DoorDash will pay $131.5 million to settle a New York City investigation into how it paid delivery workers under the city’s minimum-pay law. More than $115 million goes to more than 260,000 workers who delivered between April 2022 and late June 2026. About $16.7 million covers civil penalties and costs, per the Department of Consumer and Worker Protection. The city calls it the largest worker settlement in its history.
The settlement puts the city’s method for calculating DoorDash pay on the record. The city counts trip time and on-call time, the minutes a worker spends logged in between orders, toward the $22.13 hourly minimum, which excludes tips. DoorDash must update its software so it cannot offer a New York worker a delivery unless that worker’s time is being recorded as on-call or trip time.
The department found that DoorDash:
failed to pay thousands of workers for completed deliveries
paid thousands more after the legal deadline
excluded several categories of trip time and on-call time from its minimum-pay calculations
applied lower rates to some legs of batched trips
DoorDash said $83 million of the total resolves the disagreement over time spent online between deliveries, while $12.3 million goes to workers who were underpaid or paid late. It expects a median payment of about $48.
“We calculated on-call time differently than the City, and believe our approach was fair, practical, and legal,” DoorDash said.
A worker who was owed $1,000 but received nothing will get $3,000, per the city. A worker paid $1,000 late will get $2,000. DoorDash must also send the department pay data every month for three years. Workers can share their own trip and earnings data with the city.
DoorDash also paid $16.75 million to the New York attorney general last year for using customer tips to cover the base pay it had guaranteed about 63,000 workers between 2017 and 2019. Walmart agreed to a $100 million judgment with the FTC and 11 states over Spark Driver pay. It paid Texas another $13.3 million over its driver pay and tip practices.
