Claims, limitations & penalties

The penalty estimates build on the premium record in one chain: a workday with a potential meal or rest violation is a premium workday; a pay period containing at least one premium workday whose premium is assumed unpaid is a deficient pay period; and the deficient-pay-period count drives the § 226 schedule and the PAGA base penalty, each re-counted inside its own limitations window. Every link is an estimate resting on a disclosed assumption, not an adjudicated fact.

• § 226 wage statements — the per-employee schedule over deficient pay periods: $50 for the first, $100 each additional, capped at $4,000.
• § 203 waiting time — employees inactive for more than 28 days at the dataset’s end are assumed separated; each books 30 days at 8× the average hourly rate.
• PAGA — the base civil penalty per deficient pay period, inside the 1-year window; higher tiers are disclosed, not computed.
• Daily overtime / double time — identified in hours from daily worked time; not valued in dollars, and weekly overtime is not computed.

A pay period is deficient when it contains at least one potential meal or rest violation whose premium is assumed unpaid. Two display-time levers adjust that count while reading, without re-running the analysis: the premium buffer offsets each pay period’s premium counts first, and the assumed-paid share (default 0% — assume no premiums were paid) then removes the assumed-paid fraction.

Per employee, the estimate follows the § 226(e) schedule — $50 for the first deficient pay period, $100 for each additional — capped at $4,000 per employee: the smaller of the running schedule and the cap.

penalty per employee = min( 50 + 100 × (deficient pay periods − 1), 4000 )

3 deficient pay periods: $50 + $100 × 2 = $250

40 deficient pay periods: $50 + $100 × 39 = $3,950 — the last count under the cap

41 or more: $50 + $100 × 40 = $4,050 → capped at $4,000

Two statutory elements are assumed, not evaluated: § 226(e) conditions the penalty on a knowing and intentional failure and on resulting injury — facts outside the timekeeping record. The estimate quantifies the schedule as if those elements were met; whether they are is a merits question the data cannot answer.

Inside the 1-year § 226 window, deficient pay periods are re-counted and the cap re-applied per employee — the windowed figure is never scaled down from the all-time figure. A non-zero assumed-paid share scales the count before the schedule: at 50% assumed paid, 12 deficient pay periods enter the schedule as 6. The case figure is the per-employee estimate summed across employees.

An employee whose last recorded shift falls more than 28 days before the dataset’s most recent date is assumed separated. “Last observed” is a proxy: the timekeeping record contains no termination dates, so separation is inferred from inactivity, and the inactivity threshold is adjustable per analysis.

Each assumed-separated employee books the full 30-day statutory maximum. § 203 continues wages for up to 30 days until final wages are paid, and the timekeeping record contains no payment dates that could support a shorter accrual — so the estimate assumes the maximum, at a daily rate of the average hourly rate × 8 hours:

penalty per separated employee = average hourly rate × 8 × 30

One statutory element is assumed, not evaluated: § 203 conditions the penalty on a willful failure to pay final wages, and an objectively reasonable, good-faith dispute that wages were owed defeats willfulness (Naranjo v. Spectrum Security Services (2024) aligned the § 226 and § 203 good-faith standards). Willfulness turns on facts outside the timekeeping record; the estimate quantifies the schedule as if the element were met — whether it is, is a merits question the data cannot answer.

The statutory predicate — an unpaid amount due at the employee’s separation — is likewise assumed: the estimate accrues for every assumed-separated employee, whether or not an unpaid amount existed at their separation. Testing the predicate per employee requires payroll data the analysis does not yet ingest.

The figure is scoped to a 3-year limitations window (Pineda v. Bank of America (2010) places a stand-alone § 203 claim under the 3-year period for a liability created by statute). The window keys to the separation date, which is inferred from the last day worked rather than known, so the boundary carries that inference: an employee whose inferred separation falls outside the window is excluded, and the inferred date can run up to 72 hours earlier than the true final-wage due date, which makes the boundary conservative. A future employee-census upload will supply actual separation dates and replace both inferences.

PAGA (the Private Attorneys General Act, Lab. Code § 2699) lets an aggrieved employee recover civil penalties for Labor Code violations on the state’s behalf. The 2024 reform (AB 2288 / SB 92) restructured the penalty tiers, repealing the prior $100 / $200 initial-and-subsequent formula.

One tier is computable from timekeeping data alone: a base civil penalty per deficient pay period. The analysis defaults it to $100 — a configurable model assumption, not a statutory figure. The subsequent-violation, malice, and cure-dependent tiers turn on facts outside the timekeeping record — prior notice, willfulness, cure status — so they are disclosed, never computed.

PAGA (base) = base civil penalty per pay period × deficient pay periods (1-year window)

The count is the same deficient-pay-period count the § 226 estimate builds on — after the premium buffer, inside the 1-year PAGA window (CCP § 340(a)) — but before the assumed-paid reduction: the civil penalty attaches to the potential violation itself, regardless of the § 226 assumed-paid assumption. There is no per-employee cap ($4,000 is a § 226 rule), so the figure is a case-level multiply: at $100 across 260 windowed deficient pay periods, the base estimate is $26,000.

Of any recovered PAGA civil penalty, 65% goes to the Labor & Workforce Development Agency and 35% to the aggrieved employees (Lab. Code § 2699, as amended by the 2024 reform). The split is shown for reference; it does not change the gross figure. The base penalty is a display-time assumption, adjustable without re-running the analysis.

Lab. Code § 510 sets daily premium thresholds: hours worked beyond 8 in a workday are overtime, and beyond 12 are double time. The analysis identifies these hours from each shift’s worked time — the sum of its segments, not the shift duration — with strict boundaries: a workday of exactly 8.0 worked hours has no overtime, and exactly 12.0 has no double time.

The output is hours, not dollars. Overtime and double-time hours are reported per workday and in aggregate; no overtime dollar exposure is computed — valuing it requires pay-rate detail, including the Ferra regular-rate recompute, outside the current scope. Weekly overtime (the 40-hour week, also set by § 510) is likewise not computed.

Before any figure is computed, the analysis itself is bounded by the outer envelope: time segments dated more than 4 years before the filing date — older than the longest limitations period — are excluded from analysis and counted as excluded in the data-coverage views. Uploads are kept whole; editing the filing date and re-running the analysis re-applies the envelope.

Each figure is scoped to its claim’s California limitations period, measured back from the case filing date. The window is a lookback floor, not a range: a pay period is in scope when its end date falls on or after the filing date minus the limitations period. There is no upper bound — pay periods after the filing date are in scope — and a pay period straddling the floor counts whole.

The 4-year premium reach is itself a disclosed pleading assumption — the model assumes the UCL restitution route rather than the shorter period premium claims otherwise carry. Inside the 1-year § 226 window, deficient pay periods are re-counted and the $4,000 cap re-applied per employee — an employee at the cap all-time can fall below it in-window. No setting overrides a window’s length.

The windows scope what is displayed, at reading time: all uploaded data is retained, and the filing date can be changed without re-running the analysis.