California law requires private employers with 100 or more employees and/or 100 or more workers hired through labor contractors to annually report pay, demographic, and other workforce data to the Civil Rights Department (CRD). The CRD has now released preliminary templates, updated FAQs, and opened the pay data portal for Reporting Year 2025. The deadline to file is May 13, 2026.
This year’s reporting cycle introduces three new mandatory data fields, expands how employee groups are defined, and increases the overall complexity of submissions for both payroll employee reports and labor contractor employee reports.
Who Must File
Two categories of employers are subject to California’s pay data reporting requirements:
- Payroll Employee Report: Private employers with 100 or more payroll employees, including at least one employee in California.
- Labor Contractor Employee Report: Private employers with 100 or more workers hired through labor contractors, including at least one such worker in California. A labor contractor is defined as an individual or entity that supplies a client employer with workers to perform labor within the client employer’s usual course of business.
What Must Be Submitted
For both report types, employers must submit data for a single “snap-shot” pay period from between October 1 and December 31 of the reporting year. Workers are grouped by establishment, pay band (based on W-2 Box 5 earnings), EEO-1 job category, race/ethnicity, and sex. Each group must include the employee count, mean and median hourly rates, and total hours worked. As a reminder, the Middle Eastern or North African (MENA) race/ethnicity category added last year remains optional where voluntarily self-identified for 2025 reporting.
What Is Changing This Year
The CRD has added three new required fields to both the Payroll Employee Report and the Labor Contractor Employee Report:
Exemption Status: Employers must now classify each California worker as either exempt or nonexempt under California’s Industrial Welfare Commission wage orders and/or the federal Fair Labor Standards Act. This is a significant addition: exempt and nonexempt employees will no longer be grouped together. Employee groups must now be defined by race/ethnicity, sex, job category, pay band, exemption status, and employment type. The result is a larger number of reportable groups and a more involved data validation process. Employers should review exemption classifications now to ensure accuracy and consistency across systems.
Employment Type: Instead of only the usual full-time and part-time split, the CRD now requires employers to assign each California employee to one of three categories: full-time, part-time, or intermittent. The intermittent designation is intended for periodic or irregular schedules. This is a notable shift from the traditional two-category framework, and many HR systems do not currently distinguish intermittent employees. Hybrid, variable-hour, or on-call roles may require re-evaluation, and employers should ensure these classifications are consistently applied across payroll, HRIS, and labor contractor data.
Total Annual Weeks Worked: For the first time, employers must report total weeks worked during the reporting year for California employees. This includes weeks where an employee is on paid time off such as vacation, sick leave, or holidays. After employees are grouped by all required characteristics, employers must report total annual weeks worked for each group. If a group contains only one employee, the individual’s weeks worked must be reported. For labor contractor employees, weeks worked must reflect actual weeks worked for the reporting client employer. Because this metric requires annual aggregation, employers should confirm that timekeeping and payroll systems can accurately capture and sum weeks worked across the full year.
Why This Matters
These updates are not just additional boxes to check. The new grouping requirements, which now combine race/ethnicity, sex, job category, pay band, exemption status, and employment type, will significantly increase the number of employee groups in each report and the complexity of data validation. Employers will need to pull together data points that often live in different systems (HR, timekeeping, payroll, and vendor reporting), and the inclusion of exemption status as a reporting field places classification decisions front and center. Positions where job duties or pay practices have shifted over the past year may draw additional attention if exempt/nonexempt designations are not aligned with actual work performed.
The CRD has also signaled its continued focus on enforcement. CRD Director Kevin Kish noted that “large employers have an important role to play by submitting their data on time and conducting their own assessments to ensure compliance.” The department has acted on noncompliance in the past, including settlements with employers over failures to report pay data. The CRD has also used reported data to support enforcement actions involving pay discrimination and equal pay violations.
On The Radar: SB 464 And New Requirements For 2026 And Beyond
Beyond the 2025 reporting cycle, employers should be aware of Senate Bill 464 (SB 464), signed into law on October 13, 2025. SB 464 introduces several important requirements that will take effect in 2026, including:
- Separate retention of demographic data: Employers will be required to retain demographic data used for California pay data reports separately from employees’ other personnel records.
- Mandatory penalties for failure to file: Courts will now be required to impose penalties on employers that fail to submit pay data reports to the CRD. Labor contractors face the same penalties for failing to provide data to filing employers. Penalties include:
- $100 per employee for a first violation
- $200 per employee for subsequent violations
Looking Ahead To 2027: New Job Categories
The most significant change under SB 464 is that beginning with the 2027 filing cycle, employers will be required to use 23 job categories that generally align with Standard Occupational Classification (SOC) groups. Currently, California’s pay data reports use the 10 EEO-1 job categories. Because there is no direct mapping between the current EEO-1 categories and the new SOC-aligned categories, this transition will likely require substantial effort. Organizations should begin planning for the 2027 transition now to allow ample time for job category mapping, system updates, and data validation.
Practical Steps For Employers
Given the expanded reporting requirements and the May 13, 2026 deadline, employers should begin preparing now. There are several practical moves to consider:
- Update HRIS and payroll systems: Ensure systems can track exemption status, employment type, and weeks worked, and that these fields can be exported and aggregated for reporting purposes.
- Review exemption classifications: Identify positions where duties or pay practices have shifted over the past year and confirm that exempt and nonexempt designations remain appropriate under California law and the FLSA.
- Standardize employment type definitions: Adopt clear internal criteria for full-time, part-time, and intermittent classifications, and apply them consistently across establishments and departments.
- Confirm weeks-worked reporting capability: Determine whether payroll or timekeeping systems can calculate weeks worked reliably, including how paid leave weeks will be collected and aggregated.
- Coordinate with labor contractors: Confirm that contractors can provide exemption status, employment type, and weeks worked data, and establish timelines and data-quality expectations to avoid delays.
- Quality-check job and demographic data: Verify that job category, establishment assignments, and demographic fields are complete and current to reduce avoidable inconsistencies in the final report.
- Document methodologies and assumptions: Where estimation is required or permitted, document the approach in advance to support consistency and defensibility.
- Assign internal ownership early: Confirm which teams will be responsible for pulling and validating each required field and build a timeline that includes time for review and corrections before the May 13 deadline.
The CRD’s pay data portal is now open for Reporting Year 2025 submissions. Employers can access the reporting handbook, user guide, Excel templates, CSV examples, and updated FAQ on the CRD’s pay data reporting page here. Given the expanded scope of this year’s requirements and the enforcement framework taking shape under SB 464, employers should begin assembling their data well in advance of the May 13 filing deadline.
