What Home Care Workers Should Know About New York’s Wage Parity Act 

If you provide home health care services in New York City, Nassau County, Suffolk County, or Westchester County, a state law called the Home Care Worker Wage Parity Act affects your pay. This law has been around since 2012, but many home care workers don’t know exactly what it provides.

This post explains what the Wage Parity Act requires, shares some real examples of settlements that show how the law gets enforced, and offers a few tips if you have questions about your own paycheck.

What Does the Wage Parity Act Require?

The Home Care Worker Wage Parity Act says that if you’re a home care worker in one of the counties listed above, your employer must pay you a base wage plus extra money, called “supplemental” compensation.

Your employer can give you this extra money in one of two ways:

• Cash paid straight to you, or
• Benefits, like health insurance.

Through the end of 2025, the base wage was $19.10, and the extra amount was $2.54 an hour in New York City and $1.67 an hour in Nassau, Suffolk, and Westchester Counties. Starting January 1, 2026, the base wage for covered workers went up to $19.65 an hour, and the extra amount stayed the same. Here’s how the numbers break down:

The Benefits Have to Actually Be Worth Something

If your employer chooses to pay your supplemental compensation by providing benefits, your employer has to meet certain requirements. In order words, your employer can’t just say they’re giving you a benefit. If they take money that’s supposed to be your extra pay and put it toward a benefit instead of cash, that benefit needs to:

• Be usable. If money is taken out of your pay starting on day one, but you can’t use the benefit for months, that’s a problem.
• Be worth close to what is being deducted from your pay check. For example, a health plan that only covers basic checkups — and doesn’t cover a hospital stay, treatment for an illness, or most prescriptions — may not be worth what your employer says it’s worth.
• Not just repeat what you’re already owed for free. New York law already requires employers to give you a certain statutory benefits, such as paid sick time. If your employer is using your wage parity money to fund benefits that you’re already guaranteed by law, that may violate the Wage Parity Act.

Your pay stub is also supposed to be clear and easy to understand. Under New York law, it should show you how much of your pay is your base wage and how much is extra compensation, whether that extra amount is being paid as cash or benefits, and break down the amounts used for each benefit. If your pay stub is confusing or doesn’t explain this, that may also violate the law.

Large Settlements Show The Wage Parity Act’s Impact

Employers are increasingly being held accountable for failing to comply with the Wage Parity Act. A few recent examples include:

In December 2025, the Attorney General announced that Americare, Inc. agreed to pay nearly $45 million back to thousands of home health workers who worked for the company between 2014 and 2020, plus another $10 million to New York’s Medicaid program. The Attorney General’s office alleged that Americare did not give home health aides the pay they were owed under the Wage Parity Act, while still billing Medicaid as though it was meeting those requirements.

In June 2026, a group of plaintiffs (represented by Katz Banks Kumin and the Legal Aid Society) and the state’s fiscal intermediary in New York’s Consumer Directed Personal Assistant Program announced a $162 million settlement covering 200,000 downstate personal assistants. As part of that settlement, the fiscal intermediary will return at least $25 million allocated from Wage Parity Act compensation for health benefits to personal assistants, and another $92 million allocated for paid time off. The settlement was preliminarily approved on July 1, 2026. You can read more about that settlement here.

These cases show that when employers don’t meet the Wage Parity Act’s requirements, workers can hold them accountable and may be owed significant amounts of money.

What You Can Do

It’s often hard to tell whether home care workers’ pay follows the requirements of the Wage Parity Act. If you have questions about your own pay, here are a few things that can help:

• Look at your pay stub. See if it shows how much of your pay is your base wage and how much is extra (supplemental) compensation, and whether that extra amount is being paid as cash, benefits, or both.
• Check whether you can actually use the benefits your employer says are covered by your wage parity pay.
• Notice if your paid time off seems to be funded by wage parity money, rather than being separate from it.
• Hold on to your pay stubs, benefit statements, and any messages from your employer explaining how your pay is structured. These can be useful if you ever need to look into your situation further.

Under New York’s Labor Law, workers have six (6) years to assert violations of state wage law. So, if you provided home care services in New York in the past six years, re-examine your pay and benefits (even if you no longer work for the same employer)

The attorneys at Katz Banks Kumin regularly help home care workers with questions about their pay, including questions about the Wage Parity Act. If you’re not sure whether you’re getting what you’re owed, contact us here.