DoorDash agrees to pay $131.5M to settle New York City probe into delivery worker pay

DoorDash has agreed to pay $131.5M to settle a New York City investigation that found it underpaid delivery workers or paid them late.

The deal with the city’s Department of Consumer and Worker Protection (DCWP) ends a dispute that began early in Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s administration.

“Simply put, we screwed up,” DoorDash said in a post about the settlement. “Our mistakes meant some Dashers were underpaid or paid late.” 

“While these mistakes weren’t intentional, that doesn’t make them okay. We pride ourselves on operational excellence at DoorDash – and this was not excellent, nor was it acceptable. Dashers should be paid in full, on time, every time. We are sorry to the Dashers we let down.”

Most of the money is tied up in a disagreement over when payments should be made. More than $83 million will go toward figuring out how to pay couriers who are logged into the app and waiting for jobs between deliveries.

Another $12.3 million covers payments that were missing or delayed, and $16.7 million will be paid to DCWP as fines.

DoorDash attributed its errors to a combination of software bugs and unusual edge cases, citing examples such as deliveries that went beyond city boundaries, orders with multiple pickup or drop-off points, jobs that were canceled or only partially completed, and couriers who provided incomplete or incorrect bank details.

The company states that it has sorted out the technical faults.

New York’s minimum wage rules for app-based delivery workers started in 2023. DoorDash says these are the most complex pay rules for couriers in the country.

The company also says its New York couriers have earned over $1 billion since then, with an average pay of about $30 per active hour before tips.

The Mamdani government has treated the enforcement of those rules as a top priority.

In January, the DCWP charged both DoorDash and Uber Eats with having caused couriers to lose more than $550 million in tips as a result of changes to their apps, and at the same time the city announced a separate $5 million settlement with three delivery apps regarding violations of the minimum pay rules, along with the reactivation of thousands of couriers who had been deactivated.

Mamdani was scheduled to present the DoorDash agreement at City Hall on Tuesday morning, and City Hall called it a historic settlement for workers, according to ABC7 New York.

DoorDash had already made a deal about workers’ wages in New York. In 2025, it agreed to pay about $16.75 million to settle claims by the state attorney general that it used customer tips to reduce couriers’ guaranteed pay.