California’s electronic portal for mandatory pay data reporting opened on February 1st, giving employers three months to complete reporting. Employers with at least 100 employees should start, if they have not already, preparing a plan for submitting pay data to the state Civil Rights Department (“CRD”). Pay data reports for calendar year 2023 are due by May 8, 2024.

Since 2020, California has mandated that employers with at least 100 employees submit a pay data report to the CRD as part of its efforts to advance fair pay. Employers who satisfy the employee threshold must submit information detailing pay and hours worked for employees, categorized by establishment, job category, race/ethnicity, and sex.

In 2022, California expanded reporting requirements to include reporting on both “payroll employees” and “labor contractor employees.” This expanded requirement for “labor contractor employees” is important because of the possible logistical difficulties in obtaining the required information from “labor contractor employees”, who are actually employed by other entities. If employers utilized contracted labor, employers should identify their labor contractors and send written requests for the information needed to complete the pay data report. While labor contractors are required to comply with these requests, the obligation to file the report falls on the employer using the labor contractors.

As a reminder, the 2022 amendment also established penalties for failure to comply of $100 per employee, and increasing to $200 per employee for a subsequent failure to file a required report.

This year, California updated its reporting requirements to include three new required data points for each group of payroll employees and labor contractor employees: (1) number of employees in the group that work on-site, (2) number of employees in the group that work remotely in California, (3) the number of employees in the group that work remotely outside of California.

Employers should start compiling the required data, if they have not already, to ensure they are compliant with the May 8, 2024, deadline to report their 2023 pay data.