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US final paycheck rules, as an open dataset

One row per state: the statute, the deadline after a discharge, a resignation and a layoff, the late-payment remedy and its formula, whether PTO must be paid, the labor agency, the small claims limit, and the official source URLs with the date each row was last checked.

37

states with a full rule row

17

states with no employee-side penalty — a fact most summaries get wrong

7

states that require payment on the day of discharge

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Last reviewed 2026-11-03 · 36 of 37 states have a statute that sets a final-pay deadline; states without one are recorded as such rather than filled in.

How the rows are built

  1. Read the statute text at the state legislature site and the state labor agency's own guidance page.
  2. Record the deadline for a discharge, a resignation and a layoff separately — they differ in most states.
  3. Record the remedy exactly as written: a daily-wage multiplier with a cap, a percentage, a multiple of the unpaid wages, a floor amount, or nothing at all. No formula is invented where the statute gives none.
  4. Run a second independent check. If the two readings disagree the row is marked review and the state is not sold until it is resolved.
  5. Re-check every row on a three-month cycle and update the date below.

Fields

FieldMeaning
firedFinal-pay rule after a discharge, with the calendar-day offset used by the calculator
quitFinal-pay rule after a voluntary resignation, including any notice condition
layoffRule after a layoff or reduction in force
penaltyLate-payment remedy: kind, the human-readable formula, and any waiting period
ptorequired where the state treats accrued vacation as wages, otherwise policy
small_claimsJurisdictional limit for a claim by an individual, in USD
sourcesOfficial URLs only — legislature text and state agency pages
tierverified (two official sources agree) or single (one read directly)

Use it, cite it

The facts come from public statutes. The compilation — the normalised fields, the day offsets and the verification status — is published under CC BY 4.0: reuse it, including commercially, with attribution to LocaFact and a link to this page.

LocaFact, US final paycheck rules by state (2026-11-03, 37 states). https://locafact.com/data/

Third-party summaries disagree with each other on several states — most often on whether a penalty exists at all. Every row here points at the primary source, so a disagreement can be settled by reading the statute rather than by comparing blogs.

Build something with it

There is a free embeddable deadline calculator at /embed/ that reads the same table. If you publish a guide, a union page or a job-board help centre, you can drop it in with one line of HTML.

This dataset is reference material compiled by a self-help document tool, not legal advice, and no outcome is guaranteed. Deadlines and remedies change; verify against the linked source before relying on a row.