Inside the rapidly changing world of compliance

Federal agencies including the U.S. Department of Labor, Equal Employment Opportunity Commission and Department of Homeland Security provided a series of updates on new and existing regulatory efforts to the White House Office of Management and Budget on Friday.

The filings provided timelines on forthcoming proposed and final rules such as worker classification while announcing new regulations addressing work hours for minors, protections for pregnant workers and disparate impact liability theory, among other subjects.

The announcements are part of the Trump administration’s broader push to reshape federal employment law compliance, particularly in the antidiscrimination and wage-and-hour contexts.

DOL targets October for independent contractor rule

One of the biggest items given more clarity is the Trump administration’s independent contactor rule, the proposed version of which DOL published in February.

The proposal would return the agency’s interpretation of the Fair Labor Standards Act closer to that of the version adopted during Trump’s first term in office. The rule would be centered on an “economic reality test” that examines a worker’s main source of income via two core factors: the degree of control the worker has over their work, and their opportunity for profit or loss based on initiative, investment or both.

DOL set an October 2026 deadline for the independent contractor final rule. It estimated that the rule would provide an “initial, one-time regulatory familiarization cost” of $488 million to be offset by a cost savings of nearly $683 million achieved through “increased clarity.”

Separately, the agency confirmed it is continuing its work on a proposed rule interpreting joint employment standards under the FLSA. DOL announced a proposal in April but has yet to provide a timeline for a final rule.

DOL also announced new wage-and-hour regulatory efforts, with one proposal aimed at addressing tip credits against the FLSA’s minimum wage requirements. Given an August timeline by DOL, the proposal would follow up on an area that has been addressed by successive administrations.

One of the most recent such efforts had been undertaken by the Biden administration, which sought to clarify when employers may take a tip credit against the FLSA’s minimum wage requirements for employees who perform both tipped and nontipped work, also known as a “dual job.” A federal judge struck down the proposal, and it was later discarded.

Another proposal follows a series of moves by state and local governments to ease labor shortages by allowing younger workers to take on more work hours. DOL targeted September for a rule to amend its regulatory standards under the FLSA relating to permissible work hours for 14- and 15-year-olds.

EEOC to revisit old guidance documents in enforcement shift

The nation’s federal workplace civil rights law enforcement agency made headlines in recent weeks when it submitted a plan to the White House to end its annual demographic data reporting requirement programs, like the EEO-1.

“This EEO data collection was not mandated by statute, but was an agency-created requirement, which imposed a significant financial and administrative burden on America’s employers, including thousands of small businesses,” the agency said in a statement attached to the OMB notice.

Attorneys who previously spoke to HR Dive generally advised HR departments to retain their EEO-1 reporting processes in spite of the news, both to prepare for any resumption of the program and to comply with applicable state data collections.

EEOC also announced the proposed rescission of several decades-old interpretive rules. One of the documents addressed disparate impact liability in the context of national origin discrimination, which follows the Trump administration’s broader efforts to end regulators’ reliance on disparate impact generally. A similar action would rescind a 1979 interpretive rule on affirmative action programs.

The commission also seeks to rescind a 1979 appendix to its guidelines on sex-based discrimination, which EEOC said had been written shortly after passage of the Pregnancy Discrimination Act. The agency said the appendix is “outdated” and predates the 2022 enactment of Pregnant Workers Fairness Act.

In a LinkedIn post Monday, Kalpana Kotagal, the EEOC’s lone Democratic commissioner, said that she voted against the agency’s regulatory changes. Specifically, Kotagal said the potential rollback of EEO-1 reporting could “kneecap its ability to investigate discrimination,” while the other proposed updates would weaken workers’ civil rights protections.

“I fear that the rescissions will leave a void that will sow uncertainty for employers and ultimately undermine equal employment opportunity,” Kotagal wrote. “This is an unforced error; we should be standing up for workers, not weakening their civil rights.”

Coming soon: Yet another update to the H-1B visa program

Employers have already had to adjust to an overhaul of the H-1B visa program for skilled foreign workers. Within the past year, the Trump administration issued changes to prevailing wage rates for visa holders, implemented wage-based selection criteria for visa petitions and announced a $100,000 fee on new H-1B visas — the latter having been subject to several legal challenges.

The regulatory agenda showed DHS is pursuing even more updates. The agency said it would propose a new rule in August seeking further H-1B program reform, including revisions of cap exemption eligibility, greater scrutiny for employers that have violated the program’s requirements and increased oversight over third-party placements.

“These changes are intended to improve the integrity of the H-1B nonimmigrant program and better protect U.S. workers’ wages and working conditions,” DHS said.

The U.S. Senate has confirmed two nominees to the National Labor Relations Board, securing a 3-1 Republican majority. 

Republican James Macy, a U.S. Department of Labor official, and Democrat David Prouty, were confirmed as part of a grouping of 74 nominations in a 51-47 vote. Macy will serve a term ending in August 2030, and Prouty, who will be serving a second term, will hold the role until August 2031. 

“The confirmations continue President Trump’s reshaping of the NLRB,” according to a Friday blog post by employer-side law firm Ogletree Deakins.

NLRB operated without a quorum for months after Trump’s controversial firing of Democrat Gwynne Wilcox in January 2025. The quorum was restored in December 2025 when the Senate confirmed Republicans James Murphy, a former career NLRB attorney, and Scott Mayer, former chief labor counsel at Boeing.

The board faced losing its quorum again as Prouty’s term approached its expiration date. “The timing of the new NLRB confirmations is significant in that it avoids a potential ‘quorum gap,’” Ogletree Deakins wrote. 

The board operated with a “functioning quorum” before the latest confirmation, but the three-member Republican majority will now allow it “to overturn prior precedential decisions,” the law firm said. 

“Long-standing Board tradition requires at least three affirmative votes to reverse extant precedent,” per Ogletree Deakins. NLRB still has one vacancy that Trump could fill. 

The Associated Builders and Contractors in a Friday statement commended the confirmation of Macy and Prouty, noting that losing a quorum would have left NLRB “unable to issue decisions, creating additional uncertainty for the construction industry and the broader employer community.” 

“A fully functioning NLRB is essential to reducing the growing case backlog and ensuring labor disputes are resolved in a timely and predictable manner,” Kristen Swearingen, ABC vice president of government affairs, said.

In addition to the NLRB confirmations, the Senate also confirmed economist Brett Matsumoto to a four-year term as DOL’s Commissioner of Labor Statistics.

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By Remote

A smoke alarm with a dead battery looks exactly like one that works. A passport can be perfectly valid and still turn you back at a border that wants six months left on it. And the fire drill you passed in 2023 says nothing about the exit you have since stacked with boxes.

Contractor classification fails in all three of these ways, which is why so many companies are confident and exposed at once.

In a Remote survey of 3,250 business and HR leaders, 94% said they were confident their contractor arrangements comply with local employment law. The same survey found 94% had hit a legal, financial, or regulatory problem with contractor engagement in the past two years — meaning at least 88% are in both groups.

The financial exposure can be significant. If a contractor is found to have been an employee, the business may face retrospective liability for employment-related taxes and social contributions, as well as employment rights and entitlements that should have applied during the relevant period. Depending on the jurisdiction and circumstances, additional interest, penalties and other amounts may also apply. These consequences can arise following a regulatory review, tax assessment, audit or worker claim, including after the engagement has ended.

Contractor numbers are rising, not falling

Most HR leaders expect to need contractors less, not more: 78% believe AI will meaningfully reduce their reliance on contractors and freelancers within two years, which is reasonable — AI agents handle exactly the self-contained work companies hand to freelancers. Their hiring says the opposite. Over the past two years, 91% of the companies surveyed increased the contractor share of their workforce and 41% increased it sharply.

Contractors are not being displaced by AI projects; they are building them. Asked why their numbers had risen, leaders most often cited AI work requiring short-term specialist expertise, at 20%, tied with tightening labor and immigration rules.

Trap 1: No one runs a classification check, because the hire moves too fast

When a company finds the engineer who can build its model, it has a few weeks before a competitor hires her. Registering a legal entity takes months; a visa can take longer; a contractor agreement can be signed on Tuesday and start work on Thursday. That usually makes it the right call, because the alternative is losing her.

But that route is quick precisely because it skips registering an entity and running someone through employment onboarding — the only two points where anyone would have checked the classification. Without an entity, no local lawyer reads the working relationship. Without onboarding, nobody asks whether her hours, tools and daily supervision meet that country's definition of an employee. Nobody decided to skip the check. The fast route never contained one.

Trap 2: The classification check you ran doesn't apply in the next country

Most companies have checked contractor classification in at least one market. Far fewer have checked it everywhere they engage contractors and the tests differ. Germany: integration is relevant, but German status assessment considers the overall circumstances and the German pension authority's formal status procedure considers the contractual and practical relationship. The same contractor, on identical terms, can be correctly classified in one country and misclassified in another.

A company that checked at home and assumed the result travels has examined one legal system and drawn a conclusion about eight.

Trap 3: The classification check you ran goes out of date

This is the trap that catches careful companies. A classification check describes how someone works on the day you run it and the way she works keeps changing while the contract stays the same.

A three-month engagement gets extended, then extended again; she joins the standing Monday meeting, acquires a manager and a company laptop and two years on she works the hours the team works, on the company's tools, under someone's direction — may increasingly resemble an employment relationship under the applicable local law.

The relationship can also change over time. An engagement may begin with one set of working practices and develop into another, potentially affecting the classification analysis. The resulting liability may extend to an earlier period of the engagement, depending on the applicable law, the nature of the claim and any applicable limitation or assessment periods.

The bottom line: change the question

"Are we compliant?" no longer tells anyone anything. Ninety-four percent of the leaders Remote surveyed said yes and the same 94% had already had a problem.

Three sharper questions for the next planning review. Which markets did we enter fastest this year and did anyone check classifications there? Where a check happened, was it run against that country's law or a finding borrowed from elsewhere? And for contractors with us over a year, does the working relationship still resemble the one we signed?

Smoke alarms only tell you something when somebody tests them. So do contractor classifications.

Remote surveyed 3,250 business and HR leaders with recruitment decision-making responsibility across the UK, US, Spain, Singapore, the Netherlands, Germany, France and Australia. Fieldwork was conducted by Censuswide.

You may be able to say no.

As an employment practitioner, I generally favor letting employees work from home whenever possible and practical. This is especially true when the employee needs to work from home as a reasonable accommodation under the Americans with Disabilities Act or another disability rights law.

But there are times when the employer may not have to grant such a request.

A recent decision from a panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 5th Circuit addressed this issue. The plaintiff clearly had disabilities within the meaning of the ADA. But the court affirmed dismissal of his lawsuit against his employer, who denied his remote work request and then terminated him for absenteeism “and other concerns.”

The plaintiff was an IT employee working for a U.S. Army contractor. When he was initially hired by the contractor’s predecessor, we were in the throes of COVID-19.

The plaintiff was allowed to work from home full time at first. In February 2022, both the Army and the defendant contractor transitioned back to in-office work, and that’s when the troubles began. According to the 5th Circuit panel, the plaintiff was “overstimulated by his return to the office.” A couple of months later, he “was diagnosed with Autism, Major Depressive Disorder, and Social Anxiety Disorder.” A few months after that, he “was admitted to inpatient psychiatric care due to suicidal ideations.”

Again, there was no question that the plaintiff was a “person with a disability” within the meaning of the ADA.

In the fall of 2022, the plaintiff submitted a doctor’s note with a request that he be allowed to work remotely. His supervisor was inclined to grant the request, but the Army did not approve. And the Army was the contractor’s client.

The contractor tried letting the plaintiff work from home two to three days a week in December 2022 through January 2023. But in mid-January 2023, the plaintiff requested a medical leave of absence. A few days later, he said that “he needed to work from home.” The contractor fired him two days later.

The plaintiff tried to pursue legal action against the Army. That lawsuit was unsuccessful for largely procedural reasons. But his lawsuit against the contractor continued until May 2026, when the 5th Circuit affirmed dismissal of his claims against the contractor.

Remote work as a reasonable accommodation

Remote work is often, but not always, a reasonable accommodation under the ADA and other disability rights laws. As with all reasonable accommodations, determining whether remote work must be allowed depends heavily on the facts of the individual situation.

The relevant facts can include the employee’s specific disability; the employee’s job duties and whether they are capable of being performed from home; whether the employee has a safe and suitable home-work environment with a strong internet connection and other infrastructure; and whether the home-work environment is a place where the employer’s confidential information can be protected.

Another consideration should be the employee’s job performance, as well as the employer’s experience with the employee’s work ethic, ability to work with minimal direct supervision and communication and accessibility.

In some cases, customer demands may also be a factor, as they were in this case.

Four Tips for Employers

Here are four points for employers to keep in mind about remote work as a reasonable accommodation under the ADA:

Tip 1: The customer may control whether being on site is an “essential function of the job.”

In this case, the Army was in control. In the words of the court, “The Army determined that allowing full-time teleworking was not in its interests, and as an Army contractor, [the contractor] had a business interest in honoring the Army’s conditions.”

Strengthening the contractor’s case, the supervisor had allegedly been worried about “open[ing] the floodgates” to full-time remote work requests from other employees assigned to the Army, which could “thereby potentially damage [the contractor’s] contractual relationship with the Army.”

Tip 2: Even if the employer allowed or required remote work during COVID, it doesn’t necessarily have to allow it now.

The fact that the Army and the contractor allowed full-time remote work during the pandemic doesn’t mean they had to continue doing so indefinitely. The panel quoted from a publication issued in 2023 by the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, which stated as follows:

“The fact that an employer temporarily excused performance of one or more essential functions when it closed the workplace . . . for the purpose of protecting their safety from COVID-19 . . . does not mean that the employer permanently changed a job’s essential functions, that telework is always a feasible accommodation, or that it does not pose an undue hardship.”

The pandemic was extraordinary, and employers had to make changes that they might never have considered making otherwise. In some cases, the shift to remote work turned out to be positive, and the employers chose to continue the arrangement post-COVID. In these cases, the employers would also have to consider remote work as a reasonable accommodation under the ADA.

But in other cases, remote work was not ideal, or even advisable, but was adopted only because the employer had no other real choice. Remote work adopted in an extraordinary circumstance does not normally obligate the employer to continue allowing remote work — even as a reasonable accommodation — once the situation has returned to normal.

Tip 3: Consistency is good (within reason). 

In this case, the panel specifically found that all the contractor’s employees who were assigned to the Army were required to work on-site after the COVID precautions ended. That helped to show that the plaintiff was not being singled out or sabotaged.

Of course, the very nature of reasonable accommodation often requires that the employee with a disability be treated differently from co-workers, so employers should not be overly concerned about consistency. 

Tip 4: An employer does not always have to provide the accommodation that the employee requests.

In this case, the contractor got a pat on the back from the court for allowing the plaintiff to work from home two to three days a week, particularly given the court’s finding that he was asking for an accommodation that would alter the essential functions of his job.

In sum, the panel found that the plaintiff was not a qualified individual with a disability within the meaning of the ADA because of his inability to work on site full time, or even 2-3 days a week. Because he was not qualified, the contractor did not have to accommodate him, even though it tried.

All that said: Be careful.

This was a nice win for the contractor, but other employers still need to be careful. Remote work will often be a reasonable accommodation in other situations.

A good general rule for employers to follow is this: If you think you may have to deny a request for reasonable accommodation, discuss it with your employment counsel first.

In mid-July 2026, a wave of poor air quality struck the midwest and eastern U.S., prompting air quality alerts by public health authorities. The widespread haze — generated by wildfires in the U.S and Canada — represented the kind of extreme weather events made worse by climate change, experts told CBS News.

The event had a direct effect on workplaces. In one example, a Ford Motor Co. assembly plant in Michigan saw workers hospitalized due to the combination of heat and smoke, the Detroit Free Press reported. In Albany, New York, outdoor workers took precautions such as setting up water stations and large cooling fans.

When weather events put employee health at risk, they may trigger employer obligations under the Family and Medical Leave Act and similar state or local laws, said Ellen Donovan McCann, of counsel at Littler Mendelson.

She added that while there hasn’t been a discernible upward trend in leave associated with climate extremes at present, a growing amount of attention is being placed on the topic. This is especially the case with respect to chronic health conditions, like cardiovascular disease or asthma, which can be triggered in moments of extreme heat, air pollution or a similar phenomenon.

“We certainly have talked about the potential impact,” McCann said.

Employers should be mindful that climate change is expected to lead to an increase in chronic health conditions, said Pierce Blue, of counsel at Morgan Lewis.

Outdoor workers are particularly affected by climate-related hazards, according to a 2023 study published by the Journal of Occupational and Environmental Hygiene. The study’s authors noted that while more research is needed, evidence suggests that workers are experiencing increased morbidity and mortality related to climate change.

“It would make perfect sense if that were to lead to an increase in claims or time off,” Blue said. “Any increase would be concerning on [the employer’s] part.”

But employers also could see the effects of climate change in the FMLA context more indirectly, McCann noted, such as when an employee asked to take leave to care of a family member affected by severe weather. It’s important to be vigilant as it can already be difficult at times for employers to identify FMLA-qualifying events involving family members, she said.

She gave the example of an employee who asks for time away from work to move an elderly parent to a new long-term care facility. The FMLA’s eligibility criteria capture a broad range of conditions or circumstances and could include care of this sort. By extension, if an employee is taking care of a family member with a health condition who is at risk due to flooding, air pollution or another form of weather emergency, that also may qualify, McCann said.

“Employers might not be making the right connections or at least asking the right questions to know whether it’s FMLA,” McCann added.

Similarly, there could be a mental health component to climate-related FMLA claims, said Matt Brown, partner at Thompson Coburn. Should an employee report anxiety caused by extreme weather, for instance, this also may be a qualifying reason to take FMLA leave.

How to adjust compliance and policies for climate change

Awareness is key, McCann said. Employers will need to monitor weather reports and local public safety alerts to know when poor air quality, extreme heat or similar conditions are anticipated. Additional FMLA or alternative leave claims should be expected on such days, and employers must train staff to listen to the entirety of a given employee’s situation to determine what next steps are appropriate.

“Any time an employee needs to be absent from work, make sure you have enough facts to know if there is an obligation that’s been required,” McCann said. “Employees don’t need to use magic words — they don’t have to say, ‘I need FMLA.’”

Where possible, employers might want to consider remote or hybrid work for employees who may be affected. “That helps staffing plans because a lot of time these things come out of the blue,” Brown said, adding that certain weather events can lead to the shutdown of local transit networks or commuter pathways that workers use.

Employers should have medical certifications on file for employees with relevant health conditions, Blue said, to ensure smoother recordkeeping on the employer’s end. But training managers to recognize FMLA scenarios may be the most important task because failure to do so constitutes the biggest risk for violations, he noted.

“I don’t think the training needs to be super intense or that managers need to have a clinical knowledge of the FMLA,” Blue said. “It’s more important that, if somebody says they need time off for a medical reason or to care for their children [...] know that that could be FMLA and that you should be looping in HR or legal.”

States, localities provide guidelines

Employers have a general duty under the Occupational Safety and Health Act to protect employees from recognized hazards, but there are no particular OSHA standards specific to climate extremes or similar weather events, Blue said. Still, that doesn’t mean they are flying blind.

State and local authorities are likely to have a variety of resources, or even legal standards, to guide employers in their response. For example, at least seven states have occupational heat safety standards, according to the Natural Resources Defense Council. And in New York City, Mayor Zohran Mamdani signed an executive order in June requiring local agencies to develop heat safety plans for city employees and contractors.

Even when such regulations are not intended to cover private businesses, employers can look at those policies to formulate best practices, Brown said.

Moving forward, employers also might want to consider tracking leave trends either on their own or in conjunction with third-party leave administrators, he added. This data could be compared against historical extreme weather events or alerts to determine any correlation and adjust protocols accordingly.

Employers need not pay for an employee’s ordinary, midday travel between home and work, the U.S. Department of Labor said July 22.

The agency reached that conclusion in one of two newly issued opinion letters addressing compensable working time.

The letters are part of DOL’s 2025 recommitment to its opinion letter program, allowing stakeholders to request interpretations of how employment laws apply in specific situations.

DOL has in recent years used opinion letters to answer fact-specific employment law questions. Employer representatives have generally favored the program over alternatives because opinion letters have the potential to serve as a defense to litigation, they previously told HR Dive.

The agency’s Wednesday letter on midday commutes, FLSA2026-9, came in response to a question from an employer with a large, nonexempt workforce. The employees don’t regularly travel as part of their job duties, according to the letter, and can work from home when business needs permit.

They have not, however, been allowed to work in more than one location in a single workday because of concerns the Fair Labor Standards Act would require them to be paid for commuting in the middle of the workday. They haven’t been allowed, for example, to work from home in the morning to avoid rush hour, and come to the office at lunchtime to work the rest of the day on site.

The employer, however, said it wants to provide that flexibility, if it would not require additional compensation.

DOL, in response, assured the employer that the FLSA wouldn’t require pay in that scenario. “[A]ny time employees spend traveling between their home and their primary worksite within a workday may be excluded from recorded worktime, as long as such travel is otherwise a ‘normal’ or ‘ordinary’ commute that primarily benefits the employee,” the agency concluded.

The agency cautioned, however, that employees may be due pay for that time in circumstances outside the ordinary and that primarily benefit the employer — when an employee has gone home for the day and is called back for an emergency, for example. DOL also warned employers that its opinion should not be construed as a departure from its longstanding position that travel from worksite to worksite during the workday is compensable.

In a separate letter issued Wednesday, FLSA2026-10, DOL responded to a compensation question from an MRI engineer who worked at client sites from 8 a.m. to 5 p.m., but received service requests at home and scheduled the day’s client appointments before their shift. The employee then drove an employer-provided vehicle to job sites, often making work-related phone calls during the drive.

The agency concluded that the time spent receiving requests wasn’t compensable as it was incidental to the use of an employer-provided vehicle for commuting. The time spent scheduling appointments, however, was compensable, DOL said. And because the scheduling amounted to the beginning of the employee’s workday — and the employee lacked the freedom typically associated with commutes, sometimes even taking work calls during it — the drive time was compensable as well, DOL said.

It can be tricky to determine whether employee travel time is compensable, management-side employment law attorneys have said; DOL fact sheets and opinion letters offer some guidance, but as Wednesday’s letters illustrate, compensability decisions often require a detailed look at each specific scenario.

Employers are contending with a version of the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission they’ve never seen before, attorneys at Duane Morris said during a virtual presentation.

“Change is the new normal, and this is not your father’s, mother’s or grandparents’ EEOC,” said Gerald Maatman, partner at the firm. “It’s a very new agency that we’re seeing in front of us.”

EEOC’s 2025 enforcement data show it pursued more religious and pregnancy discrimination cases than in prior years, while disability discrimination remained a frequent type of filing, Maatman said. The agency’s data also showed a “heavy dose” of retaliation cases, he noted.

Taken together with the commission’s legal activity so far in 2026, the data suggest EEOC will continue to prioritize disability, religion and race discrimination claims through the second half fiscal year 2026, said Jennifer Riley, partner at Duane Morris.

Riley and Maatman specifically highlighted the agency’s attempt to enforce an administrative subpoena against Nike as a signal of its priorities. EEOC sought information on Nike’s diversity, equity and inclusion programs, requesting employee records and descriptions of the company’s efforts to increase representation of racial and ethnic minorities.

“In my 40 years of defending employers dealing with EEOC investigations and lawsuits, this was a very unique situation and kind of the tip of the spear of the Trump-led EEOC championing attacks on DEI programs,” Maatman said of the Nike case.

The case law on EEOC subpoena enforcement appears favorable to the commission, he added, so courts are likely to order employers to comply. 

Additional shifts can be seen in how current EEOC leadership has pivoted away from the agency’s 2022-2026 Strategic Plan, which Maatman said essentially serves as a blueprint for the agency over a four-year period. That document was supplemented by the 2024-2028 Strategic Enforcement Plan, which outlined six subject matter enforcement priorities.

For example, the strategic plan called on EEOC to file bigger, targeted lawsuits seeking widespread equitable relief and prosecute systemic “pattern and practice” discrimination cases affecting large groups of workers. The SEP, meanwhile, identified protection of “vulnerable workers” — such as immigrant workers, workers with certain disabilities and LGBTQ+ workers — as one of the agency’s six priorities.

Under Chair Andrea Lucas, EEOC has instead prioritized enforcement of “reverse bias” claims against majority-group workers, including White male workers, Maatman said. Those efforts also extend to American workers who the agency alleges have suffered national origin discrimination, said Daniel Spencer, partner at Duane Morris.

There’s also been an emphasis on pre-litigation mediation, conciliation and settlements, from which it obtained $528 million from employers in 2025. Per the agency, this the highest such amount obtained in a fiscal year in EEOC history. Even so, the commission collected $660 million in total monetary relief, slightly down from 2024’s nearly $700 million recovery total. According to Maatman, the split between pre- and post-litigation recovery also shows how the agency’s tactics are shifting.

“The EEOC is front-end loading its settlements more prior to filing the lawsuits, certainly threatening to file lawsuits, and getting a lesser amount of money in terms of the settlements for its merits lawsuits,” he said.