DoorDash to Pay $115M+ to 260,000+ Underpaid NYC Workers
DoorDash will pay $131.5 million after a New York City investigation found that hundreds of thousands of delivery workers were underpaid, paid late, or never paid for work they had already completed.
Mayor Zohran Mamdani announced the settlement on Tuesday, calling it the largest worker settlement in New York City history and the largest involving food delivery workers in the U.S. More than $115 million will go directly to over 260,000 delivery workers, while roughly $16 million will cover civil penalties and other costs.
The case began after dozens of workers complained to the city's Department of Consumer and Worker Protection that DoorDash had failed to pay them or had delayed payments for completed deliveries.
Those complaints led to a much larger investigation. City officials examined terabytes of company data covering more than 152 million payment transactions and 110 million working hours.
Investigators found problems with DoorDash's compliance with New York City's Minimum Pay Rate for app-based delivery workers. DoorDash increased hourly pay to meet the city's rate in December 2023, but investigators found that certain types of trips and on-call time were left out of pay calculations.
DoorDash attributed many of the errors to technical bugs and complicated delivery scenarios, including trips crossing city boundaries, orders involving multiple pickups or drop-offs, and canceled or partially completed deliveries. The company also said more than $83 million of the settlement resolves a disagreement over how time spent online between deliveries should factor into worker pay.
Workers who went unpaid or received late payments are set to receive more than the original amount they were owed. For example, someone who earned $1,000 but was never paid would receive $3,000 through the settlement, while a worker whose $1,000 payment arrived late would receive $2,000. Individual payments could reach as much as $5,000.
Eligible workers will not have to submit claims themselves. A settlement administrator is expected to contact workers by email in late October using the most recent email addresses DoorDash has on file.
The payments cover eligible workers who were underpaid between April 22, 2022, and June 28, 2026. Recipients will be able to choose between an electronic payment and a mailed check. Some DashLink workers may receive a smaller second payment in early 2027 as DoorDash continues correcting parts of its time-calculation system.
The settlement goes beyond paying workers back. For the next three years, DoorDash must provide detailed monthly data reports to city regulators, establish new internal controls, and maintain a compliance monitor who submits annual sworn reports.
New York City is also developing software that will allow delivery workers to share trip and earnings data directly with regulators. DoorDash cannot block or penalize workers for using the system.
This is not the company's first major settlement with New York regulators. Last year, DoorDash agreed to pay nearly $17 million over allegations that customer tips were used to subsidize guaranteed worker pay.
New York City's Minimum Pay Rate for app-based delivery workers currently stands at $22.13 per hour before tips and is adjusted annually for inflation. The latest settlement shows just how costly errors in calculating those wages can become when they are multiplied across millions of deliveries and hundreds of thousands of workers.
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