SB 464, a new law in California effective 1-1-26, will change pay data reporting starting with employers’ 2025 reporting year.
What Pay Data Reporting Currently Is
Right now, if a business has 100 or more employees, it must file a Pay Data Report each May about the previous year’s workforce. This report includes things such as:
- headcount by race, ethnicity and sex in broad job categories
- how many workers fall into each pay band and
- average and median pay for those groups
What SB 464 Adds for 2025 Reporting
For the 2025 reporting year (due 5-13-26), the Civil Rights Department introduced additional required fields in the reporting templates:
- Exemption Status (exempt vs. non-exempt)
- Employment Type (full-time, part-time, intermittent)
- Total Annual Weeks Worked (number of weeks in which an employee received pay, including paid leave)
The new law also makes provision for the Civil Rights Department to request that courts penalize employers for not filing.
Before 2026, the law said a court may impose penalties if an employer failed to file a required pay data report. Now, under SB 464:
- Courts must impose civil penalties when requested by the Civil Rights Department.
- Penalties are $100 per employee for the first failure and $200 per employee for subsequent failures.
- Labor contractors who fail to provide data could share in those penalties.
Datatech customers can expect a software update within the coming weeks. Until then, hold off on generating your pay data reports.
Once the update is ready, we will provide further instruction on updating existing employees with the new information required. This will need to be completed before generating your pay data files.