New York City delivery workers who were shorted by DoorDash do not have to file a claim, submit evidence, or hire a lawyer to get paid back. The city says it already knows who is owed, and the money starts finding workers in late October.
DoorDash will pay at least $131.5 million under a settlement announced Tuesday, Sept. 22, 2026, by Mayor Zohran Mamdani and the city’s Department of Consumer and Worker Protection. More than $115 million goes directly to more than 260,000 delivery workers who were underpaid, never paid, or paid late between April 22, 2022, and June 28, 2026. About $16.7 million covers civil penalties and the city’s costs. The city calls it the largest worker settlement in New York City history and the largest food-delivery worker settlement in the country.
The payout formula is simple: workers generally receive 200% of what they were shorted, on top of the original amount. A worker who was never paid $1,000 receives $3,000. A worker who was paid $1,000 late receives $2,000. That example is the city’s own, and it sits at the high end — DoorDash says the median payment will be about $48.
Here is how the money arrives. City investigators identified every worker owed by analyzing DoorDash’s own records — more than 152 million payment transactions and 110 million working hours. In late October, a settlement administrator will email each eligible worker the amount they are owed. Workers can choose an electronic payment or a mailed check; anyone who does not respond gets a check sent to their last known address. The one action workers should take now: make sure the email and mailing address on their DoorDash account are current, because that is where the notice — and the money — will go. A second round of payments is planned for early 2027 covering workers underpaid between June 29 and Nov. 29, 2026.
The settlement exists because New York is one of the first two cities in the nation, along with Seattle, to set a minimum pay rate for app-based delivery workers. New York City’s rate is currently $22.13 an hour before tips. More than $83 million of the settlement resolves a dispute over how DoorDash paid workers for time spent online waiting between deliveries.
The two sides describe what went wrong very differently. The city’s settlement page says DoorDash deliberately paid workers below the minimum pay rate; DoorDash says the errors were not intentional, blaming technical bugs and complicated situations such as deliveries crossing city boundaries and bad banking information. The company was blunt about the outcome either way: “Simply put, we screwed up”.
“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. Council Member Harvey Epstein added: “Amidst a cost of living crisis, delivery workers deserve to rest assured that work completed means compensation earned”.
Going forward, DoorDash must submit detailed pay data to the city every month for three years, and workers will get tools to share their trip and earnings data directly with the city.
The bottom line: if you delivered for DoorDash anywhere in New York City at any time since April 2022, watch your inbox in late October — and update your contact information on the app today. And if you are outside New York, this is what a city minimum pay law, backed by an audit of a company’s own records, can deliver.
Drafted by News Observed Editorial AI, human reviewed and published.