DoorDash says it 'screwed up' payments to 264K workers in NYC, agrees to $131.5M settlement. Most 'dashers' will get less than 50 bucks

"Simply put, we screwed up," the company said in a statement, while insisting the mistakes weren't intentional.

The full DoorDash settlement breakdown

Workers get $115.4 million of the $131.5 million, according to consent order terms reported by amNewYork. The rest covers about $11.3 million in civil penalties, $4.3 million for a worker-driven compliance program and roughly $468,000 to run the payouts.

City officials and Mayor Zohran Mamdani are calling it the largest worker settlement in New York City history and the largest involving food delivery workers anywhere in the U.S. The tab could still grow, too, since DoorDash is still calculating what it owes for work done between June 29 and Nov. 29. Any back pay from that stretch comes with an extra 13.79% civil penalty, according to the order.

For its part, DoorDash says it already set aside the full amount in prior quarters.

How much will DoorDash drivers get?

For most Dashers, not much. DoorDash says the median payout will be around $48, with the average missed payment at just $7.70 and 65% of affected workers shorted by $1 or less. Everyone who qualifies is guaranteed at least $10, even if they were owed less.

Some workers are in line for a lot more, though. Those who were paid late or not at all will get about 200% of what they were shorted, according to the city. So a worker who never received a $1,000 payment will collect $3,000, while someone whose $1,000 showed up late will get $2,000. Meanwhile, money for minimum-pay violations is split based on how much trip time each worker logged.

At the settlement announcement, Mayor Mamdani said upward of 27,000 workers will clear $1,000 and more than 4,000 will top $5,000.

How the city says DoorDash underpaid workers

Under city law, app-based delivery workers in New York have to earn at least $22.13 an hour before tips, a floor that gets adjusted for inflation every year. DoorDash raised its pay to meet that minimum in December 2023, but the agency found the company was excluding several categories of trip time and on-call time from the hours it actually paid for.

Deputy Mayor for Economic Justice Julie Su put it bluntly at the Sept. 22 announcement: "DoorDash built a system that was quietly leaving out categories of trips and on-call time so the real amount of work by deliveristas wasn't counted." She added that the practice was hidden from workers, making it nearly impossible for them to tell when they'd been shortchanged.

The investigation started after dozens of workers complained about missing or late pay. Rosendo Tacam, a delivery worker and leader of Los Deliveristas Unidos, was one of the first to file a complaint.

"I gave DoorDash everything I had, and then they deactivated me and didn't pay me for my last week of work," Tacam said in the city's announcement. "I felt angry and disrespected."

DoorDash says many of the errors "were caused by technical bugs or happened in complicated situations," like deliveries that crossed city lines or had multiple stops. Others came down to workers entering incomplete or inaccurate banking information. By the company's count, about $6.6 million in payments never reached Dashers and another $5.7 million showed up days or even weeks late — though it says fewer than 1% of its NYC payments were affected.

DoorDash says that more than $83 million is tied to on-call time, referring to the stretches Dashers spend logged into the app waiting for their next order. The company says it paid for those hours all along, using a calculation it still considers "fair, practical, and legal," but agreed to switch to the city's formula rather than drag out the fight. It also says NYC Dashers have averaged roughly $30 per active hour before tips since the pay rule kicked in back in 2023.

DCWP's settlement page says the agency found DoorDash "deliberately" paid workers below the minimum rate or not at all, though DoorDash settled without a hearing. And when a reporter asked about DoorDash calling the underpayments mistakes, Mamdani wasn't buying it, describing the violations as "sustained" and "rampant."

DoorDash's past New York settlements and tip fight

It's not the first time DoorDash has had to pay up in New York, either. In February 2025, New York Attorney General Letitia James secured $16.75 million from the company after her office found it used customer tips to cover pay DoorDash had already guaranteed Dashers between May 2017 and September 2019. That claims window has since closed, with a final deadline of Feb. 13, 2026, according to the Attorney General's Office.

Then there's the fight over tips. In a Jan. 13 report, DCWP accused DoorDash and Uber (NYSE:UBER) Eats of using "design tricks" in their apps that cut workers' tips by more than $550 million. According to the agency, both apps moved the tip option to after checkout shortly after the city started enforcing its minimum pay rate in December 2023 — and within a week, the average tip on the two platforms plunged from $3.66 per delivery to 93 cents.

DoorDash pushed back the same day, saying the report "gets a lot wrong," arguing that moving tipping after checkout "isn't novel or nefarious." DoorDash also pointed to the report's own finding that total pay to NYC delivery workers rose by $1.2 billion under the minimum pay rule.

Since Jan. 26, a city law has required delivery apps to offer a tip option at checkout, including a 10% preset and a custom amount. The city says that change has already added more than $104 million in tips for delivery workers.

How DoorDashers can get their settlement payment

If you delivered for DoorDash in New York City and were underpaid, you don't have to lift a finger to get your money, since the city says it has already identified everyone owed using DoorDash's own records.