DoorDash to Pay $131.5 Million After NYC Finds It Shortchanged More Than 260,000 Delivery Workers

The city calls it the largest food delivery worker settlement in U.S. history. DoorDash admits it “screwed up” but says most of the money settles a dispute over how to count waiting time.

New York City has secured a $131.5 million settlement from DoorDash after an investigation found the company underpaid, paid late, or never paid more than 260,000 delivery workers between April 2022 and June 2026.

Mayor Zohran Mamdani announced the deal Tuesday at City Hall with Deputy Mayor for Economic Justice Julie Su and Department of Consumer and Worker Protection (DCWP) Commissioner Samuel Levine. The city calls it the largest worker settlement in New York City history and the largest settlement involving food delivery workers in the United States.

The news is also moving fast on social media. A Jacobin Instagram reel frames the deal around the 2025 mayoral race, captioned: “This is why DoorDash spent millions trying to beat Zohran.” The spending is on the record. DoorDash put $1 million into Fix the City, the main super PAC backing Andrew Cuomo, and another $1.8 million into a second Cuomo-aligned super PAC, Local Economies Forward NY, according to Gothamist.

What the settlement does

Most of the money goes to workers, not city coffers.

• More than $115 million goes into a fund for delivery workers.
• About $11.3 million covers civil penalties, $4.3 million funds a worker-driven compliance program, and roughly $468,000 pays to administer the settlement, according to amNewYork. DoorDash describes the non-worker portion as a $16.7 million fine.
• DoorDash puts the number of Dashers receiving payments at about 264,000.
• Mamdani said more than 27,000 workers will receive over $1,000, and more than 4,000 will receive over $5,000.
• DoorDash says every affected Dasher will get at least $10, and the median payment will be around $48.

Late and missing pay is being penalized, not just repaid. Under the city’s formula, a worker who was never paid $1,000 will receive $3,000, and a worker who was paid $1,000 late will receive $2,000.

The biggest single piece, more than $83 million by DoorDash’s count, resolves a fight over on-call time: the minutes workers spend logged into the app between deliveries. New York’s Minimum Pay Rate, passed in 2021 and enforced since December 2023, requires apps to pay for that time. The rate now stands at $22.13 an hour before tips. DoorDash says it calculated on-call time differently from the city and still considers its approach “fair, practical, and legal,” but chose to adopt the city’s method rather than spend years fighting. Another $12.3 million covers payments that were missed or late. On those, DoorDash did not hedge.

“Simply put, we screwed up.” DoorDash statement

The deal also brings oversight. DoorDash must send DCWP detailed data reports every month for three years, update its software so it cannot offer a New York delivery unless the worker’s time is being counted as paid time, stop paying lower rates for some legs of batched trips, and keep an internal compliance monitor who certifies compliance to the city each year. DCWP is also working with the Workers Justice Project and Princeton’s Workers’ Algorithm Observatory on software that lets workers share their own trip and pay data with the city. DoorDash is barred from penalizing workers who use it.

Why City Hall is treating this as a political win

Mamdani went after DoorDash CEO Tony Xu by name. He cited Xu’s remark on a July podcast that a CEO should “take the greedy algorithm and keep going all the way to see if there is more,” then said thousands of delivery workers had felt “the human cost of the greedy algorithm.” The company calls the errors unintentional. The mayor rejected that framing.

The case did not start under this administration. DCWP’s investigation began under former Mayor Eric Adams, after dozens of workers, many assisted by the Workers Justice Project, complained that DoorDash had paid them late or not at all. Ligia Guallpa, the group’s executive director, told Gothamist the case “really accelerated” after Mamdani took office in January. DCWP’s new Research and Analytics Division combed through terabytes of company data, identifying more than 152 million payment transactions and 110 million working hours tied to the case.

It is not the city’s first app-labor action of 2026. In January, New York secured more than $5 million from Uber Eats, Fantuan, and HungryPanda covering more than 49,000 workers, and Uber agreed to reinstate wrongfully deactivated workers, potentially as many as 10,000. The same month, DCWP accused DoorDash and Uber Eats of app design tricks that cost workers more than $550 million in tips. Those tip allegations were separate from Tuesday’s pay settlement.

The other side of the story

DoorDash is not conceding that its whole pay model was illegal. It says fewer than 1% of its New York City payments were affected, that about $6.6 million never reached workers and another $5.7 million arrived late, that the average missing payment was $7.70, and that 65% of affected Dashers were shorted by $1 or less. It blames technical bugs and complicated jobs: deliveries crossing city lines, multi-stop orders, canceled or partial trips, and in some cases incomplete banking details from workers. The company says it has fixed the bugs and strengthened its compliance program.

That is the gap between the two messages. City Hall is selling historic accountability and a warning to every platform. DoorDash is selling a technical cleanup and a decision to stop fighting the city’s formula. Both can hold at once: small shortfalls, stacked across millions of trips and hundreds of thousands of workers, still add up to nine figures.

What to watch next

The bigger test is whether three years of monthly data and worker-side monitoring change how the app counts waiting time, or whether this becomes one more payout while the algorithm keeps running. Mamdani’s stated line is that no corporation is above the law. The monitoring period is where that gets tested.

Sources: NYC Department of Consumer and Worker Protection; NYC Mayor’s Office press conference transcript; DoorDash statement; Gothamist; amNewYork; NBC News; Fox News; ABC7 New York. Social framing via Jacobin on Instagram.