On September 11, 2026, the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC or Commission) approved a final rule adding a new Rule 165.9(d) to the Commission’s whistleblower regulations, creating what the agency calls the “30 Percent Presumption.” Under the presumption, when a whistleblower’s total award would be $5 million or less and none of the rule’s disqualifying conditions apply, the Commission will presume the claimant should receive the full 30 percent statutory maximum—effectively defaulting to the highest possible payout for the smaller matters that make up the bulk of the CFTC’s whistleblower docket. The Commission’s release explains that, subject to Commission discretion and its analysis of relevant regulatory factors, the final rule incorporates this presumption for whistleblower awards of $5 million or less. The rule is modeled on the Securities and Exchange Commission’s Rule 21F-6(c), a step the Commission describes as further enhancing the ongoing efforts at harmonization between the two agencies.
The harmonization point is significant. The CFTC has observed the SEC’s longer-running whistleblower program and modeled this rule on the SEC’s approach in an effort to adopt practices that have produced measurable results.
What the Final Rule Does
Under new Rule 165.9(d), the Commission is adopting a presumption under which any awardees would receive, in total, the 30 percent statutory maximum when the amount collected in any Covered and Related Action, in the aggregate, would yield a maximum award of $5 million or less, and the awardee meets certain conditions. A $5 million award at the 30 percent rate corresponds to collections of roughly $16.66 million, so the presumption applies to the smaller and mid-sized end of the Commission’s enforcement docket.
The presumption is not unconditional. It falls away if a reduction would otherwise be warranted for the claimant’s culpability or involvement in the violation, or for interference with internal compliance or reporting systems; if the claimant engaged in unreasonable reporting delay; or if the Commission determines that applying the presumption would be inappropriate either because the claimant’s assistance was limited or because doing so would be inconsistent with the public interest or the Program’s objectives. Where a matter within the threshold has multiple awardees and at least one satisfies those conditions, the aggregate award is still set at the 30 percent maximum, with the Commission allocating a larger share to whichever claimant or claimants actually earned it.
Before this amendment, CFTC staff ran every meritorious claim, regardless of dollar size, through the full multi-factor analysis under Rule 165.9(b) and (c), significance of the information, degree of assistance, law enforcement interest, participation in internal compliance systems, and the negative factors that can reduce an award. For claims likely to result in awards at or near the statutory cap, the preamble states that the process consumed resources that could be devoted to resolving larger, more complex matters, and that responding to contests of Preliminary Determinations added further delay. The rule also makes technical corrections to Rules 165.10(a)(7) and 165.15 to reflect the Whistleblower Office’s 2025 move to the Office of the General Counsel.
Why the Commission Says This Matters
A central issue the rule addresses is processing speed. The Commission disclosed that from 2012 to 2025, the average time from the deadline for prospective whistleblowers to submit award claims to the date of a Commission Final Order granting an award to meritorious claimants averaged more than 2.5 years—a delay the Commission itself describes as a concern for the Commission, claimants, and members of Congress, since delays could dampen incentives for potential whistleblowers to participate in the Program.
The Commission’s cost-benefit analysis draws on its own award history. Of the 73 awards the agency granted across 56 orders between 2014 and the end of calendar year 2025—totaling more than $395 million—approximately 82 percent were at or under $5 million, collectively representing about 10 percent of total award dollars paid to whistleblowers. The vast majority of CFTC whistleblower matters, by count, are the type of smaller dollar claims the new presumption covers. The Commission calculated that of the 43 matters within that range, 12 had award percentages below 30 percent; paying all of them at the statutory maximum would have increased total Customer Protection Fund payouts by less than $4 million over the entire period, against a fund balance exceeding $200 million.
The Commission’s reasoning is that a small, quantifiable increase in payouts can produce a meaningful reduction in the staff time spent conducting analysis that, in most cases, results in a near-maximum award. Commenters representing whistleblower claimants generally agreed that greater predictability would strengthen the Program.
The Commission declined most of the commenters’ requests for more: no mandatory six-month deadlines for Preliminary Determinations, no automatic inflation-indexing of the $5 million threshold, and no borrowing of the Department of Justice’s False Claims Act relator-share model, which the Commission concluded is inapposite given that the CFTC and SEC whistleblower programs, both enacted by the Dodd-Frank Act, have no qui tam analog. It did, however, leave the door open to revisiting the threshold later if inflation erodes its value. It was also unmoved by the one dissenting comment’s concern that money incentivizes fabrication, finding the risk of fraudulent claims slight because the presumption only affects award percentage for already-meritorious claimants, not eligibility, and because adverse incentives to file fraudulent claims are more likely to arise from higher-value awards than from the smaller awards this rule targets.
The SEC Parallel
The CFTC did not have to guess whether a 30 percent presumption would work, because the SEC ran the experiment first. The SEC adopted its own version, Rule 21F-6(c), in September 2020, creating a presumption that the Commission will pay a meritorious claimant the statutory maximum amount where none of the negative award criteria specified in Rule 21F-6(b) are present, for awards where the statutory maximum for the covered action and any related actions is $5 million or less in the aggregate—the same threshold the CFTC just adopted. At the time, the SEC noted that awards of this type made up the vast majority, in number, of all whistleblower awards to date, historically representing nearly 75 percent of the total.
The results provided the CFTC with supporting evidence. The SEC applied its presumption in approximately 89 percent of eligible cases after the 2020 amendments, compared with 46 percent before. The SEC’s 2021 annual report to Congress described the presumption as having had a significant impact on its whistleblower program, having allowed for increased consistency among awards and greater transparency to claimants and their counsel, and having assisted in expediting the processing of award claims. The speed gains were concrete: the SEC reported that average processing times for claims eligible for the presumption dropped measurably after the rule took effect, with staff able to issue Preliminary Determinations faster because the multi-factor balancing analysis was no longer required for the majority of cases. The CFTC cited this efficiency track record as a principal reason for adopting its own version of the rule.
The SEC has awarded more than $2.2 billion to 444 individual whistleblowers since its Program’s inception in 2011. Its FY2024 annual report disclosed over $255 million in awards to 47 whistleblowers, the third highest annual total, including a single award of approximately $98 million split between two whistleblowers. That followed FY2023, when the agency awarded nearly $600 million, the highest annual total by dollar value in the Program’s history, to 68 individual whistleblowers.
The CFTC’s numbers are smaller by an order of magnitude. Through the end of calendar year 2025, CFTC whistleblower reports contributed to enforcement actions resulting in over $3.3 billion in financial remedies, including approximately $160 million returned to harmed customers, and the agency granted 73 awards in 56 matters totaling over $395 million since its first award in 2014. Just days after finalizing the new rule, on September 14, 2026, the CFTC announced 10 whistleblower awards totaling more than $150 million in determinations issued between July and September 2026, pushing the Program’s lifetime total past $580 million, associated with enforcement actions producing more than $5.1 billion in monetary sanctions. General Counsel Tyler Badgley described it as a record year, and Chairman Michael S. Selig called the rule an important step in further harmonizing the CFTC and SEC.
The proximity of the new presumption and the $150 million batch of awards may reflect an agency effort to address a backlog and establish new expectations about the pace of claim processing. It may also reflect staffing realities: the CFTC’s Whistleblower Office has historically operated with a small team relative to the SEC’s, and the move to the Office of the General Counsel in 2025 coincided with broader agency-level resource pressures. A rule that mechanically resolves the award percentage for most claims frees limited staff capacity for the larger, more complex matters that require a full multi-factor analysis—a consideration the Commission itself highlighted in the cost-benefit section of the release.
DOJ’s Different Model
The Department of Justice launched its own Corporate Whistleblower Awards Pilot Program on August 1, 2024, a three-year initiative run by the Criminal Division’s Money Laundering and Asset Recovery Section that pays awards from criminal or civil forfeiture rather than from a dedicated fund financed by monetary sanctions. Whistleblowers may receive up to 30 percent of the first $100 million in net proceeds forfeited, and up to 5 percent of proceeds between $100 million and $500 million, with a presumption in favor of the maximum for the first $10 million forfeited—a structure DOJ describes as modeled on the SEC’s 2020 rule. DOJ’s own materials describe the pilot as modeled on successful programs run by the SEC, CFTC, and FinCEN. The CFTC’s new final rule similarly notes that FinCEN has proposed a 30 percent presumption at a higher $15 million threshold, which the CFTC considered and rejected as an alternative for its own rule.
DOJ’s own materials make the lineage explicit, describing the pilot program as modeled on successful whistleblower programs run by the SEC, CFTC, and FinCEN. The CFTC’s new final rule similarly notes that the Financial Crimes Enforcement Network has itself proposed a 30 percent presumption, though at a considerably higher $15 million threshold rather than $5 million. This is a proposal that the CFTC’s own commenters flagged and the Commission considered, and rejected, as an alternative threshold for its own rule.
Viewed together, the three programs illustrate a broader trend in federal enforcement policy. The SEC established the 30 percent presumption in 2020. The CFTC and, per its own rule, FinCEN have each proposed or adopted a version of it since. DOJ incorporated a purpose-specific version into a pilot program aimed at corporate crime outside the securities and derivatives context. The whistleblower-incentive framework developed at the SEC has become a model that other agencies have drawn on, rather than each agency designing a bespoke program independently.
What This Means for Exchanges, FCMs, and Other Regulated Entities
The new rule does not create any direct obligation for exchanges, futures commission merchants, or other CFTC-regulated entities, but it reshapes the enforcement landscape they operate in. A presumptive 30 percent award on matters yielding $5 million or less in total awards is an incentive for more people to file whistleblower complaints, more quickly. For compliance departments managing trade surveillance, customer protection, anti-money laundering, and position-limit monitoring, the practical effect is an increase in the volume and velocity of tips flowing into the Commission—including tips that could trigger an enforcement inquiry touching the entity’s own operations. The rule’s carve-outs for culpability and interference with internal compliance or reporting systems also put a premium on the robustness of an entity’s internal reporting channels: a whistleblower who can show that internal mechanisms were inadequate or obstructed has a cleaner path to the statutory maximum, while the regulated entity faces the compounding risk of both the underlying enforcement exposure and the reputational characterization of having frustrated internal compliance.
Exchanges and FCMs evaluating this landscape may choose to consider engaging advisors who understand both the enforcement side and the compliance architecture—counsel who can pressure-test internal reporting systems, help guide an entity’s response when a Preliminary Determination lands, and navigate the intersection of CFTC and SEC whistleblower regimes that the Commission is explicitly working to harmonize. The fact that approximately 82 percent of historical CFTC whistleblower awards fall within the new presumption’s threshold means that the overwhelming majority of whistleblower-driven enforcement matters will now move faster and with greater predictability, compressing the window in which a regulated entity can respond to a whistleblower-driven inquiry. Our team advises exchanges, FCMs, and other market participants on whistleblower and enforcement risk. This includes designing and stress-testing compliance programs that address the Commission’s internal-reporting expectations, managing internal investigations triggered by whistleblower tips, and defending against enforcement actions where a whistleblower’s information is in play.
If you have questions about how this rule may affect your business, please contact Jeff Le Riche or Kip Randall.
Recent Comments