The delivery company DoorDash reportedly spent about $1.4 million trying to stop Zohran Mamdani from becoming mayor of New York City in 2025. Less than a year later, Mamdani’s administration has made the company pay $131.5 million to settle claims that it underpaid or paid late hundreds of thousands of delivery workers.
The settlement was announced in September, and the story has gone viral again this week after the Daily Mail highlighted the contrast between DoorDash’s election spending and the bill it now faces.
What the settlement says
Under the deal with the city’s Department of Consumer and Worker Protection (DCWP), DoorDash agreed to pay $131.5 million, according to ABC News, Fox News and The Intercept. More than $115 million will go directly to delivery workers as restitution, with some workers eligible for up to $5,000 each, Fox News reported. The remaining $16 million or so covers civil penalties and fines.
The city said more than 260,000 delivery workers were underpaid between April 2022 and June 2026. Investigators reviewed about 152 million payments. Payments to workers were due to begin in late October. DoorDash must also send payment data on its delivery workers to the city every month for three years.
Mamdani called it the “largest settlement for food delivery workers ever secured in American municipal history,” according to Fox News. “The size of this settlement shows the damage done to workers by wage theft,” he said, The Intercept reported.
DoorDash: “We screwed up”
DoorDash admitted mistakes. “Simply put, we screwed up,” the company said in a statement reported by ABC News and Fox News. It said the errors were unintentional but that this “doesn’t make them okay,” and apologised to the workers, whom it calls Dashers.
Mamdani rejected the idea that it was an accident. He accused DoorDash of leaving out time spent on cancelled trips and trips that crossed city limits when calculating pay, saying it was “not a rounding error.” He also criticised chief executive Tony Xu over comments about a “greedy algorithm.”
The $1.4 million election spending
According to The Intercept, DoorDash spent about $1.4 million during the 2025 mayoral race to oppose Mamdani and support former governor Andrew Cuomo. This included a $1 million donation in May 2025 to Fix the City, a super PAC that spent heavily against Mamdani. At the time it was one of the largest donations in the race. Mamdani went on to win the election and took office in January 2026.
Not everyone is convinced
Critics say the headline figure overstates the scale of wrongdoing. Writing for the libertarian magazine Reason, C. Jarrett Dieterle argued that only about $12.3 million related to clear underpayments or late payments, while about $83 million came from a legal dispute over how to count “idle time” between deliveries, including time drivers spent outside the city. He also noted that the investigation began in 2023, before Mamdani took office, and that most affected drivers were owed small amounts, although about 700 were owed more than $10,000 each.
The effects
The case is a major test of New York’s minimum pay rules for app-based delivery workers, among the strictest in the United States. It sends a strong message to gig companies that the city will enforce those rules, and it gives Mamdani a high-profile win on his promise to stand up for low-paid workers.
The settlement matters to immigrant communities. Many of New York’s delivery workers are immigrants, including Africans, and late or missing pay hits them hard. Workers who believe they are owed money can check with the DCWP.
The case also adds to debate about corporate money in elections, coming the same week that Elon Musk’s record spending failed to deliver for Republicans in the midterms. DoorDash is currently working to buy Instacart for about $17 billion, so it is likely to stay under close watch from regulators.
Sources: ABC News, Fox News, The Intercept, Reason, Daily Mail.
