How DoorDash’s Pay System Left 264,000 Workers Owed $131.5 Million

Online delivery platform DoorDash has agreed to pay $131.5 million, which New York City officials described as the largest worker settlement in the city’s history, to resolve a city investigation into its payment practices.

The settlement will provide relief to approximately 264,000 delivery workers, after the city found that DoorDash failed to pay thousands of workers for work they had performed and failed to pay thousands more on time.

Of that total, $115 million will go toward worker relief, with roughly $83 million covering time Dashers spent logged into the app between deliveries.

In a post on X, Mayor Zohran Mamdani wrote that "DoorDash has ripped off more than 260,000 NYC delivery workers," adding that the settlement would force the company "to pay $131.5 million."

But working out whether workers were paid correctly wasn't always straightforward, so to speak. Under the city’s 2023 pay rules, delivery workers are paid $22.13 per hour for the time between pickup and delivery, while high performers can receive bonuses based on factors including on-time deliveries and customer satisfaction.

That means couriers working similar hours can still receive different amounts, making it harder to determine whether they received everything they were owed. Now, however, the delivery company said the median payment being returned to workers will be around $48.

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How Workers' Complaints Led to an Investigation

The dispute dates back to a 2023 city law requiring delivery apps to pay workers for time spent waiting for orders, not just the time spent making deliveries.

Complaints about missing wages eventually reached the Workers Justice Project, a labour rights organisation, which brought them to the city's Department of Consumer and Worker Protection. The complaints prompted the agency to open an investigation into DoorDash that year.

City officials examined more than 152 million payment transactions as part of the investigation, where they found that thousands of workers had been paid late, underpaid, or not paid at all.

DoorDash acknowledged the extent of the problem, saying more than 200,000 Dashers had been underpaid or paid late since 2023.

The company attributed some of the errors to technical bugs and complicated deliveries, including trips that crossed city lines, involved multiple pickup or drop-off points, and were partially fulfilled or cancelled. It also said some problems resulted from workers submitting incomplete or inaccurate banking information.

“These errors were unintentional, but that doesn’t make them acceptable,” DoorDash said in a statement. “Dashers should be paid in full, on time, every time. We take full responsibility, and we’re deeply sorry.”

The company said it has since fixed the issues behind the errors and made changes to prevent them from happening again.

DoorDash Will Face Three Years of Monitoring

The settlement comes after years of efforts by New York officials to regulate food-delivery platforms and strengthen protections for workers classified as independent contractors.