New York City leaders announced what they call the largest enforcement action in city history.
DoorDash is ordered to pay $131.5 million to roughly 264,000 workers who deliver through the platform.
A Department of Consumer and Worker Protection investigation found that from April 2022 to June 2026, the delivery company underpaid or did not pay thousands of delivery workers.
"What we are looking for is to not just protect these workers, not just this incredible worker who stepped forward, but every worker who joins this workforce in the days, weeks, months to come," Mayor Zohran Mamdani said.
The city says $115 million will go directly to workers, while DoorDash will have to pay $16 million in costs and civil penalties.
The mayor says more than 27,000 workers will be receiving over $1,000 and just over 4,000 workers will get around $5,000.
"It's one of the most, hardest job in this country because, the way you see it, people think they're just riding a bike. But it's not just riding a bike. It's following a system that doesn't reflect the reality," said Cellou Baldee, a delivery worker from the Bronx.
The DCWP says they launched an investigation after several workers filed complaints with the help of the Workers' Justice Project.
"We are engineering software to allow workers to share their own DoorDash data directly with DCWP, that give us an independent way to detect underpayment compared with what the company is telling us, with what workers are experiencing, and take swift enforcement action if the numbers do not match," said DCWP Commissioner Sam Levine.
DoorDash says the average missing payment owed to a Dasher is just under $8 and 65% of impacted workers were underpaid by a dollar or less. However, they did acknowledge their mistake.
"We screwed up, and our mistakes meant some NYC Dashers were underpaid or paid late. We’re making things right by paying every Dasher what they’re owed and fixing what caused this," DoorDash wrote.
The city says workers will not have to file a claim or submit evidence that their pay was incorrect.
In late October, workers will receive an email detailing how much money they will be getting.