Texas, California and New York Lead U.S. States in Recovered Back Wages

The biggest economies dominate, but not strictly by size

Texas tops the table with $352.5M recovered for workers across 14,000 Wage and Hour cases. California follows at $285.8M, and New York at $201.6M. The leaders are, unsurprisingly, among the most populous states, more workers and more employers mean more opportunities for wage violations and more enforcement activity.

But population alone does not set the order. Texas recovered more than California despite a comparable workforce, and the spread from the top state to the tenth is roughly 4-fold. Recovery totals reflect not just how many workers a state has, but how concentrated its low-wage, high-violation industries are, agriculture, construction, food service, and home health care all generate disproportionate wage-theft caseloads.

Recovery per case tells a second story

Total recovery rewards volume, but average recovery per case reveals where individual violations are largest. A state with fewer cases but a higher average often hosts large employers settling sizable multi-worker claims, while a state with many small cases reflects a long tail of individual minimum-wage and overtime disputes. Texas's 14,000 cases averaging $25K apiece illustrates the high-volume pattern.

What the numbers leave out

Even the leading states recover only a fraction of the wages economists estimate are stolen each year, research has put national wage theft above $50 billion annually, dwarfing the totals here. The Wage and Hour Division is resource-constrained and largely complaint-driven, so recovery figures track enforcement capacity and worker willingness to come forward as much as the underlying scale of theft. Workers can check any employer's wage-compliance record, or drill into state-level totals and the largest recoveries, on PlainWorker.