DoorDash to pay $131.5 million after underpaying New York City delivery workers

DoorDash agreed to pay $131.5 million to settle a New York City investigation into underpaid and late wages for delivery workers, the city’s Department of Consumer and Worker Protection announced Tuesday.

Nearly $115 million of the settlement will go directly to roughly 264,000 delivery workers, with a median payout of about $48 per worker, according to NBC News. DoorDash will pay an additional $16.7 million fine to the city.

The city agency’s investigation, which the company’s own findings support, examined how DoorDash calculated pay for on-call workers and found $83 million in underpayments tied to that calculation method, plus $12.3 million linked to missed or late payments.

New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani announced the settlement, which local reporting described as the largest of its kind in city history. “City Hall will not sit idly by while a mega-corporation that made nearly a billion dollars in profits last year rips off the working people who keep this city moving,” Mamdani said. He said the city is “always looking at the question of how we can best protect the dignity of these workers and also recognize the worth and value of their labor.”

DoorDash did not dispute the findings. “Simply put, we screwed up,” the company said in a statement. “Our mistakes meant some Dashers were underpaid or paid late.”

The city’s Department of Consumer and Worker Protection analyzed more than 150 million DoorDash payments to delivery workers as part of the investigation. Commissioner Samuel Levine said the settlement “sends a strong message that we are in a new era of enforcement in New York.”

The settlement is separate from an earlier $16.75 million agreement New York Attorney General Letitia James secured from DoorDash in 2025 over the company withholding customer tips from delivery workers, a case her office pursued under state law rather than the city’s worker protection statutes.

New York City’s Local Laws 107 and 108, enacted to regulate food delivery apps, require companies to pay workers a minimum hourly rate and to make tipping mechanisms transparent to customers. City officials have said interface design choices by delivery platforms previously made it harder for customers to tip, a practice separate from the wage calculation issues addressed in Tuesday’s settlement.

DoorDash operates in New York City under the city’s minimum pay standard for app-based delivery workers, which the Department of Consumer and Worker Protection has enforced since 2023. The agency has pursued a series of enforcement actions against delivery platforms over wage compliance since the standard took effect.

DoorDash attributed the underpayments to a mix of operational issues, including deliveries that crossed city boundaries, orders with multiple pickup or drop-off stops, partially fulfilled or canceled orders, technical bugs and incomplete banking information for some workers, according to the Spokesman-Review.

As part of the settlement, DoorDash agreed to send detailed pay data to the city every month for three years, giving the Department of Consumer and Worker Protection an ongoing window into its compliance. City officials declined to say whether competing platforms Uber Eats and Grubhub are currently complying with the 2023 pay law.

The $131.5 million settlement makes New York City the site of the largest wage recovery action against a food delivery platform to date, according to the mayor’s office.