California Workplace Harassment and Discrimination Statistics, 2026

Most statistics pages about workplace harassment repeat the same national figures. These pages are built on California data: the EEOC's state by state charge tables, which run from fiscal 2009 to fiscal 2025, and the Civil Rights Department's annual reports for 2022, 2023 and 2024, which list complaints by basis and by county. We added the Bureau of Labor Statistics county labor forces to compute filings per 100,000 workers, a figure no agency publishes. National numbers appear only as a baseline.

Every figure on these pages was checked against its source at the time of publication, and every page names its sources at the bottom. Where we computed something ourselves, a share, a change, a rate, we say so.

The pages

Harassment

• Sexual harassment statistics
• Workplace harassment, every kind
• Hostile work environment
• Sexual assault at work
• Sexual harassment complaints by year, California vs U.S.
• Who reports, and what happens after
• Sexual harassment claims filed by men

Discrimination

• Workplace discrimination, all bases
• Race
• Age
• Sex and gender
• Pregnancy
• Disability
• Religion
• National origin and immigrant workers
• LGBTQ workers
• Retaliation
• Wrongful termination
• Equal pay and the wage gap
• Workplace bullying

Agencies, money and outcomes

• EEOC charges in California by year
• CRD complaints by year
• EEOC or CRD, where California workers file
• Settlements and what the agencies recovered
• Outcomes and win rates

By county

• All 58 counties
• Los Angeles County
• Orange County
• San Diego County
• Inland Empire
• Bay Area
• Sacramento area
• Central Valley

From our files

• The bank teller case

The headline numbers

How we built these pages

The EEOC publishes its enforcement statistics as spreadsheets, updated each spring for the fiscal year that ended the previous September. We used the fiscal 2025 release. The Civil Rights Department publishes a PDF annual report each year, the most recent covering 2024, with complaint counts by basis in Tables 1 and 2 and by county in Appendix C. We extracted every table and checked the totals against the printed sums. Labor force figures are the Bureau of Labor Statistics local area series for August 2026 statewide and the latest available month by county.

Two conventions run through every page. Both agencies count a complaint under every basis it alleges, so basis columns add up to more than the number of complaints. And the EEOC state tables count only charges filed with the EEOC, while CRD counts the much larger number of complaints filed with the state, so the two are never added together.

These pages are updated once a year when the new releases arrive. If you need a figure that is not here, the sources at the bottom of each page are where we got ours.

What these numbers mean if it happened to you

The numbers on these pages describe hundreds of thousands of California workers over the last few years. If you are one of them, the number that matters is one. California gives you three years to file with the Civil Rights Department, one year after that to sue, uncapped damages, and a statute that covers nearly every employer in the state. The review is free.

Sources

The figures on this page were taken from the following publications, as released by the agencies. Percentages, changes, sums and rates per 100,000 workers are our own arithmetic from those figures.

• EEOC, Table E1b, charge receipts by state and basis, FY 2009 to FY 2025, www.eeoc.gov
• EEOC, Table E1a, charge receipts by basis or statute, FY 1997 to FY 2025, www.eeoc.gov
• EEOC, Table E1c, charge receipts and resolutions by type, FY 1997 to FY 2025, www.eeoc.gov
• EEOC, Table E2a, charges alleging harassment, FY 2010 to FY 2025, www.eeoc.gov
• EEOC, Table E2c, Title VII sexual harassment charge receipts and resolutions, FY 2010 to FY 2025, www.eeoc.gov
• California Civil Rights Department, 2024 Annual Report (complaint tables and county appendix), calcivilrights.ca.gov
• California Civil Rights Department, 2023 Annual Report, calcivilrights.ca.gov
• California Civil Rights Department, 2022 Annual Report, calcivilrights.ca.gov
• U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, Local Area Unemployment Statistics, California and county labor force, latest month available in September 2026, www.bls.gov

Frequently asked questions