The city’s Department of Consumer and Worker Protection announced Tuesday that DoorDash will pay more than $115 million in restitution to underpaid workers and $16 million in civil penalties and administrative fines, the largest worker‑rights settlement in New York’s history.
Under the agreement, DoorDash must submit detailed compliance reports to the department each month for three years, and its operations will be monitored through data shared by workers, a move the new Mamdani administration says is essential to enforce the city’s new delivery‑app protections.
The settlement follows a year‑long investigation that found DoorDash “deliberately paid workers below the Minimum Pay Rate or not at all,” according to the department’s findings. The city warned delivery platforms to comply with the new rules just two weeks after Mayor Mamdani took office and has already sued rival app Motoclick for similar violations.
While the settlement was being negotiated, DoorDash was spending heavily in the 2025 mayoral race. The company contributed $1 million to the anti‑Mamdani super PAC Fix the City and $1.8 million to Local Economies Forward NY, a group that also funneled more than $360,000 to former Gov. Andrew Cuomo’s campaign. In total, DoorDash’s political outlay against Mamdani was about $1.4 million.
Fix the City, which accounted for nearly half of the $31 million in outside spending in the race, ran ads, text messages and mailers that portrayed Mamdani as a “radically dangerous” candidate. One mailer digitally lengthened and darkened his beard, a tactic Mamdani called “blatant Islamophobia.” The PAC’s video ads disclosed that its top three donors were Michael Bloomberg, DoorDash and John Hess.
Mamdani, who campaigned on regulating delivery apps and expanding protections for gig workers, said the settlement “shows the damage done to workers by wage theft” and underscored the importance of enforcement. DoorDash issued a brief statement acknowledging the mistake: “Simply put, we screwed up. Our mistakes meant some Dashers were underpaid or paid late. While these mistakes weren’t intentional, that doesn’t make them okay.”
Advocates note that the settlement is roughly 100 times the amount DoorDash spent trying to influence the mayoral election. “It’s not a contribution, it’s an investment, with the donor expecting something in return,” said Greg Coleridge, former co‑director of Move to Amend. Worker‑justice groups such as the Worker’s Justice Project argue the company’s political spending was an attempt to buy the city’s democracy, a claim echoed by executive director Ligia Guallpa.
DoorDash’s latest payout adds to a string of recent settlements in New York. In May 2024 the firm paid $75,000 after the state attorney general found it violated the city’s Fair Chance Act, and in February 2025 it settled for $16.75 million over the use of tips to subsidize guaranteed pay.