DoorDash has agreed to pay $131.5 million to settle claims that it underpaid or delayed payment to hundreds of thousands of couriers in New York City.
The city’s Department of Consumer and Worker Protection had been investigating the company’s payment practices after new wage rules for delivery workers took effect in 2023, the New York Times reported.
The third-party delivery company on Tuesday said it made mistakes while trying to comply with those rules, which it described as the most complex in the country. It blamed technical bugs or complicated situations, such as deliveries that crossed city boundaries, and said the payment errors were not intentional.
“Simply put, we screwed up,” the company said in a statement.
The payment issues affected about 264,000 drivers, the company said, and accounted for less than 1% of payments in the city. About $6.6 million never reached these workers, and another $5.7 million arrived days or weeks late.
The company will pay $12.3 million to those couriers, with a median payout of about $48 per person. All impacted workers will get at least $10, even if they were underpaid by less than that.
DoorDash will pay a much larger sum — about $83 million — to settle a separate issue: workers who were underpaid for time they spent logged into the DoorDash app but not actively delivering.
The company said it calculated pay for this “on-call time” differently than the city and believes its approach was “fair, practical, and legal.” But it has now agreed to use the city’s formula “rather than spend years fighting over whose method was right.”
The company will also pay $16.7 million in fines to the Department of Consumer and Worker Protection.
San Francisco-based DoorDash said it has fixed the bugs that caused the errors and has also strengthened its compliance program to prevent future issues.
“This settlement reflects the responsibility we take for falling short,” the company said.
New York City has among the strictest regulations for food delivery companies in the U.S. and has repeatedly clashed with these companies over its efforts to rein them in.
In 2023, New York enacted a law that required delivery companies to pay workers at least $17.96 per hour spent actively delivering (before tips). The rate has gone up each year and now stands at $22.13.