NYC reaches $131.5 million DoorDash settlement: who gets paid and when

More than 260,000 New York City delivery workers who were paid late, underpaid or never paid by DoorDash will share in a $131.5 million settlement, Mayor Zohran Mamdani announced Tuesday. Over $115 million of the total is earmarked for workers, while roughly $16 million covers civil penalties.

The deal was struck with the city’s Department of Consumer and Worker Protection and spans violations from April 2022 through June 2026. Officials described it as the biggest worker settlement New York City has ever reached. No settlement involving delivery workers anywhere in the United States has been larger, and it dwarfs the $39 million agreement the city made with Starbucks nine months ago.

DoorDash settlement payments: what NYC workers need to do

For now, nothing. Eligible workers will not have to submit a claim or show evidence that they were shorted. According to the city, its list of Dashers who are owed money is already complete. Notices will go out by email in late October, and payments are expected to begin this fall.

A typical payout will be modest. Samuel Levine, who heads the department, put the median at roughly $48, though a number of Dashers are owed over $10,000. DoorDash says about $83 million of the workers’ portion pays for time Dashers spent logged into the app and waiting between orders.

What the city investigation found

The Workers Justice Project, a group that advocates for workers’ rights, heard from delivery workers in 2023 about wages that never arrived, and the city opened its probe that year. Some workers also said DoorDash deactivated their accounts without cause and kept their final pay. Investigators then combed through upward of 152 million payment records. They concluded the company had left out certain work time, such as time linked to canceled orders and trips that crossed city lines.

“This was not a rounding error or an accidental mistake,” Mamdani said at a news conference. DoorDash pointed to technical bugs and to complicated orders: deliveries with multiple pickup or drop-off stops, trips that left city boundaries, and orders canceled or only partly completed. The company also said some workers supplied incomplete or incorrect bank details. “Simply put, we screwed up,” it said in a statement.

Going forward, DoorDash agreed to calculate on-call pay with the city’s formula. For the next three years, it must send officials detailed data every month so they can verify compliance with rules on minimum pay, trip information, distance limits, and disclosure of pay and tips. A city law in effect since 2022 requires app-based delivery companies to pay their workers no less often than weekly.