DoorDash has agreed to pay more than $115 million to more than 260,000 delivery workers in New York City who were underpaid as part of a $131.5 million settlement with the city.
The worker settlement is being heralded as an historic win by New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani and his administration, who claim that it’s both the largest settlement in the city’s history and the largest involving food delivery workers in the U.S. That said, the city’s Department of Consumer and Worker Protection began a citywide investigation years before Mamdani took office after receiving complaints from dozens of DoorDash workers—aka “Dashers.”
The settlement owed to workers works out to an average payment of about $442, but the amounts due will likely vary widely. Workers who weren’t paid at all or who weren’t paid on time by DoorDash will receive compensation calculated at approximately 200% of the amount they were underpaid.
Mamdani said in a statement that the settlement is an indication of the city ensuring that workers get what they’re owed and that his administration will keep fighting for the working people. In a televised address, he went even further, blasting the company’s “greedy algorithm” that saw the company fail to count every hour that workers had worked.
“This was not a rounding error or an accidental mistake,” Mamdani said in a televised address. “Today, after years of corporate greed and impunity, we are holding DoorDash to account.”
DOORDASH: ‘WE SCREWED UP’
DoorDash didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment from Fast Company, but a spokesperson told The New York Times that while the San Francisco-based company believed its approach to calculating the appropriate pay for its workers was “fair, practical and legal,” it will use the city’s method going forward.
The company spokesperson said the median payment that will be returned to affected workers is about $48. But some workers could be owed checks in excess of $10,000, Samuel Levine, commissioner of New York’s Department of Consumer and Worker Protection, told the outlet.
In a statement to Documented, Samantha Ramirez, a spokesperson for DoorDash, acknowledged that the company made errors and had failed to pay some workers. “Simply put, we screwed up,” she said. “Our mistakes meant some Dashers were underpaid or paid late. While these mistakes weren’t intentional, that doesn’t make them okay.”
DELIVERY APPS UNDER SCRUTINY
DoorDash is one of several food delivery companies that’s been targeted by New York over the years regarding how it treats its workers. In 2023, the city began enforcing a minimum pay rate for delivery workers, which now stands at $22.13 per hour—or the full-time annual equivalent of about $46,000.
The city agency that conducted the investigation found DoorDash had violated this minimum pay rate by excluding “several categories of trip time and on-call time when calculating compensable time.” That meant that more than 260,000 workers were underpaid over a period of more than four years, from April 2022 until June 2026.
Those workers who were underpaid will begin receiving notifications from settlement administrators about the amount that they’re owed and checks will be sent out beginning in late October. Another round of checks will be sent out in early 2027 after DoorDash finishes correcting elements of its compensable-time calculation logic that caused underpayments, according to information from the city.
But the settlement is but a drop in the bucket for DoorDash, which reported more than $13.7 billion in annual revenue in 2025, a nearly 28% increase from the prior year. Shares of the company fell about 0.4% in mid-afternoon trading on Tuesday, extending a year-to-date selloff of more than 12%.
