Workplace Discrimination Complaints by County: All 58 California Counties

The Civil Rights Department publishes an appendix each year listing complaints by the county where they arose. We have compiled the last three reports into one table, ranked by 2024 total, and added a rate per 100,000 workers for every county whose labor force we pulled from the Bureau of Labor Statistics. As far as we know, nobody else publishes this table.

All counties, ranked by 2024 complaints

How to read the county tables. CRD records the county where each complaint arose, and its Appendix C counts complaints of every kind by county: employment complaints accepted for investigation, employment complaints filed for a right to sue, housing complaints, and smaller categories under the Unruh Act, the Ralph Act and other statutes, which are in the total but not shown separately here. The county tables cover complaints with a county recorded, which is fewer than the statewide totals, so the sum of the counties is lower than the statewide figures on our CRD by year page. Rates divide the 2024 employment filings (investigated plus right to sue) by the county labor force.

What the ranking shows

Five counties, Los Angeles, Alameda, Orange, San Diego and Sacramento, produced 60 percent of all complaints with a county recorded in 2024. Los Angeles alone produced 4,825, more than the next three counties combined.

Rates tell a different story from counts. Alameda County, home to Oakland, had 168.2 employment filings per 100,000 workers, the highest of the large counties, followed by San Francisco at 100.7, Sacramento at 95.7 and Los Angeles at 84.7. Orange County, with the third largest labor force in the state, filed at 78.5 per 100,000, and San Diego at 52.6. Public sector employment, union density and the presence of employment lawyers all push the rate up, and none of those things measures how much discrimination happens.

Detailed pages: Los Angeles County, Orange County, San Diego County, the Inland Empire, the Bay Area, Sacramento and the Central Valley.

What these numbers mean if it happened to you

• The county changes the courthouse and the jury, not the law. Every county is covered by the same Fair Employment and Housing Act, the same three year deadline and the same uncapped damages.
• A lawsuit is normally filed in the superior court of the county where you worked, or where the employer has its principal office.
• Rural counties show very small counts. That reflects fewer workers and fewer lawyers, not fewer problems, and a claim from a small county is worth exactly what the same claim is worth in Los Angeles.

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.

• 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

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