How to File a Wage Claim for Unpaid Wages

Disclaimer: Informational only, not tax, legal, or financial advice. Wage-and-hour rules change and facts vary case by case. For guidance on your situation, check current U.S. Department of Labor guidance or consult an employment attorney.

You asked. They said the hours were already paid, or the check is coming, or nothing at all. Now the email thread has gone quiet and the money is still missing.

At that point you stop negotiating and start filing. There are three places to file, they do not deliver the same thing, and one of them changed in a way most guides on the internet have not caught up with yet.

Here is how each route works, what it can and cannot recover, how long you have, and what to bring.

First, Put the Ask in Writing

If you have only asked verbally, send one written request before you file anywhere. Email or text, dated, naming the pay periods and the dollar amount you believe is owed.

Two reasons. It sometimes just works, because payroll errors are common and a specific written number is easier to fix than a hallway complaint. And it creates the paper trail every agency will ask you for. In a handful of states a written demand is also a prerequisite for penalties: Colorado, for example, adds significant penalties once a written demand goes unanswered for 14 days.

Keep it factual and short. You are not building an argument, you are creating a dated record that you asked and they did not pay. If you need the full escalation sequence before this point, final paycheck laws when you quit covers the deadlines your employer was already supposed to meet.

Your Three Routes: State Agency, Federal WHD, or Court

All over the internet these get treated as interchangeable free options, which they are not. Note the vocabulary too, because using it correctly makes you sound like someone who knows the process: you file a claim with a state labor agency, and a complaint with the federal Wage and Hour Division (WHD).

	State labor agency	Federal WHD complaint	Private lawsuit
Covers	All state wage law: earned wages, commissions, final pay, PTO where owed	FLSA only: minimum wage and overtime	Both, depending on what is pled
Cost	Free	Free	Contingency; a prevailing employee gets attorney’s fees under 216(b)
Lawyer needed	No	No	Practically, yes
Liquidated damages	Varies; some states have their own penalty schemes	No, barred in pre-litigation settlements since June 27, 2025	Yes, an equal additional amount unless the employer proves good faith
Deadline	180 days to 6 years depending on state	2 years, 3 if willful	2 years, 3 if willful
Confidential	Usually not; your employer sees the claim	Yes; your name and the existence of the complaint are protected	No
Scope	Your claim only	Can expand to the employer’s entire payroll	Can expand into a collective action

What changed in June 2025

For years, the standard advice was that a WHD complaint could get you your back wages plus an equal amount in liquidated damages, at no cost and with no lawyer. That advice is now wrong.

On June 27, 2025, WHD issued Field Assistance Bulletin 2025-3, which rescinded the prior policy. The agency may no longer seek, pursue, accept, endorse, or use as a bargaining chip any liquidated damages in a pre-litigation administrative matter under the FLSA. A supervised settlement under section 216(c) now recovers unpaid minimum wages and overtime, and nothing else.

Liquidated damages did not disappear. 29 U.S.C. 216(b) still provides “an additional equal amount as liquidated damages,” and it is still the default rather than a bonus, unless the employer proves it acted in good faith and on reasonable grounds. But that doubling is now available only through a private lawsuit or litigation the Department of Labor files itself.

Which route fits your claim

Take a recent, modest, state-law-flavored claim to your state agency. Unpaid final check, missing commissions, a vacation payout your state treats as earned wages. Federal law says nothing about most of these; your state law does.

A systemic minimum wage or overtime problem goes to WHD. If the same thing is happening to everyone on your shift, a federal investigation can look at the whole payroll rather than just your paychecks, and your name stays out of it.

With a large dollar figure, talk to an employment lawyer first. If doubling the recovery is the difference between worth-it and not, you want to know that before you spend eight months in an administrative process that structurally cannot give it to you. Most employment attorneys will evaluate a wage case for free, and fee-shifting under 216(b) means you are not necessarily paying out of pocket.

The Deadline That Actually Applies to You

There are two clocks, and they do not run at the same speed.

The federal clock comes from 29 U.S.C. 255(a): two years from the date each paycheck was short, or three years if the violation was willful. Willful means the employer knew the conduct was illegal or showed reckless disregard for whether it was.

The state clock is whatever your state says, and the spread is enormous:

State	Window to file a wage claim
Texas	180 days from the date wages were due (jurisdictional)
California	1 to 4 years by claim type; 3 years for minimum wage, overtime, and unpaid breaks
New York	Up to 6 years under NY Labor Law 198(3)

Texas deserves the bold warning. Its 180-day window is jurisdictional, meaning a late claim is not a weaker claim, it is dismissed. The Texas Workforce Commission counts the filing date as the day it receives your claim, not the day you mailed it.

Check your own state’s window before you decide anything else. It is entirely possible for the state route to be closed while the federal one is wide open, or the reverse.

Filing does not pause the clock

Filing a complaint with WHD does not toll the FLSA statute of limitations. The two-year or three-year clock keeps running the entire time the investigation is open.

Wait fourteen months for a federal outcome and you may have quietly lost more than a year of recoverable wages before you ever reach a courtroom. Equitable tolling exists, but it is narrow and generally requires employer misconduct or extraordinary circumstances.

File this month, not next quarter. Every week that passes drops the oldest week off the back end of your claim.

What You Have to Prove, and What to Attach

Agencies want documents, not adjectives. Gather what you can:

Pay stubs for every period in dispute, plus a few clean ones for comparison
Your W-2 or 1099
Offer letter, rate agreement, or anything stating your pay rate
Posted schedules and any timesheets you submitted
Texts and emails about pay, hours, or schedule changes
Bank deposit records showing what actually landed
Names of coworkers who saw the same thing

If you are unsure what your stub is telling you, how to read a pay stub walks through each line, and what counts as hours worked covers the time your employer has to pay for in the first place.

The reason your own log carries weight

Employers are legally required to keep accurate time and pay records under 29 CFR Part 516. When they fail to, the law does not punish you for their bad recordkeeping. Under Anderson v. Mt. Clemens Pottery Co., 328 U.S. 680 (1946), you satisfy your burden by showing you performed the work and producing evidence supporting a “just and reasonable inference” of how much. Then the burden shifts to the employer to disprove your number.

So a dated log you kept yourself is the exact evidence that standard was built to accept, not a weak stand-in for records the employer never made.

This is where an hours tracker earns its place. ClockWage44 logs each shift on-device with start times, end times, breaks, and your rate, runs the paycheck engine so you can see what you should have been paid, and exports a dated record that stays yours rather than living in a system your employer can edit. You can also run the numbers through the overtime calculator or the timesheet calculator to put a specific figure on the claim form.

What Happens After You File

Expect months, not weeks. The three best-documented states each run it differently, and the federal process is different again.

Texas (Texas Workforce Commission). Your employer gets 14 days to respond. TWC investigates and issues a Preliminary Wage Determination Order. Either side has 21 days to appeal, and appeals go to a wage claim hearing. If you win and the employer does not pay, TWC collects from the employer; there is no state fund that pays you instead.

California (Labor Commissioner’s Office, DLSE). Your claim goes to a settlement conference first, where a deputy tries to resolve it without a hearing. If that fails, the claim proceeds to a Berman hearing where a hearing officer takes testimony and evidence and issues a decision within 15 days of its conclusion. On paper the Labor Commissioner decides within 30 days of filing whether to take the case and holds the hearing within about 90 days of that decision; in practice local caseloads stretch that, and most claims run several months to a year from filing to resolution.

New York (DOL Labor Standards). A pre-investigation review, then a jurisdiction determination, then a case number, then investigation (which can include field visits), then findings and remediation. NY DOL is explicit that the timeline depends primarily on how cooperative your employer is.

Federal (WHD). Intake, then a decision on whether to investigate. If they do, an investigator reviews payroll records and interviews employees privately, then holds a final conference with the employer. WHD does not commit to a timeline.

For scale on the federal side: in FY2025, WHD recovered $259 million in back wages for nearly 177,000 workers across just under 17,000 concluded compliance actions. That is roughly $1,465 per worker on average, and the highest recovery total since 2019. Food service accounted for more than $42 million of it; healthcare, more than $53 million.

Retaliation, and Money That May Already Be Waiting

Two things to close on, and the second one might pay you today.

They cannot punish you for this

The single most common reason workers never file is the fear of losing the job. 29 U.S.C. 215(a)(3) makes it illegal for an employer to fire, demote, cut your hours, or otherwise discriminate against you for complaining about wages, filing a claim, or cooperating with an investigation. That protection covers internal complaints too, not just formal filings.

Retaliation is its own separate violation with its own remedies, which can include reinstatement and lost wages. And federal complaints are confidential: WHD states plainly that the name of the complainant, the nature of the complaint, and whether a complaint exists at all may not be disclosed. If you are still employed and worried about exposure, that confidentiality asymmetry is a real factor in choosing your route.

Check whether the DOL is already holding your money

Before you file anything, spend two minutes on this. When WHD recovers back wages and cannot locate the worker they belong to, it holds the money for three years and then sends it to the U.S. Treasury.

Search your former employers in the Workers Owed Wages database at webapps.dol.gov/wow. If your name is there, verify your identity, submit Form WH-60, and payment is processed in roughly six weeks. As of October 1, 2025, all payments are electronic.

Anyone who has worked for a chain restaurant, a staffing agency, or a large healthcare operator should run this search. Money that is already recovered and sitting in an account is the fastest wage recovery there is.

The Habit That Wins These

The workers who get paid are the ones who wrote the hours down while they were working them, not the ones with the best argument.

Every step above (the written demand, the claim form, the investigator’s questions, the hearing) runs on dates, times, and numbers you can produce. Start logging tonight, whether or not you ever file anything. It takes seconds a day and it turns “they shorted me” into a figure with a date attached.

Off-the-Clock Work and Unpaid Hours: What counts as compensable time and how far back you can claim it.
Final Paycheck Laws When You Quit: State deadlines, PTO payout, and waiting-time penalties.
How to Calculate Overtime Pay: Check the rate your employer should have used.
Overtime Laws by State: Daily overtime and state rules that go beyond the FLSA.
Timesheet Calculator: Total your real hours for the periods in dispute.

References

Frequently Asked Questions

How do I file a complaint with the Department of Labor?

Call 1-866-487-9243 (1-866-4US-WAGE) or contact your nearest Wage and Hour Division office. Have your name and contact details, your employer's name, address, and phone, your manager or owner's name, a description of the work you did and when you did it, how and when you were paid, and your estimate of what you are owed. It is free, no lawyer is required, and complaints are confidential.

How far back can I claim unpaid wages?

Under the FLSA, two years, or three if the violation was willful. State windows vary a lot: Texas gives 180 days from the date the wages were due, California gives three years for minimum wage and overtime claims, and New York gives six years. Whichever window is shorter is the one that starts costing you weeks first.

Is it better to file with the state or the DOL?

It depends on the claim. A state agency enforces all of your state's wage protections, including final pay, commissions, and PTO where it is owed, while the federal Wage and Hour Division covers only FLSA minimum wage and overtime. WHD complaints are confidential and can expand into the employer's whole payroll; state claims are served on your employer but are usually faster for a single unpaid check.

Can I still get double damages if I file with the DOL?

No. Since Field Assistance Bulletin 2025-3 took effect on June 27, 2025, the Wage and Hour Division may not seek or accept liquidated damages in any pre-litigation settlement, so a supervised payment now covers unpaid minimum wages and overtime only. Liquidated damages are still available, but only through a private lawsuit under section 216(b) or litigation the Department itself files.

How long does a wage claim take?

Months, not weeks. Texas gives the employer 14 days to respond and then issues a preliminary determination that either side can appeal within 21 days. California schedules a settlement conference first and a hearing after that; on paper the Labor Commissioner decides within 30 days whether to take the case and holds the hearing within about 90 days of that decision, but local caseloads commonly stretch a claim to several months or a year. Federal investigations run largely on the employer's cooperation and have no fixed clock.

Does filing a claim stop the clock on my deadline?

No, and this catches people out. Filing an administrative complaint with the Wage and Hour Division does not pause the FLSA's two-year or three-year statute of limitations, so the oldest weeks of your claim keep falling off while the investigation runs. If a large amount is at stake, ask an employment lawyer about preserving your court deadline before you rely on an agency process.

What if my employer never kept a record of my hours?

The burden shifts to them. Employers must keep accurate time and pay records under 29 CFR Part 516, and under Anderson v. Mt. Clemens Pottery, when those records are inadequate you meet your burden by showing you performed the work and offering a reasonable estimate of how much. A dated log you kept yourself, with start times, end times, and breaks, is precisely the evidence that standard was written to accept.

Can I be fired for filing a wage claim?

No. Section 215(a)(3) of the FLSA makes it illegal to fire, demote, cut hours, or otherwise retaliate against you for complaining about wages or taking part in an investigation, and remedies can include reinstatement and lost wages. Federal complaints are also confidential: your name, the nature of the complaint, and even whether a complaint exists cannot be disclosed.

Is there money the DOL already recovered for me?

Possibly. When the Wage and Hour Division recovers back wages and cannot locate the worker, it holds the money for three years before sending it to the U.S. Treasury. Search your former employers at webapps.dol.gov/wow, submit Form WH-60 with identification if you find yourself listed, and payment is processed in about six weeks, electronically as of October 1, 2025.