Reminder of Impending Deadline and New Requirements in California’s Annual Employer Pay Data Filing

Reminder: The SB 1162 filing deadline is May 8, 2024.

The deadline for this year’s mandatory Senate Bill 1162 government filing is fast approaching. This year’s deadline is May 8, 2024. The reporting is complex and will take much time for employers to prepare in order to meet the filing deadline.

Threshold to File

Employers that meet the following threshold requirements are required to file a demographic pay data report with the California Civil Rights Department: (1) the employer must have had 100 or more employees during the calendar year 2023, and at least 1 such employee either worked in CA or reported into CA remotely, OR (2) the employer must have had an aggregate of 100 or more employees during calendar year 2023 supplied by one or more third party “labor contractors” (such as a temp agency), and at least 1 such employee either worked in CA or reported into CA remotely (e.g., 50 employees from labor contractor A plus another 50 employees from labor contractor B equals 100 and meets the threshold).

Employers that meet threshold #1 above must file a “Payroll Employee Report.” Employers that meet threshold #2 above must file a “Labor Contractor Employee Report.” Employers that meet both thresholds must file both reports. Your company’s reporting to the State will only include the employees who are working in CA or reporting into CA remotely.

Additional Requirements for This Year

The first change this year is if you had any remote workers in your chosen Snapshot Period (this is one full pay period that you select which must fall within the window 10/1/2023 through 12/31/2023) for reporting, then you must count the number of remote workers separately. While remote workers also had to be included in your company’s reporting as part of the aggregated employee population in last year’s reporting, the difference this year is California requires employers to separately count them, by providing: (i) number of employees that do not work remotely; (ii) number of remote employees located within California, and (iii) number of remote employees located outside of California. This breakdown must be provided for each permutation of establishment, job category, race/ethnicity, sex, and pay band.

The second change is that last year for the Labor Contractor Employee Report only, “unknown” was an acceptable response for ethnicity/race and for gender. This is no longer allowed in this year’s reporting. This will require employers to spend extra time and effort to track down any unknown ethnicity/race and gender for employees in the Snapshot Period that is chosen for the Labor Contractor Employee Report. By contrast, the Payroll Employee Report has never allowed “unknown” as a response for ethnicity/race or gender.

Additonal Resources

The State’s FAQs are comprehensive on all of the filing requirements, and it is highly recommended that employers study the State’s FAQs (available here). For an additional overview on SB 1162, please watch EP’s webinar (available here) about SB 1162 filing requirements and also see EP’s SB 1162 FAQs page (available here).

EP has a technology solution to make this reporting simple

Keep in mind that EP technology offers an alternative solution that takes the pain out of SB 1162 reporting. Please contact the EP Insight Solutions team at insights@ep.com if you have questions about this alert or about signing up for the subscription fee-based Diversity Management solution containing a SB 1162 pay data reporting assistance module.