robust total recovery amount this year appears to be a continuation of the FY24 trends, a breakdown of recoveries by industry demonstrates notable differences. First, the share of healthcare related recoveries, which in FY24 was lower than we had seen in many years, has regained ground, going from 57% to 64% of the total FCA mix (which is still lower than in most prior years).

“Other” recoveries (that is, recoveries involving non-U.S. Department of Defense and U.S. Department of Health and Human Services programs) had surged last year, making up $1.15 billion of the final FY24 FCA recovery mix. They are off to a slower start in FY25, representing only $208.4 million of the total recovery so far. Defense recoveries, which had represented a sliver of the total in FY24, have rebounded to about a quarter of the recoveries so far in FY25, in part due to a number of settlements brought under the DOJ’s increasingly active civil cyber-fraud initiative.

Also of note: out of the 176 recoveries reported, almost half were in qui tam cases, indicating that the relator mechanism continues to be a key driver of recoveries, despite legal uncertainty following last year’s ruling by Judge Mizelle in the Middle District of Florida that the qui tam device is unconstitutional.

These statistics are just a snapshot based on public reports and could well change once DOJ’s full-year statistics for FY25 come out. But the brisk pace with which DOJ has secured recoveries so far demonstrates that FCA recoveries in FY25 are likely to surpass those in FY24, reflecting the continued post-pandemic rebound in FCA litigation. We’ll continue to monitor and report back as this and other developments in the FCA landscape take shape over the remainder of this year.

© Arnold & Porter Kaye Scholer LLP 2025 All Rights Reserved. This Blog post is intended to be a general summary of the law and does not constitute legal advice. You should consult with counsel to determine applicable legal requirements in a specific fact situation.