Is a Structured Settlement an Annuity?

A structured settlement is not an annuity

A structured settlement is a way of settling a claim or lawsuit, using a combination of cash and customized stream (or streams) of future periodic payments.
An annuity is one of the types of qualified funding assets for a structured settlement.
Structured settlements can also be funded using obligations of the United States government. Future periodic payment obligations for many types of settlements where the paying party to the claim or litigation is insured may also be funded using reinsurance agreements (a/k/a “reinsurance structured settlements”).
There are also other market based methods of funding future payment obligations for settlements that can be used for funding both qualified and non qualified structured settlements.

It’s unreliable.
The misinformation is mostly borne of the ignorance of the staff writers for structured settlement factoring companies or their marketing networks, their unwillingness to avail themselves of abundant research and their editorial and management’s unwillingness to correct inaccuracies when they’ve been made aware of them.
Here is an example of a common misconception and misinformation that was published at the time of the original posting in 2019, on a website called Annuity(dot)org. Annuity.org exists primarily to promote and help genrate leads for a structured settlement factoring company called CBC Settlement Funding in Conshohocken, PA: They say “A structured settlement is a type of annuity that pays out an award from a civil lawsuit by spreading the payments out over a long period of time”. The Annuity(dot)org statement is not only inaccurate to say that a structured settlement is an annuity, but it’s also inaccurate to say that a structured settlement pays out an award. A structured settlement is not an award. They are two different things. That’s why a structured settlement includes the word “settlement”. Otherwise it would be called a structured award, right?