Home care agencies love to tell caregivers “personal attendants don’t get overtime.” That was California law once — and it has been false since 2014. Under the Domestic Worker Bill of Rights (Labor Code §1454), a personal attendant — someone whose main job is supervising, feeding, or dressing a child or a person who needs help with daily living — earns time-and-a-half after 9 hours in a day or 45 hours in a week.
Do the math on a typical caregiving schedule and the numbers get large fast. A caregiver working 12-hour shifts, 5 days a week, at $17 an hour is owed 3 overtime hours a day — 15 a week — at $25.50. If the agency paid straight time, that is $127.50 a week in stolen premium, over $6,600 a year, and the Labor Commissioner can reach back three years.
Live-in and 24-hour arrangements are where the worst abuse lives: agencies paying a flat daily rate that, divided by actual hours on duty, falls below minimum wage — which adds liquidated damages that double the shortfall (§1194.2). The state’s recent enforcement tells the story: multi-million-dollar citations against home care agencies for exactly this pattern, usually combined with fake “independent contractor” labels.
If you care for someone for a living, run your own numbers once. Ten minutes with a calculator has turned into five-figure recoveries for caregivers who assumed they had no rights.
Think this is happening to you? Use the free Wage Claim Builder to turn it into a dollar figure and a filed claim in 10 minutes, or report the business confidentially. Filing is free, retaliation is illegal (Labor Code §98.6), and your immigration status does not matter.
