Labor & Employment Law Daily Wrap Up, INDUSTRY NEWS, TRENDS—DoorDash announces it will pay $131.5M for underpaying delivery workers, including $16.7M in fines to NYC, (Sep 22, 2026)

By Brandi O. Brown, J.D.

“We screwed up, and our mistakes meant some NYC Dashers were underpaid or paid late. We’re making things right by paying every Dasher what they’re owed and fixing what caused this. We want to be upfront about what happened, our settlement, and what we’re doing.”

This morning DoorDash announced that it has reached a settlement with New York City’s Department of Consumer and Worker Protection, to the tune of $131.5 million, for issues regarding its compliance with the pay rules for delivery workers.

“Simply put,” the announcement explains (for a second time), “we screwed up. Our mistakes meant some Dashers were underpaid or paid late. While these mistakes weren’t intentional, that doesn’t make them okay.”

Settlement. As described by the online delivery company, the $131.5 million settlement with the city includes $12.3 million for Dashers who were underpaid or paid late and over $83 million to resolve a disagreement over how to calculate pay for time Dashers spend online between deliveries. Of that amount, DCWP is receiving $16.7 million in fines.

As for “what went wrong,” DoorDash claims that NYC “has the most complex earning standard for delivery workers in the country” and that, in spite of its “best efforts to comply with the new rules, [it] made mistakes.” It cites errors caused by “technical bugs” and “complicated” geographic and delivery situations, as well as errors stemming from the receipt of “incomplete or inaccurate banking information” from Dashers.

Different “method” of calculation. However, it acknowledges that most of the settlement relates to “bonuses” for online or on-call time, not late or missing pay. Online or on-call time, it notes, are the hours a Dasher is logged into the app but not on an active delivery. “Under the City’s rules, Dashers must be paid for this time spent online between deliveries, and they were. We calculated on-call time differently than the City, and believe our approach was fair, practical, and legal. But rather than spend years fighting over whose method was right, we chose to pay Dashers sooner and use the City’s method going forward.”

Approximately 264,000 Dashers will receive a payment, with most of them receiving missing or late payments. “We’re paying every impacted Dasher what they earned,” the company states, “and all affected Dashers will be contacted to be made whole in the coming weeks. Dashers will be paid a minimum of $10, even if they were underpaid by less than that.” It has also provided contact information.

NYC DCWP has information about the delivery services industry and specific legal requirements available in several formats, including a notice of rights related to NYC restaurant delivery workers. Earlier this year it announced a report analyzing how both DoorDash and Uber Eats had “engineered design tricks in their interfaces to make it harder for consumers to tip delivery workers. The report shows that tips for Uber Eats and DoorDash delivery workers fell by more than $550 million, while holding steady on rival platforms that kept their interfaces unchanged.”

Companies: DoorDash

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