Does Local Law 144 Apply to My Company?

When "Does Local Law 144 Apply to My Company" Is the Wrong Question to Start With

An HR director in Austin gets a Slack message from legal: "Are we covered by that NYC AI hiring law?" The company is headquartered in Texas. It has forty employees. Nobody on the team has ever set foot in a New York office. The instinct is to check the box "no" and move on.

Then someone remembers the company sourced three finalists for a fully remote analyst role last quarter, and all three listed New York, NY as their location. The applicant tracking system ran every resume through a scored ranking tool before a recruiter looked at it. Suddenly the Texas headquarters is irrelevant, and the question is no longer rhetorical.

This is the pattern that trips up more companies than any other part of Local Law 144: teams assume the law is about where the employer sits, when it is actually about where the candidate or employee sits and whether an automated tool touched the decision. Get that backwards and you either over-comply on roles that were never in scope, or — worse — miss a real obligation because "we're not a New York company" felt like a satisfying enough answer.

By the end of this piece you'll be able to run your own applicability check in a few minutes, without guessing.

The Two Triggers That Actually Matter: AEDT Use and NYC Job Location

Local Law 144 turns on two conditions, and both have to be true before the law applies to a given hiring or promotion decision:

1. An automated employment decision tool (AEDT) is used to substantially assist or replace discretionary human decision-making in that hiring or promotion decision.
2. The position itself is located in New York City — an NYC office the role sits in at least part of the time, or a fully remote role whose associated location is an NYC office.

Neither condition alone triggers coverage. A NYC-based employer that still screens every resume by hand, with no scoring or ranking tool anywhere in the process, is not using an AEDT and isn't covered — no matter how many NYC residents apply. And an AEDT running at a company with no New York City office at all is generally outside the law's reach, even when New York City residents apply, because DCWP ties coverage to where the job is rather than to where the applicant happens to live.

Residency does carry weight, but downstream of that test rather than as a trigger of its own: once a position is in scope, the notice obligation runs to the candidates and employees who reside in the city.

So the honest answer to "does Local Law 144 apply to my company" is: it depends on what your tools do and where the jobs they touch are located — not on your certificate of incorporation, and not on the home address of whoever happens to apply.

What Counts as an AEDT (and What Doesn't)

The statute defines an automated employment decision tool as any computational process derived from machine learning, statistical modeling, data analytics, or artificial intelligence that issues a simplified output — a score, classification, or recommendation — used to substantially assist or replace discretionary decision-making about employment (Perkins Coie, 2023). Resume-ranking algorithms, video-interview scoring tools, and automated candidate-matching engines are the clearest examples.

A basic applicant tracking system that just stores resumes and lets a human sort them by keyword search is generally not the same thing. The line between "a database with a filter" and "a computational process issuing a simplified output" is exactly where most companies get stuck, which is why it deserves its own walk-through rather than a guess — see is my hiring tool an AEDT for the fuller test.

If your company doesn't use anything meeting that definition anywhere in its hiring or promotion pipeline, the job-location question becomes moot — you're not in scope, full stop. If you're not sure whether your stack includes one, that's the first thing to nail down before spending time on the rest of this analysis.

The NYC Job-Location Trigger: Offices, Remote Roles, and Who Gets Notice

Assuming you do use an AEDT somewhere in the pipeline, the second trigger is where the job sits — and this is where "does Local Law 144 apply to my company" gets genuinely complicated for hybrid and remote-first employers.

The core idea, as DCWP has framed it: Local Law 144 reaches New York City jobs. An employer with a physical NYC office is the employer the law speaks to, and the question is then which of its roles carry the NYC connection. That means:

• A fully remote role whose associated location is your NYC office is an NYC job for these purposes, wherever the person filling it lives.
• A hybrid role with regular in-office days in the city is in scope on the same reasoning, as is an AEDT-scored internal promotion for a role based at that office.
• A candidate who lives outside NYC applying for an NYC-based position is within scope, because the position carries the connection — while an NYC resident applying for a role based elsewhere is not.

Getting the direction of this test backwards is the single most common blind spot, and it runs both ways: employers with no NYC presence over-scope themselves because an NYC resident applied, while employers who do hold an NYC office under-scope by counting only the desks in it and forgetting the remote roles attached to it. Residency then decides who on an in-scope requisition must actually be notified. We've built out the mechanics — including how this interacts with remote and hybrid postings — in more detail in the NYC candidate-residency AEDT trigger explainer and in our remote-worker deep dive.

Local Law 144 follows the job, not the payroll address and not the applicant's home — which is exactly why a remote role can be in scope when it is tied to a New York City office, and out of scope when it isn't.

Where Employer Location Comes In

Employer location is not beside the point. Under DCWP's guidance it is closer to the starting point: the law reaches employers holding a physical New York City office, for the roles based at that office and for fully remote roles associated with it. A company with no NYC office at all generally sits outside the law's scope, however many New York City residents pass through its funnel.

What that changes operationally is the shape of the check. "Do we have a New York office" is the right first question, but it is not the last one, because a single NYC office pulls in more than the people sitting in it: hybrid roles with regular in-office days, and fully remote roles associated with that office, count too. Those scattered cases are the ones that get missed, and each creates real, dated obligations under the law's three core requirements: an annual independent bias audit, a public summary of the most recent audit results posted on the employer's website (including the date the AEDT was put into use), and candidate or employee notice at least ten business days before the tool is used, with an alternative process or accommodation available on request (Crowell & Moring LLP, 2023; Epstein Becker Green, 2023). The law has applied since January 1, 2023, with enforcement beginning July 5, 2023 (Epstein Becker Green / Workforce Bulletin, 2023).

A Walk-Through: Applying the Test to Your Company

Run this in order, and stop as soon as you get a "no":

1. Does any tool in your hiring or promotion pipeline meet the AEDT definition? If no, stop — you're not in scope for that process. If yes, continue.
2. Is the position itself located in New York City — an NYC office at least part of the time, or a fully remote role associated with an NYC office? If no, that role isn't covered, whoever applies to it.
3. If both are yes, treat the role as in scope and check it against the three core obligations: audit currency, public summary posting, and the ten-business-day notice window — with the notice going to the candidates and employees who reside in New York City.

Because this test runs per-requisition rather than per-company, the honest answer for most mid-size employers with any NYC footprint is "sometimes, depending on the role" — which is a much harder thing to track by memory than a single yes/no company-wide determination. That's the operational problem, not a legal one: someone has to actually check job location and tool use against every requisition, consistently, and keep a record of that check.

This is operations, not legal advice — if a specific decision or a novel fact pattern is close to the line, confirm the determination with DCWP or with outside counsel before relying on it. For a full walkthrough of the law's remaining mechanics once you've confirmed you're in scope, see the NYC Local Law 144 compliance guide.

What To Do If You're In Scope

Penalties for confirmed violations run up to $500 for a first violation and $500 to $1,500 for each subsequent violation, and they accrue per violation per day (Office of the NY State Comptroller, 2025) — which is exactly why "we probably don't need to worry about this" is an expensive guess to get wrong repeatedly across a hiring season. Separately, a December 2025 Comptroller review found DCWP's own enforcement had gaps of its own, flagging far more non-compliant companies than DCWP's initial review had caught (DLA Piper, 2026; OSC, 2025) — a reminder that a light regulatory touch today doesn't mean the requirement disappears, only that documenting your own rationale now is cheaper than reconstructing it later.

The first concrete step is running every open requisition and every active AEDT through the job-location-and-tool-use test above, in writing, rather than from memory. That's precisely what the NYC Candidate-Residency & AEDT-Trigger Determination Worksheet is built to do — a downloadable worksheet that walks each role through the same two-part test — job location first, then who must be notified — so you have a dated, defensible record of why a given requisition was or wasn't treated as in scope. It doesn't perform or certify a bias audit and it doesn't score any candidate; it documents the applicability call your team already has to make anyway.

If what you actually want is a live, always-on version of this check running automatically against your requisition pipeline — flagging an NYC-located requisition the moment an AEDT touches it — that kind of ongoing monitoring is exactly what we're building toward. Join the waitlist to hear when it ships.