Sun Country $1.55M Pilot Military Leave 401(k) Settlement — Automatic Payment

Retirement Plans · Pending — Automatic Payment

Current Status

There is no claim form: class members identified in Sun Country's records will be paid automatically if the court approves the settlement. The U.S. District Court for the District of Minnesota certified the class and granted preliminary approval on August 11, 2026. The deadline to object is October 30, 2026, and the deadline to challenge Sun Country's data is November 6, 2026. The final approval hearing is set for November 17, 2026 at 1:00 p.m. Central Time by Zoom. No payment date had been announced as of September 30, 2026.

What Changed Recently?

Sun Country, Inc., the Board of Trustees of the Sun Country, Inc. 401(k) Profit Sharing Plan and its members agreed to pay $1,550,000 to resolve Smith v. Sun Country, Inc., et al., a class action over employer contributions for pilots who left for military service. The court certified the class and preliminarily approved the deal on August 11, 2026, and notice went out to the pilots identified in Sun Country's data.

The lawsuit, filed on February 27, 2024, alleges that Sun Country did not make the 401(k) contributions the Uniformed Services Employment and Reemployment Rights Act (USERRA) requires for a returning servicemember's time away, and that the plan's fiduciaries breached their duties under ERISA by not requiring those contributions. Sun Country pilots receive a nonelective employer contribution based on their pay, so leave that was not credited meant a smaller retirement account. Sun Country and the other defendants deny wrongdoing and any liability, and the settlement is not an admission.

While producing data in the case in September 2025, Sun Country identified that its payroll calculations for returning pilots had not consistently matched the method it intended to use and disclosed that to the court and plaintiffs' counsel. The company says it switched to a revised calculation on October 1, 2025. The parties settled at a second court-supervised settlement conference on June 10, 2026, after a first one in August 2025 ended without a deal.

A separate case produced the Alaska Airlines pilot military leave settlement, which pays pilots for vacation that did not accrue during military leave.

Who Qualifies?

The class covers current and former Sun Country pilots who participated in the Sun Country, Inc. 401(k) Profit Sharing Plan and who:

• completed a period of qualified military service between July 21, 2011 and December 31, 2025, after becoming a Sun Country employee;
• returned from that leave and were re-employed at Sun Country; and
• did not receive a plan contribution for that service at the rate USERRA requires — the rate they would have earned but for the leave, or, when that rate is not reasonably certain, their average pay rate over the 12 months before the leave.

Beneficiaries of those pilots are also class members. Plan fiduciaries named as defendants, their families and beneficiaries, and anyone who already settled or lost the same claims are excluded. Class counsel identified about 131 current and former pilots in Sun Country's data. A pilot who received the notice without asking for it has already been identified as a class member.

How Much Can You Get?

Payments are individual. Under the proposed plan of allocation, each pilot's share is based on the contributions that plaintiffs' expert calculated should have been made for their military leave, plus the investment earnings those contributions would have produced, minus any contributions Sun Country actually made. The notice says the settlement administrator can share the underlying data but cannot yet give an estimate for any one person.