Wage Statement Violations
California requires an accurate, itemized wage statement with every paycheck, and penalties apply even when the wages themselves were correct.
California requires employers to give every employee an accurate, itemized wage statement each time wages are paid. Labor Code section 226 lists what the statement must contain and makes an employer liable for penalties when the statement is missing or incomplete, even in cases where the wages themselves were paid correctly.
What the Wage Statement Must Show
Section 226(a) requires nine specific items:
- Gross wages earned
- Total hours worked, for employees who are not exempt
- The number of piece rate units earned and the applicable piece rate, where that applies
- All deductions, itemized separately
- Net wages earned
- The inclusive dates of the pay period
- The employee’s name and either the last four digits of their Social Security number or an employee identification number
- The name and address of the legal entity that is the employer
- All applicable hourly rates in effect during the period and the hours worked at each rate
The standard courts apply is whether a reasonable person could promptly and easily determine the required information from the statement alone, without performing outside calculations or consulting other documents.
Case Results
Common Defects
salaried employee
hours rather than listed separately
line instead of itemized
name or address
inaccurate
period shown as one blended rate
pay left off entirely
no paper option available at no cost
Penalties
An employee who suffers injury as a result of a knowing and intentional violation may recover the greater of actual damages or $50 for the initial pay period in which a violation occurs and $100 for each subsequent pay period, subject to an aggregate cap of $4,000 per employee, plus costs and reasonable attorneys’ fees. An employee is deemed to have suffered injury when the employer fails to provide a wage statement at all.
A separate obligation applies to records. An employer must keep wage statement records for at least three years and must produce copies on request to a current or former employee. Failure to comply within 21 days of the request carries its own penalty of $750.
Deadlines
The deadline for a section 226 penalty claim is one year. That is shorter than the deadline for most underlying wage claims, so an employee may still have a timely claim for unpaid wages covering three or four years even after the wage statement penalties have expired.
Relationship to Other Wage Claims
Wage statement defects rarely appear on their own. Missing overtime hours usually reflect unpaid overtime. A blended rate can conceal an unpaid shift differential. An omitted commission points to an unpaid commission. For that reason, a wage statement review is often the fastest way to identify what else may be wrong with an employee’s pay.
Systemic defects can also support a claim under the Private Attorneys General Act, though the 2024 reforms reduced the penalty to $25 per pay period where the employee could still promptly and easily determine the accurate information from the statement.
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