Walmart will pay Texas $13.3 million over deceptive Spark Driver pay practices. The money will be split evenly between driver redress already paid and a civil penalty, under an agreement with Attorney General Ken Paxton.
The Texas deal builds on a much larger settlement. Walmart agreed to a $100 million judgment with the FTC and 11 states over the same conduct. That settlement set the template now repeating in Texas: federal regulators settle on deceptive pay claims, states pile on with their own penalties, and the company runs a decade-long audit program either way.
What Walmart allegedly did: Texas alleged that, since at least 2021, Walmart's Spark Driver platform used several practices that misled drivers about their expected earnings. It alleges the platform:
Split tips between drivers on batched orders without telling them;
Silently removed orders and tips from accepted batches;
Told drivers they'd get tips Walmart never actually collected; and
Misrepresented incentive pay.
Walmart also told customers “100% of tips go to the driver” while, in numerous instances, it did not pass the tips through, according to the filed agreement.
Walmart denied wrongdoing but settled anyway.
The audit program: Both the federal order and the Texas agreement require Walmart to run an earnings verification program for at least 10 years. Walmart must assign someone to oversee it. It must document every instance a driver received less than the pay promised on their offer card. It must assess the program's effectiveness annually, and keep records for five years. Texas will receive copies of the reports Walmart already submits to the FTC.
Walmart is also permanently barred from cutting a driver's promised pay or tip after an order is accepted, except for a handful of cases such as a customer cancellation or a missed delivery window.
The pattern: Walmart isn’t the first gig delivery operator caught running this play. The FTC fined Amazon $61.7 million in 2021 for lowering Flex drivers’ guaranteed hourly rate without telling them and used customer tips to make up the shortfall, while continuing to say that 100% of tips were passed through.
DoorDash paid Washington, D.C. $2.5 million in 2020 for a similar tip subsidy scheme.
Walmart’s combined $113.3 million settlement is now the largest of the three. It is also the first to come with a mandated, annually-audited compliance program rather than just a penalty.
The Walmart settlement is a product of the FTC's Joint Labor Task Force, a cross-agency unit launched by Chairman Andrew Ferguson in February 2025 to root out deceptive labor-market practices. The Amazon and DoorDash cases predate it. In each of the three cases, the underlying defect is the same: drivers accept a job at a promised pay or tip amount, but the company changes what it actually pays without telling them.
