Equal Pay Statistics for California, 2026

Pay discrimination produces fewer complaints than any other kind for one reason: people do not know what their coworkers earn. California has attacked that directly, with a Fair Pay Act that compares substantially similar work rather than identical jobs, a ban on asking about salary history, pay scale disclosure in job postings, and mandatory pay data reporting for large employers. The filing counts are small. The stakes are not.

California Equal Pay Act charges by year

EPA charges from California have run between 46 and 99 a year in this series. Most pay discrimination claims are filed as sex discrimination under Title VII or the state act rather than under the Equal Pay Act, so the sex charge counts on our gender discrimination page capture more of them.

A note on how to read the EEOC figures. The EEOC counts a charge under every basis it alleges, so a single charge that claims sex discrimination and retaliation shows up in both columns and the columns add up to more than the total. The state figures cover charges filed with the EEOC itself, not the tens of thousands of complaints California workers file with the state Civil Rights Department, which we cover separately.

The national series and outcomes

Nationally the EEOC resolved 1,261 Equal Pay Act charges in fiscal 2025. 115 settled, 103 were withdrawn with benefits, 63 ended in a reasonable cause finding, 729 in a no cause finding and 250 were closed administratively. Merit resolutions totaled 281, 22.3 percent of resolutions, and the agency obtained 14.4 million dollars for charging parties without litigation.

The pay gap

The National Women's Law Center calculates from Census data that women overall were paid 76 cents for every dollar paid to men in 2024 when part time and part year workers are included, with far larger gaps for Black, Latina and Native women. The gap is a population measure, not a count of unlawful acts, but it is the reason California keeps expanding its pay transparency rules.

What California law provides

• The Fair Pay Act requires equal pay for substantially similar work, viewed as a composite of skill, effort and responsibility, across job titles and across locations.
• The employer must justify a gap with a seniority system, a merit system, a system that measures production, or a bona fide factor other than sex such as education or experience, applied reasonably.
• Employers cannot ask about salary history, must give the pay scale for a position on request, and must include the pay scale in job postings if they have fifteen or more employees.
• Employers with 100 or more employees must file annual pay data reports with CRD, broken down by job category, race, ethnicity and sex.
• Race and ethnicity pay gaps are covered by the same statute, not only sex.

The deadline for a Fair Pay Act claim is two years, three if the violation was willful, and no agency filing is required first.

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 E3a, Equal Pay Act charge receipts and resolutions, FY 1997 to FY 2025, www.eeoc.gov
• National Women's Law Center, the wage gap state by state, 2024 data, nwlc.org

Frequently asked questions