California Releases Pay Data Reporting Guide for Filers

The California Civil Rights Department (CRD) recently released updated guidance for the 2024 pay data reporting cycle. The updated guidance makes significant changes to the race/ethnicity categories while leaving most other aspects of the prior year’s reporting process in place.

The deadline for filing 2024 California pay reports is May 14, and the platform opened for new filings on Feb. 3.

California requires covered employers to file payroll employee reports for their own employees and labor contractor employee reports for their labor contractor employees.

California law mandates that private employers with 100 or more employees, including those hired through labor contractors, must annually submit a pay data report to the CRD, detailing employee pay, demographics, and other workforce data, including mean and median hourly wages broken down by race, ethnicity, and gender for each job category. Failure to comply can result in penalties of up to $100 per employee for the first offense and $200 per employee for subsequent violations.

Changes to Race/Ethnicity Categories

For the 2024 reporting cycle, the CRD has added “Middle Eastern or North African” (MENA) as a new race/ethnicity category. This change is based on action taken last year by the U.S. Office of Management and Budget (OMB) to revise Statistical Policy Directive No. 15 on race and ethnicity data standards. 

The newly published California Pay Data Reporting Handbook defines this category as “individuals with origins in any of the original peoples of the Middle East or North Africa, including, for example, Lebanese, Iranian, Egyptian, Syrian, Iraqi, and Israeli.” Another change for the 2024 reporting cycle is that the former “Two or More Races” category has been changed to “Multiracial and/or Multiethnic.” A minor change has been made to remove the word “Other” from the “Native Hawaiian or Other Pacific Islander” category so that it is now “Native Hawaiian or Pacific Islander.” The 2024 reporting materials provide an updated race/ethnicity/sex code incorporating these changes.

The CRD directs employers to report employees in the new MENA category if this information is available. If that information is not available, employers may continue reporting these employees following prior guidance based on the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission’s (EEOC’s) instructions for reporting race/ethnicity on the EEO-1 survey. 

For instance, if an employer has self-ID information for employees for which MENA was an available category, the employer may use that information to show which employees have identified under this category. On the other hand, if that information is not available, the employer is free to use the 2023 EEO-1 guidance with respect to these employees. Under the 2023 EEO-1 guidance, individuals with Middle Eastern and/or North African origins are under the “White” race/ethnicity category. This guidance means that employers that collected self-ID information under the prior EEO-1 guidance may continue to report using that self-ID information and do not have to gather new self-ID information to complete their 2024 reports.

Many Things Remain the Same

Outside of the changes to race/ethnicity categories, many of the reporting standards from 2023 remain in place for 2024, including the following:

• The CRD did not update its guidance as to which workers are labor contractor employees who must be included in the 2024 reports. There was some hope that the CRD would provide additional information to help employers understand this requirement. However, the provided information seems to be nearly identical to the guidance in last year’s FAQs.
• The 12 pay bands used in 2023 remain the same for 2024. Each reported employee’s 2024 W-2 wages are used to place that employee in one of these 12 pay bands for reporting purposes.
• Client employers are encouraged to report to the CRD labor contractors that do not supply all necessary reporting data but are not required to do so. Just as with the 2023 reporting cycle, the FAQs state that client employers “should” email the CRD to report labor contractors that do not provide all required reporting information. The CRD tells client employers to provide names, addresses, federal employer identification numbers, and state employer identification numbers for the labor contractors as well as documentation of the effort to obtain the required information in these emails.
• The 2024 reports continue the requirement to provide the same information on remote workers required for the 2023 reports, including identifying which employees work remotely and which remote employees live in and outside California.
• The 2024 guidance reiterates that labor contractors must provide data showing the client employer establishment where their labor contractor employees are assigned to perform work and that labor contractors should not provide data showing their own establishments. This has been a point of confusion since labor contractor employee reporting began.

New Reference Resources

The CRD has issued additional resources to help filers for the 2024 reporting cycle. For the first time, the CRD has issued a 2024 California Pay Data Reporting Handbook. For prior reporting years, the CRD had issued FAQs and other guidance, but before this year, it had not provided a handbook. The handbook is 23 pages long and includes information on which employers must file reports, how the filing should be made, and other reporting requirements. 

Unlike the FAQs, which can sometimes be challenging to follow, the handbook’s organization provides a more user-friendly guide to the pay data filing process. However, the FAQs may still need to be consulted because they include additional details that could be important to filers.

Another change for the 2024 reporting cycle is that the instructions for completing the reporting templates for the payroll employee and labor contractor employee reports are no longer included as a tab in each template. Instead, the instructions are now found in separate 10-page documents. These instructions provide more details than the instruction tabs from prior years’ reporting cycles. 

Both sets of instructions include an overview section, step-by-step instructions, and a section discussing single-establishment and multiple-establishment reporting before providing a discussion of each column in the template. This discussion provides important information on the data being requested, the type of data accepted, and character limits. These updated instruction sets, as well as the handbook, are nice additions to the CRD’s user resources.

Now may be a good time for employers to assess their preparations to file the 2024 California payroll employee and labor contractor employee pay data reports.

James A. Patton Jr. is an attorney with Ogletree Deakins in Birmingham, Ala. Kiosha H. Dickey is an attorney with Ogletree Deakins in Columbia, S.C. Christopher W. Olmsted is an attorney with Ogletree Deakins in San Diego. © 2025 Ogletree Deakins. All rights reserved. Reposted with permission.