DoorDash Agrees to Pay $131.5 Million Over Underpaid NYC Delivery Workers

DoorDash agreed Tuesday to a $131.5 million settlement with New York City after a city investigation found the delivery company underpaid more than 260,000 couriers under municipal minimum-pay rules, including some who were paid late or not at all.

The city's Department of Consumer and Worker Protection said the deal sends more than $115 million directly to delivery workers and more than $16 million to the city in civil penalties and costs.

DoorDash described the deal in different pieces: more than $83 million to settle a dispute over how to count pay for drivers logged into the app and waiting between deliveries, $12.3 million for couriers who were underpaid or paid late, and $16.7 million in fines to the city agency. Those figures add up to a little more than $112 million. Neither the city nor the company has published a line-by-line accounting of the full $131.5 million.

About 264,000 delivery workers will receive payments, DoorDash said, including 209,000 for missing or late pay. The company put the median payout at about $48 and said errors touched less than 1% of all payments to New York City drivers.

DoorDash blamed many mistakes on technical glitches and complicated deliveries — orders that crossed city boundaries, multi-stop jobs, and deliveries canceled or only partly completed. In other cases, drivers had given incomplete or incorrect banking details. The company said it believed its way of calculating on-call pay was legal but will use the city's method from now on.

"Simply put, we screwed up," DoorDash said in a statement. "Our mistakes meant some Dashers were underpaid or paid late. While these mistakes weren't intentional, that doesn't make them okay."

The settlement resolves the city's investigation into DoorDash's compliance with pay standards that took effect in 2023. DoorDash must also send the city detailed pay data every month for three years. A separate city report released earlier this year accused DoorDash and Uber Eats of costing workers more than $550 million through tipping-system changes. DoorDash said Tuesday's settlement is not related to tips.

DoorDash said that since the rules took effect, its New York City drivers have collectively earned more than $1 billion, with average pay about $30 per active hour before tips.