DoorDash settles worker underpayment allegations with New York City for $131.5M

DoorDash has agreed to pay $131.5 million as part of a settlement with the New York City government to resolve allegations of underpaying workers.

Under the settlement with the city’s Department of Consumer and Worker Protection (DCWP), which New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani (D) and city officials announced on Tuesday, DoorDash will pay $115 million to 260,000-plus workers it either did not pay at all or paid late. The food delivery company will also pay more than $16 million in civil penalties and costs.

Mamdani’s office touted the settlement as the largest one involving food delivery workers in the U.S. and the largest worker settlement in the city’s history.

“When a worker earns a wage, they deserve to be paid that wage — not tomorrow, not after a lawsuit, but on time and in full,” Mamdani said in a release.

The mayor added, “This is what it looks like when City government stands with working people: We find the violations, we enforce the law and we make sure workers get what they’re owed.”

In its own statement , DoorDash acknowledged it “screwed up,” but denied the payment errors were intentional.

The company said New York City has the “most complex earning standard” for delivery workers in the country. Under the DCWP’s minimum pay rate it first started enforcing in 2023, food delivery workers in New York City must receive $22.13 per hour.

“Most of this settlement isn’t about late or missing pay, but how to calculate bonuses paid to Dashers for online or on-call time — the hours a Dasher is logged into the app but not on an active delivery,” DoorDash said, adding it “calculated on-call time differently” than the city.

The company argued its calculation method 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.”

Workers eligible for a payment do not need to file a claim or submit evidence, as the DCWP has identified those individuals via an analysis of DoorDash’s records.

DCWP’s settlement administrator will send emails in late October to each worker whom DoorDash underpaid from April 22, 2022, to June 28, 2026. Those emails will include the amount the worker is owed from the settlement.

“Today, New York City’s delivery workers are showing that opaque algorithms will not have the final word when it comes to how much they are paid for the hard work they do,” DCWP Commissioner Samuel Levine said in the release from Mamdani’s office.