DoorDash has agreed to pay $131.5 million to settle claims that it systematically underpaid delivery workers in New York City, in what city officials are calling the largest worker settlement in the city’s history and the largest of its kind involving food delivery workers in American municipal history.
The settlement, announced on Tuesday by Mayor Zohran Mamdani and the city’s Department of Consumer and Worker Protection, will see more than 260,000 workers receive compensation. The bulk of the total, around $115 million, will be distributed directly to affected workers, while approximately $16.7 million will go towards civil penalties and associated costs.
The city’s investigation involved the analysis of billions of rows of DoorDash data, covering more than 152 million individual payment transactions and 110 million working hours. Investigators found that thousands of workers had not been paid for completed work at all, while thousands of others received their earnings later than the law permits.
The compensation formula reflects the nature of each violation. A worker who was owed money but received nothing will receive roughly three times the original amount owed, while someone who was paid late but in full will receive twice the delayed sum. That broadly translates to approximately 200 per cent of the underpaid amount on top of what was originally due.
DoorDash acknowledged the failures in a statement accompanying the settlement, attributing the discrepancies to technical issues and unusually complicated delivery scenarios rather than deliberate policy. The company stated that its workers should be paid in full and on time, every time.
Beyond the financial redress, the settlement introduces a new compliance monitoring mechanism. DoorDash must provide detailed operational data to city authorities for three years and workers will be given tools to report information about their trips and earnings directly to officials. Affected workers will not need to file individual claims; personalised notices are expected to go out from late October to those who experienced underpayments between April 2022 and June 2026.
The resolution arrives as New York enforces a minimum pay rate of $22.13 per hour, excluding tips, for app-based delivery workers. City officials have positioned the settlement as both a corrective measure and a signal that labour protections will be actively monitored rather than left to workers to pursue through litigation alone.
