Does Local Law 144 Apply to Candidates Outside NYC?

The Question That Comes Up the Week Before a Launch

An HR director at a 120-person company headquartered in Manhattan is about to turn on a resume-screening tool for a hiring push. Half the open roles are based in the NYC office. The other half are fully remote, and the candidate pool for those roles is scattered across New Jersey, Texas, and Florida. She has a Local Law 144 checklist for the NYC roles — bias audit, notice, alternative process — but she's staring at a spreadsheet of remote applicants and asking the question that stalls a lot of launches: does Local Law 144 apply to candidates outside NYC, or only to the people physically walking into the building? Get the answer wrong in either direction and you're either sending notices you don't legally need to send, or skipping notices you do. By the end of this piece you'll be able to run the scope question candidate by candidate, and document why you landed where you did.

What Local Law 144 Actually Regulates

Local Law 144 requires any employer or employment agency using an automated employment decision tool to screen candidates for employment or employees for promotion to meet three obligations: an annual independent bias audit of the tool, a public summary of that audit's results posted on the employer's website alongside the AEDT's distribution date, and a notice to the affected candidate or employee at least 10 business days before the tool is used — with a path to request an alternative process or accommodation (Crowell & Moring LLP, 2023; Epstein Becker Green, 2023). The law defines an AEDT broadly: any computational process derived from machine learning, statistical modeling, data analytics, or AI that issues a simplified output — a score, classification, or recommendation — used to substantially assist or replace discretionary hiring or promotion decisions (Perkins Coie, 2023). It's been in force since January 1, 2023, with enforcement beginning July 5, 2023 (Epstein Becker Green / Workforce Bulletin, 2023).

None of that tells you, on its own, whether a specific remote candidate counts. That's a scope question, and scope questions live in a different part of the law than the obligations do.

The Question That Decides Scope: Where the Position Is

Compliance teams often treat this as two co-equal tests — where the job is, and where the candidate lives. DCWP's FAQs, published 30 June 2023 following its 22 May 2023 roundtable, make clear it is not a tie. Position location controls; residency does a narrower job:

1. Where is the position located? This is the controlling question. The law reaches a role based at an NYC office at least part of the time, a fully remote role whose associated location is an NYC office, or an employment agency using the AEDT from within New York City.
2. Who on an in-scope requisition must be notified? This is where residency does its work. Once a position is in scope, the notice obligation runs to the candidates and employees who reside in the city — but NYC residency does not, by itself, pull an out-of-city position into scope.

DCWP has addressed the crossover case directly: a position located outside New York City — a Jersey City role, say — carries no bias-audit or notice obligation even when a Brooklyn resident applies. So the pattern that feels hardest often resolves cleanly: a New York City resident applying for a fully remote role associated with an office in another state is out of scope. If you want the deeper mechanics of how residency and role location interact, we cover that in more depth in our piece on remote workers and NYC candidate status.

What does stay fact-specific is what counts as a remote job "associated with" an NYC office, particularly for employers holding offices in several cities. Confirm those against DCWP's current FAQ page before finalizing any employer-facing determination — and structure the analysis so you're not making the call from memory every time a new requisition opens.

Why "Remote" Doesn't Mean "Out of Scope"

The instinct a lot of HR teams have is: the role is remote, so the city doesn't matter. That instinct is the single most common way companies under-scope their AEDT notice obligations. A remote designation describes where someone works day to day — it doesn't answer the question the law actually asks, which is what office the role is associated with. A "remote" role attached to your New York City office is an NYC role for these purposes, however far from the city the person filling it lives. Treating "remote" as a synonym for "out of scope" is a shortcut that saves five minutes today and creates a documentation gap you'll have to explain later.

This is also where the volume problem sneaks in. A single misjudged requisition might feel low-risk. A recruiting funnel running the same AEDT against thousands of applicants across a hybrid workforce, with the same shortcut applied every time, is a different kind of exposure — and it's the kind that shows up all at once during a review, not one candidate at a time.

The office-association question isn't a formality you answer once and forget. It's a per-requisition judgment call, and every one of them needs a paper trail.

Building a Defensible Rationale When the Answer Isn't Obvious

Here's the operational reality: you will not always get a clean yes or no. Some requisitions are genuinely ambiguous — a hybrid role with a NYC office that's mostly aspirational, or a candidate who lists a NYC address but is relocating out of state before the start date. When the answer isn't obvious, the goal isn't to guess correctly every time. It's to write down what you considered and why you landed where you did, so that if a regulator, an auditor, or your own leadership asks about a specific requisition eight months later, you have a documented rationale you can defend instead of a shrug.

That's a scope-determination exercise, not a legal opinion, and it's worth saying plainly: this is an operational documentation practice, not legal advice. If a specific requisition sits close to the line, that's a conversation for outside counsel or a direct question to DCWP — not a call to make solo off a blog post. What a documentation habit gives you is the record that shows you asked the right questions at the time, on every requisition, not just the obvious ones.

Building that habit for every open requisition, every candidate pool, every hybrid role is exactly the kind of repetitive, easy-to-skip task that erodes under deadline pressure. A structured worksheet — position location first, then who must be notified, the reasoning applied, the decision made — turns a judgment call into a documented one. If your scope questions extend past candidates into whether your company is even a covered employer under Local Law 144 in the first place, that's a related but separate question we walk through in does Local Law 144 apply to my company.

Penalties Don't Care That You Weren't Sure

Local Law 144 penalties accrue per violation, per day — up to $500 for a first violation (and each additional violation on the same day), and $500 to $1,500 for each subsequent violation (Office of the NY State Comptroller, 2025). A missed notice on a single requisition that ran for weeks before anyone caught the scope error doesn't accrue as one mistake. It accrues as one mistake repeated every day the tool kept running against that candidate pool. "We weren't sure if the candidate was in scope" is not a defense line you want to be building in real time after the fact — it's a line you want answered, on paper, before the tool ever screened the first resume.

Your First Action Item

You don't need to resolve every ambiguous case from a blog post. You need a repeatable way to walk through the position-location question first, then the notice question, on every requisition, log the reasoning, and flag the genuinely close calls for a real legal conversation before they become a pattern across your recruiting funnel. Our NYC Candidate-Residency & AEDT-Trigger Determination Worksheet is built for exactly that — a structured, per-requisition record of where the position sits, where the candidate sits, and why you called it in-scope or out. For the broader compliance calendar this scope decision feeds into, our Local Law 144 compliance guide walks through what happens once a candidate is confirmed in scope. Download the worksheet, run it against your next requisition, and start building the paper trail before the next hiring push, not after.