NYC Local Law 144: The Operator's Guide to Running AEDT Compliance

Where Most HR Teams Actually Get Stuck

It's a Tuesday afternoon and someone in Legal forwards a link about NYC Local Law 144. Your applicant tracking system ranks resumes. You didn't build that feature, didn't ask for it, and honestly forgot it was even switched on until this email landed. Now you're trying to figure out: does this apply to us? Who runs the audit? What do we tell candidates? And — the part nobody wants to say out loud — what happens if we've already been running this thing for a year without any of it?

This is the normal way employers discover NYC Local Law 144. Not through a training session. Through a vendor feature flag that quietly became a regulated decision-making system the day it started ranking, scoring, or filtering New York City candidates.

The law itself is not complicated once you separate it into its parts. It has a scope test, three obligations, and a penalty structure. What's complicated is running those three obligations every year, for every AEDT, without missing a deadline — which is an operations problem, not a legal one. By the end of this guide, you'll know exactly what NYC Local Law 144 requires, in what order, and what a working compliance calendar for it actually looks like.

What Counts as an AEDT Under NYC Local Law 144 (and What Doesn't)

Local Law 144 doesn't regulate "AI in hiring" as a general category. It regulates a specific, defined thing: the automated employment decision tool, or AEDT. The statutory definition covers 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).

Break that definition into its working parts and the scope question gets much easier to answer in a meeting:

• Is there a computational process behind it? A rules-based keyword filter that just checks for a required certification isn't the same thing as a model that learns a ranking pattern from historical data — though the line has gotten blurrier as vendors bolt machine learning onto older products.
• Does it produce a simplified output? A score, a percentile, a "recommended" flag, a ranked list — all of these are simplified outputs. A dashboard that just displays raw resume text without any scoring layer isn't.
• Does that output substantially assist or replace a human decision? This is the part hiring teams underestimate. If a recruiter is supposed to review every application manually but in practice never scrolls past the top-ranked twenty, the tool is substantially assisting the decision in practice, whatever the process diagram says on paper.

Resume screening and ranking tools, video-interview scoring platforms, and chatbot-based candidate assessments are commonly cited examples of AEDTs. Scheduling or triage chatbots are only in scope if they score, rank, or otherwise substantially assist a selection decision — a pure scheduling function alone is not enough. Confirm current examples against DCWP's published FAQ before relying on this categorization for a specific tool. If you're not sure whether a specific feature in your stack clears the bar, that's a narrower question worth working through directly — see what is an automated employment decision tool and is my hiring tool an AEDT for the step-by-step version of this test applied to real tool categories.

One more scope question catches out-of-state employers, and it is the one most often gotten backwards. Under DCWP's published guidance, coverage turns first on where the job is, not simply on where the applicant lives: the law reaches employers with a physical New York City office, for roles based in NYC at least part of the time and for fully remote roles associated with that NYC office. A role located outside New York City is generally not pulled into scope merely because an applicant happens to be an NYC resident, and an employer with no NYC office at all is generally outside the law's reach entirely. Residency does matter downstream — the statute's notice duty runs to candidates and employees who reside in the city — but it is not an independent trigger on its own. This test is fact-specific, so confirm your own situation against DCWP's current FAQ, or with counsel, before you set a company-wide rule.

NYC Local Law 144 became effective January 1, 2023, and enforcement began July 5, 2023 — a date pushed back from an originally announced April 15, 2023 start (Epstein Becker Green / Workforce Bulletin, 2023). If your AEDT has been in use since before either of those dates, you don't get a pass; the obligations apply to current use, regardless of when you first deployed the tool.

The Three Core Obligations You're Actually Running

Once a tool is confirmed as an AEDT, Local Law 144 gives you exactly three recurring obligations to operate (Crowell & Moring LLP, 2023; Epstein Becker Green, 2023):

1. An annual independent bias audit of the AEDT, measuring selection rates and scoring impact across sex, race/ethnicity, and intersectional categories.
2. A public summary of the most recent bias audit results, posted on the employer's website, along with the date the AEDT was first used and the date of the audit it's reporting on.
3. Advance notice to candidates and employees — at least 10 business days before the AEDT is used — that an AEDT will be or was used, along with a path to request an alternative selection process or accommodation.

Notice that none of these three obligations is "buy a compliant tool." Local Law 144 doesn't certify vendors or products. It puts the burden entirely on the employer (and, in practice, the vendor supplying audit data) to run these three things, year after year, for every AEDT in active use. That's the part that turns into a real operations project the moment you have more than one tool, more than one role family, or more than one hiring season running at the same time.

The Annual Bias Audit: What It Is and Who Can Perform It

The bias audit is the centerpiece obligation, and it's also the one most employers get wrong first — usually by assuming a vendor's internal fairness testing counts. It doesn't. Local Law 144 requires the audit be conducted by an independent auditor, meaning a person or entity with no financial or employment relationship to the employer or to the AEDT's vendor. That independence requirement is structural, not a nice-to-have: it's the reason a company can't audit its own tool, and it's the reason an AEDT vendor can't quietly perform the audit on its own product and call it independent.

The audit itself measures selection rates — the rate at which each demographic category is selected for the role, hired, or advanced — and compares them across categories. The most common lens applied to that comparison is the four-fifths rule (also called the 80% rule), borrowed from the EEOC's Uniform Guidelines: a selection rate for any group that falls below 80% of the rate for the highest-selected group may indicate adverse impact worth investigating further (via Assessment Systems, 2024). It's a screening heuristic, not a legal verdict — a ratio below 80% flags a pattern; it doesn't, by itself, prove discrimination. If you want the arithmetic behind that ratio worked through with real numbers, the four-fifths rule explained walks through the calculation step by step.

Finding and vetting the right independent auditor — someone who genuinely has no financial stake in either your company or your AEDT vendor, and who can produce the specific selection-rate breakdowns the law requires — is its own research project. Independent bias auditor requirements under Local Law 144 covers what to look for and what questions to ask before you sign an engagement letter.

It's worth being direct here about what running this obligation actually involves for HR, versus what the law asks of the auditor. The auditor performs the statistical work and signs the audit. Your side of the job is operational: pulling the underlying selection data the auditor needs, tracking which AEDTs are due for their annual audit and when, confirming the audit actually happened and was delivered, and keeping a documented record of all of it. None of that is legal advice, and none of it is auditing — it's the paperwork and calendar discipline that has to exist around the audit for it to actually happen on schedule, every year, for every tool.

Posting the Public Disclosure: Your Audit Summary Goes on the Website

Once the audit is complete, Local Law 144 requires a summary of the results to be posted publicly on the employer's website — accessible without a login, findable, and including both the date the AEDT was first used and the date of the audit being summarized (Crowell & Moring LLP, 2023; Epstein Becker Green, 2023).

This is, on paper, the simplest of the three obligations: get a document, put it on a webpage. In practice it's the one that most consistently doesn't happen. A widely cited academic study — the "Null Compliance" analysis of 391 employers subject to Local Law 144 — found that only 18 had posted an audit report and only 13 had posted the required transparency notice (Wright & Muenster et al., ACM FAccT, 2024). That's not a marginal compliance gap; it's the majority of covered employers apparently skipping the most visible, lowest-cost-to-execute obligation in the entire law.

A separate 2025 academic review, "Auditing the Audits," raised a related concern: even among the audit reports that do get posted, many may under-report disparities because of missing demographic data, opaque aggregation methods, or metrics that don't reflect how the tool is actually deployed day to day (ACM FAccT, 2025). Posting something isn't the same as posting something that would hold up to scrutiny.

For an HR team running this obligation, the practical task is narrower than the academic critique: get the summary from your auditor, publish it in the right place with the right two dates attached, and keep dated proof that you did — a screenshot, a CMS timestamp, something that shows the posting existed on a specific date, not just that it exists today.

Candidate and Employee Notice: The 10-Business-Day Window

The third obligation is the one candidates actually see: notice that an AEDT will be used to assess them, delivered at least 10 business days before that use, along with information on how to request an alternative selection process or a reasonable accommodation (Crowell & Moring LLP, 2023). The notice can be posted on the careers page, included in a job posting, or sent directly — the law gives some flexibility on the channel, but not on the ten-business-day floor or on the requirement to offer an alternative-process path.

Ten business days sounds generous until you map it against a real hiring pipeline running on a compressed timeline, a rolling requisition, or a high-volume seasonal hiring push where dozens of AEDT-screened roles open and close inside a single week. Getting the notice out the door on time, for the right roles, in the right form, is the piece that turns from "obviously we do that" into "wait, did we actually send that for req #4471" the first time someone audits your own process. Candidate notice requirements under Local Law 144 covers timing edge cases, acceptable notice formats, and what the accommodation request path needs to include.

None of the guidance in this article is legal advice, and none of it substitutes for a determination from DCWP or from outside counsel about a specific tool, a specific role, or a specific notice you've already sent. What follows describes the operational mechanics of the law as written and as enforced so far — confirm anything role-specific with DCWP or your own counsel before treating it as final.

What Happens If You Don't Comply — And What Actually Happened So Far

Local Law 144 sets civil penalties of up to $500 for a first violation (with each additional violation on the same day treated as its own violation), and $500 to $1,500 for each subsequent violation, with penalties accruing per violation, per day (Office of the NY State Comptroller, 2025). Run an AEDT out of compliance across multiple business days, multiple roles, and multiple candidates, and the exposure compounds fast — but the exact schedule and how it's applied case by case is worth confirming directly with DCWP rather than assuming from a summary like this one.

Here's the part that surprises most HR leaders once they look past the statute text: enforcement, so far, has been noticeably light relative to the scale of noncompliance researchers have documented. A New York State Comptroller audit released in December 2025, covering the review period from July 2023 through June 2025, characterized DCWP's enforcement of Local Law 144 as ineffective (Office of the NY State Comptroller, 2025; DLA Piper, 2026). Two specific findings stand out:

• On the same set of companies DCWP had reviewed and found largely compliant, the Comptroller's own auditors found substantially more violations — 17, compared to DCWP's own review, which flagged only minimal noncompliance (Office of the NY State Comptroller, 2025).
• During the entire audit scope, DCWP received only two AEDT-related complaints, and the Comptroller's report noted that DCWP never investigated whether its own complaint intake process was actually working (Office of the NY State Comptroller, 2025). Separately, the Comptroller's testers found that 75% of 311 test calls related to Local Law 144 were improperly routed and never reached DCWP at all (DLA Piper, 2026).

It would be easy to read all of that as a signal that Local Law 144 isn't worth taking seriously. That reading has two problems. First, weak enforcement in a two-year review window is not the same as weak enforcement forever — the Comptroller's own report is a pressure point that tends to precede tighter follow-through, not looser follow-through, and the underlying $500-to-$1,500-per-violation-per-day exposure hasn't gone anywhere. Second, and more practically: the employers named in litigation or media coverage over AEDT bias aren't chosen at random. They tend to be the ones a plaintiff's attorney, a journalist, or a competitor already had a reason to look at. Weak average enforcement doesn't mean weak enforcement against you, specifically, the one time it matters.

A related, newer disclosure obligation is worth flagging here even though it lives in NY WARN rather than Local Law 144: since March 2025, New York WARN filings have asked employers to check a box indicating whether "technological innovation or automation" contributed to a layoff or mass layoff — the first such requirement in any U.S. state (Kaufman Dolowich, 2025). In the first year of that requirement, zero of 162 filers checked the box, across filings covering roughly 28,300 workers (SoftwareSeni, citing NY DOL data through end of January 2026). There's no separate penalty for failing to check that box honestly — the only penalty exposure sits with the underlying WARN notice itself (SoftwareSeni, 2026) — but a zero-out-of-162 result, next to public reporting on AI-driven layoffs, is the kind of gap regulators tend to notice.

There's also a bill on the horizon worth knowing about, though not worth treating as a current obligation: the AI Labor Information Act (§ 201-j) passed the New York legislature in June 2026 and would require covered businesses — generally those with more than 50 employees, plus publicly traded companies — to report annually to NYSDOL on how AI affects hiring, layoffs, hours, and job tasks, with a civil penalty of up to $500 per day for failing to report (NY State Assembly Bill A9581-B, 2026; National Law Review, 2026). As of this writing, the Governor has not signed it and has not publicly stated a position, so it is not an in-force obligation — it's a bill to watch, not a deadline to plan around yet (Thompson Coburn LLP, 2026).

Building the Calendar That Runs NYC Local Law 144 Compliance

Everything above is the law. What actually keeps an employer out of the penalty range is the calendar underneath it — and this is where most of the friction lives, because NYC Local Law 144 doesn't hand you a calendar. It hands you three deadlines relative to your own AEDT usage dates, and it's on you to build the tracker that keeps them from colliding.

A working operation needs, at minimum, four connected pieces:

• An AEDT inventory. Every tool in use, mapped to the roles it screens, with a clear yes/no on whether it meets the statutory definition. This is also where an ONET-based role-tagging approach earns its keep — the ONET database (USDOL/ETA, licensed CC BY 4.0) provides a standardized, SOC-coded way to map which roles a given AEDT actually touches, so you're not re-litigating "does this apply to our warehouse leads too" every time a new requisition opens.
• An audit calendar. The date each AEDT was first used, the date of its last bias audit, and the date the next one is due — annual, tied to first-use date, not the calendar year.
• A notice log. Proof that the 10-business-day candidate notice went out, for which requisitions, in which format, with dated timestamps.
• A posting record. Dated evidence that the current audit summary is live on your website, with both required dates attached.

Running all four of those by hand, in a shared spreadsheet someone half-remembers to update, is exactly how a company ends up in the "Null Compliance" study's 373-employer majority — not posting because nobody owns the follow-through, not because anyone decided not to comply. That's the operational gap Rovaryn Digital built the Complete NY AI Employment Compliance Kit to close: a downloadable set of registers, trackers, and worksheets that structure the AEDT inventory, the audit calendar, the vendor documentation, and the notice log into one operating system your team actually runs — not software, not a subscription, and not a substitute for the independent auditor who performs the audit itself. The kit doesn't score anyone and doesn't certify anything. It keeps the paperwork organized enough that when your auditor asks for last year's selection data, or DCWP asks for proof of your posting date, you have it in one place instead of six inboxes.

If you'd rather have this run for you automatically — reminders that fire before a deadline, a live status view across every AEDT and every vendor — that's the direction the always-on version of this operation is headed. The hosted app, the automatic reminder engine, and the live Vendor Audit Registry lookup are not available yet; if that's the kind of tooling your team needs, join the waitlist and we'll let you know the moment it ships.

For now, the first concrete step is the same one every operator eventually takes: build the inventory, confirm which tools are actually AEDTs under NYC Local Law 144, and get the calendar running before the next audit date sneaks up on you. Download the kit, get on the newsletter for update alerts when DCWP guidance shifts, and start the tracker today rather than the week the deadline arrives.