The Governor’s signing deadline passed on 12 October, and the annual round of alerts followed within the week. Nearly all of them are organised by subject: wage and hour here, leaves there, discrimination after that. That is a sensible way to write a summary and a useless way to plan a quarter.
An employer does not have a wage-and-hour problem in November. It has a capacity problem. Someone has to do the work, that person already has a job, and there are about eight weeks left. So here is the same list, sorted by the only variable that matters between now and 1 January: how much of somebody’s time each item is going to take.
Heavy: two laws that require a project, not a memo
SB 294, the Workplace Know Your Rights Act
This applies to every California employer, with no size threshold, and it is the largest single piece of new administrative work in the 2026 set.
You must give every current employee a standalone written notice on or before 1 February 2026, and annually after that, and to every new hire at the time of hire. The notice covers workers’ compensation, protections against unfair immigration-related practices, employee rights during an I-9 inspection or an interaction with an immigration agency, constitutional rights if law enforcement enters the workplace, the right to organise and engage in protected concerted activity, and how to reach the relevant enforcement agencies. It must go out in the language you normally use for employment communications, and you must retain proof of delivery for three years.
Separately, by 30 March 2026 you must give employees the opportunity to designate an emergency contact to be notified if they are arrested or detained at work or during work hours, and you must honour that designation.
Why this is a project. The word to notice is standalone. This is not a poster, and it is not a paragraph you can bolt onto the handbook acknowledgment. It is a separate document, distributed to a named list of people, in the right language, with evidence retained. If your employee roster lives partly in a payroll system and partly in a spreadsheet, you will discover that this quarter rather than in February.
The Labor Commissioner is directed to post a template notice, which will relieve you of the drafting. It will not relieve you of the distribution, the translation, or the proof.
SB 513, training records in the personnel file
This one is quietly demanding, and it has been widely under-reported because it does not create a new training requirement. It creates a new records requirement, which is worse, because records requirements are enforced on a thirty-day clock you do not control.
SB 513 amends Labor Code section 1198.5. It does not oblige you to create training records. But where you maintain them, the employee’s personnel file must include, for each training: the employee’s name, the name of the training provider, the duration and date of the training, the core competencies covered including any equipment or software skills, and any resulting certification or qualification. Those records are then producible on a personnel-file inspection request, and failure to produce within thirty days exposes you to a civil penalty of seven hundred and fifty dollars, injunctive relief, and attorney’s fees.
Now consider what you already train on. Harassment prevention. Workplace violence prevention, initially and annually. Whatever your equipment, your software, and your industry require. Most of those records currently sit with whoever ran the session, in whatever format that vendor produced, in a folder nobody has opened since. Under SB 513 they belong in the personnel file, in a shape that satisfies five named elements.
Doing this properly in December is an afternoon of tedium. Doing it in response to a records request is a scramble with a penalty attached.
Moderate: three laws that require you to rewrite a document
AB 692, the end of stay-or-pay agreements
From 1 January 2026, a contract term requiring a worker to pay the employer or a third-party training provider on separation is void. That reaches quit fees, replacement-hire fees, and training-repayment clauses. The law is not retroactive; it does not reach contracts entered into before that date.
Two carve-outs matter for ordinary employers. A discretionary retention bonus survives if the repayment terms sit in a separate agreement, the worker gets at least five business days to consult counsel, repayment is prorated over a retention period of no more than two years, and the worker may defer receipt until the period ends. Tuition repayment survives if it is proportional to the required employment period. Get the conditions wrong and the remedy is actual damages or five thousand dollars per worker, whichever is greater, plus injunctive relief and fees.
If you have ever paid for a certification, a commercial licence, a bootcamp, or a relocation on the understanding that the employee would stay or repay, your template needs to be redrawn before you use it again in January.
SB 642, what a pay scale now has to mean
California has required a pay scale in job postings, for employers with fifteen or more employees, since 2023. SB 642 changes what the phrase means. From 1 January 2026 a pay scale is a good faith estimate of the salary or hourly wage range the employer reasonably expects to pay for the position upon hire.
That is a narrower thing than most employers have been publishing. A range that spans an entire job family, or that runs from the bottom of a grade to the top of it, is not an estimate of what you expect to pay a new hire. It is a description of a structure.
SB 642 also broadens “wages” for equal pay purposes to reach bonuses, stock, stock options, profit sharing, and other forms of compensation; replaces “opposite sex” with “another sex”; and extends the limitations period from two years to three, with a six-year lookback on damages. A range you publish next year can be evidence in a claim brought in 2029.
SB 464, pay data reporting
Only for employers at or above one hundred payroll employees, or one hundred labor contractor employees. Two changes arrive on 1 January 2026. The demographic information you gather for the report must be collected and stored separately from personnel records. And the civil penalties, one hundred dollars per employee for a first failure and two hundred for a subsequent one, become mandatory on the Department’s request rather than discretionary with the court.
A further change, the shift from ten reporting categories to twenty-three, arrives in 2027 and affects the report you file in May of that year. Not urgent. Worth knowing now, because it changes how you should be capturing job titles in the meantime.
Light: four laws that need a line in the handbook and nothing more
- AB 406. Since 1 October 2025, paid sick and safe time may be used to appear in court as a subpoenaed witness or to serve on a jury. From 1 January 2026 the protection extends to employees, and family members of employees, who are victims of specified crimes attending related judicial proceedings.
- SB 303. An employee’s own good-faith acknowledgment of their personal biases, given as part of bias mitigation training you solicited or required, does not by itself constitute unlawful discrimination. This is a shield for the training, not for anything done afterwards.
- SB 617. If you are subject to Cal-WARN, your notice content must now also carry employer contact information, a description of the CalFresh programme, and local workforce development board details.
- SB 261. An unpaid wage judgment left unsatisfied one hundred and eighty days after the appeal period closes now exposes the employer to a penalty of up to three times the judgment plus interest, with automatic fees to the prevailing employee, and successor liability that survives a reorganisation.
The payroll numbers, which need no debate
| Threshold | 2025 | From 1 January 2026 |
|---|---|---|
| State minimum wage | $16.50 per hour | $16.90 per hour |
| Exempt salary, executive, administrative and professional | $68,640 per year | $70,304 per year |
| Computer software professional exemption | $56.97 per hour | $58.85 per hour, or $122,573.13 per year |
| Licensed physician and surgeon exemption | $103.75 per hour | $107.17 per hour |
The exempt salary figure is two times the state minimum wage for full-time employment, so it moves whenever the minimum wage moves. Every January a number of employers raise their hourly staff, forget that the exempt floor moved as well, and carry a misclassified salaried employee into the new year at the old number. Check the whole exempt population against the new figure, not just the people near the line, because the line moved.
Local ordinances are a separate exercise. A number of California cities and counties raise their own rates on 1 January and others on 1 July, and the applicable rate follows where the employee works rather than where you are. If you have anyone working in a city with its own ordinance, check that ordinance directly.
One that did not pass
SB 7, the bill that would have restricted the use of automated decision systems in discipline, termination and scheduling, was vetoed. A good deal of commentary was written about it before the veto, and some of that commentary is still circulating.
But do not read the veto as a clear field. The Civil Rights Council’s regulations on automated decision systems under the Fair Employment and Housing Act took effect on 1 October 2025 and apply to employers with five or more employees. They reach resume screeners, targeted job advertising, skills assessments, and analysis of video or voice, including where the tool is operated by a vendor rather than by you. They require records relating to automated decisions, including datasets, to be retained for four years. If you use a screening tool, that obligation is already running.
A sequence for the next eight weeks
- November. Produce a clean, current employee roster with preferred language and delivery method. Everything in SB 294 depends on it, and it is the item most likely to be missing.
- November. Pull every training record you hold into one place and check it against the five elements SB 513 requires.
- December. Redraw the templates: offer letter, any training-repayment or retention-bonus agreement, and the job posting format.
- December. Run the exempt population against $70,304 and decide, per person, whether to raise the salary or reclassify. Reclassification has consequences beyond payroll, so decide it in December rather than discovering it in March.
- January. Distribute the SB 294 notice with time to spare before 1 February, and record what went to whom.
Sources
- California Department of Industrial Relations, minimum wage and exemption rates, dir.ca.gov.
- California Civil Rights Department, pay data reporting, calcivilrights.ca.gov.
- Chaptered text of SB 294, SB 513, AB 692, SB 642, SB 464, AB 406, SB 303, SB 617 and SB 261, 2025 session.
This describes general California employment requirements. It is not legal advice about your organisation, and it does not account for a collective bargaining agreement, an industry-specific order, or a local ordinance that may change the answer.