The AEDT 10-Business-Day Notice, Explained

When the Clock Starts Ticking

Your recruiting team wants to turn on a resume-screening AEDT for a role posting Monday morning. Someone asks the obvious question: when does the candidate notice need to go out? "Ten business days before we use the tool" sounds like a simple subtraction problem — until you actually try to do it. There's a long weekend coming up. Is a floating holiday a business day or not? Does the notice need to go out before the posting, before the first resume gets screened, or before an offer is made? Get the math wrong and you've either delayed a hire for nothing or used the tool on a candidate who never got timely notice.

This is where a surprising number of AEDT rollouts quietly go sideways — not because nobody knew the rule existed, but because nobody worked out exactly how to count to it. By the end of this piece, you'll be able to compute an AEDT 10-business-day notice deadline correctly, identify what re-triggers the clock, and know what to keep as proof that the notice actually went out on time.

The AEDT 10-Business-Day Notice: How the Countdown Actually Works

Local Law 144 requires that a candidate or employee receive notice at least 10 business days before an automated employment decision tool is used to substantially assist or replace a discretionary decision about them — screening, video-interview scoring, or applicant ranking among the covered categories. This sits alongside the law's other two core obligations: an annual independent bias audit, and a public summary of the most recent audit results posted to the employer's website, including the date the AEDT was first used. All three obligations work together, but the notice clock is the one that runs on every individual candidate, every time.

"Business day" excludes weekends by definition, and it excludes recognized holidays — but the law itself doesn't hand you a printed list of which holidays count in a given year. Practically, that means: build your count from a real calendar, not a mental shortcut. Take the date you intend to first use the AEDT on a candidate. Count backward 10 days, skipping Saturdays and Sundays, and skipping any day your organization (or the city) observes as a holiday. Whatever date you land on is your outer deadline for sending notice — send it that day or earlier, never later. Because the exact holiday list DCWP recognizes for this purpose isn't something we're going to guess at here, confirm the current calendar year's observed holidays directly with DCWP before you lock in a standing notice schedule, especially around November and December when several holidays cluster close together and can quietly eat two or three extra days off your count.

The statute's language is simple — notice "at least ten business days" before use — but simple language is exactly what produces sloppy counting. Treat the 10-business-day window as a calculation to run every time, not a number to remember once.

What Actually Restarts the Clock

The AEDT 10-business-day notice isn't a one-time event tied to the job posting. It attaches to use of the tool on a specific person. That has a few practical consequences worth building into your process:

• Every distinct AEDT in the pipeline may need its own notice. A resume screener, a video-interview scoring tool, and a ranking algorithm are three separate automated employment decision tools even if a candidate encounters all three in one hiring process. Each one's use can trigger its own notice obligation. Our companion piece on candidate notice requirements under Local Law 144 walks through how to map a multi-tool pipeline so you're not sending one notice when three were needed.
• Internal candidates count too. An existing employee being evaluated for promotion through an AEDT is still a covered "candidate" for notice purposes under the law. This is a spot where employers who've only built a notice process for external hiring get caught flat. See our breakdown of AEDT notice for internal promotions if your organization uses any automated tool in promotion or internal-transfer decisions.
• A materially changed tool is arguably a new tool. If the AEDT is reconfigured, replaced, or retrained in a way that changes what it measures, treat that as a fresh notice trigger rather than an extension of the old one.

What the Notice Has to Actually Say

Sending something 10 business days out isn't the same as sending a compliant notice. The law expects the notice to tell the candidate or employee that an AEDT will be used to assess them, and to point to an alternative process or accommodation request if one is available. Employers frequently get the timing right and the content wrong — a generic "we use technology in our hiring process" line buried in an offer letter isn't the same as a clear, standalone notice. Our detailed walkthrough of what an AEDT candidate notice must include covers the specific elements to check for before a notice template goes live across your hiring team.

Proving the Notice Went Out on Time

Ten business days is a deadline, and deadlines get challenged. If a candidate or a regulator later asks whether notice actually went out on time, "we're pretty sure we sent it" is not documentation — it's a guess. What you want on file, per candidate, per tool: the date the notice was sent, the method (email, portal, mail), the content version that was sent, and the date the AEDT was actually used on that person, so the gap between the two is visible at a glance. Our companion resource on proof-of-notice documentation for AEDT candidates walks through the specific fields worth keeping and how long to retain them.

This is operations, not legal advice. Nothing here is a substitute for confirming your specific notice language, timing edge cases, or accommodation process with DCWP or with outside counsel — particularly if your hiring pipeline runs across multiple AEDTs, multiple job families, or a mix of external and internal candidates. What a documented notice process gets you is a defensible record of when notice went out and what it said, which is the piece regulators and plaintiffs' counsel actually ask for.

The penalties for getting this wrong are not abstract. Local Law 144 civil penalties run up to $500 for a first violation (with each additional violation on the same day counted separately), and $500 to $1,500 for each subsequent violation — and penalties accrue per violation, per day, which means a missed notice on a high-volume screening tool can compound fast. Enforcement so far has been inconsistent; a 2024 academic review of 391 employers found only 13 had posted a compliant transparency notice at all. That's not a reason to relax — it's a reason a documented, timestamped notice process is one of the more defensible things you can have in a file if enforcement tightens.

Running the Notice Flow Without Missing One

The math behind an AEDT 10-business-day notice isn't hard once you've done it a few times. What's hard is doing it correctly, consistently, across every tool in your pipeline, every requisition, every internal promotion cycle — without a spreadsheet quietly drifting out of date. That's the operational gap the Candidate Notice Operations Workbook is built to close: separate notice-tracking sets for screener, video-interview, and ranking tools, a business-day countdown you can drop a use-date into, and a proof-of-notice log formatted to hand to an auditor or answer a candidate's question without scrambling.

Start there, then work outward to your broader Local Law 144 posture using our NYC Local Law 144 compliance guide. Get the notice count right once, build it into a repeatable workbook, and it stops being a source of last-minute panic every time a new requisition opens.