DoorDash has agreed to pay a $131.5 million (£99 million) settlement to New York City regulators, admitting it failed to compensate thousands of workers correctly or on time. The food delivery giant stated, "Simply put, we screwed up," acknowledging that some Dashers were underpaid or paid late.
The agreement with the Department of Consumer and Worker Protection follows a city investigation into wage violations. A significant portion of the payout addresses how DoorDash calculated compensation for the time delivery drivers spent waiting for orders.
The San Francisco-based company attributed the issues to "complex" changes to the minimum wage in New York state, introduced in 2023. These changes mean wages vary based on county, tipping, and employer size. DoorDash also cited technical glitches and multi-stop delivery routes as causes for underpaying workers or delaying wages.
The errors affected approximately 264,000 workers, with systemic errors causing around $6.6 million in wages to never reach workers and another $5.7 million to arrive late. DoorDash stated that local workers earn roughly $30 per active hour on average and confirmed that the software bugs responsible for the mistakes have been patched.