Updated October 27, 2026, with the FedEx lawsuits filed in New York through October 24.
Between September 4 and October 24, 2026, more than 380 lawsuits were filed in New York federal courts by FedEx delivery drivers who say they were never paid overtime. One Boston law firm filed all of them, each one is brought by a single driver, and every one names FedEx.
If you drive a route in New York, that news raises two fair questions. Does any of this apply to me? And if I wasn’t one of those drivers, is it too late?
It might apply, and not only if you deliver for FedEx. The problem those cases describe is the ordinary arrangement for route delivery in this state. You are hired by a small local company. You wear the big company’s uniform, drive its van, scan its packages and run the route it sets. You work ten, eleven, twelve hours a day. Your check does not show time and a half.
And no, it is not too late just because you weren’t part of those cases. The deadline behind them applied only to the drivers in them. Your own claim runs on its own clock, and under New York law that clock reaches back six years.
Why so many FedEx drivers sued at once
The cases started in Pennsylvania. In 2018, FedEx drivers brought a collective action for unpaid overtime in federal court in Pittsburgh, and more than 30,000 drivers around the country joined it. In 2024 it stopped going forward as one group case. Drivers then refiled together, each by name, in three large cases in the same court, which named 14,296 drivers in all.
On May 18, 2026, the judge ruled that those drivers’ claims could not be tried together and split them up. Each driver got 60 days to refile alone, in a court where the claim belonged, or the claim would be time-barred. That deadline was paused while the two sides tried mediation. Mediation failed, and in September the individual cases began arriving in courts around the country, including in Michigan, Nevada, Arkansas and New York.
New York received 386 of them: 158 in the Southern District, which sits in Manhattan and White Plains, 227 in the Eastern District, which covers Brooklyn, Queens, Staten Island and Long Island, and one upstate.
The cases are nearly identical. Each brings one claim, for overtime under the federal Fair Labor Standards Act. Each driver says they were paid by a FedEx contractor, drove a vehicle of 10,000 pounds or less, regularly worked more than 40 hours a week and never got time and a half. And each argues that FedEx controlled the work so closely, from the terminal and the scanner to the uniform and the rules for every delivery, that FedEx was their employer too.
FedEx’s position is that the contractors, not FedEx, employ the drivers and are responsible for their pay. In at least one Manhattan case it has told the judge it intends to ask for dismissal. These cases are at the very start.
If you weren’t one of those drivers
That 60-day deadline was never yours. It applied only to the drivers named in the Pennsylvania cases. If you weren’t one of them, it didn’t start or end anything for you.
Your clock is your own. Under federal law you can generally recover overtime for the last two years, or three if the violation was willful, counted back from when you file. Under New York law it is six years. Every month you wait, the oldest month falls off.
New York law gives you more than those cases ask for. The FedEx suits are federal claims only. A New York route driver may also have claims under New York Labor Law that federal law doesn’t give: six years instead of two or three, overtime even when the federal motor carrier exemption applies, and, for drivers paid close to the minimum wage, an extra hour’s pay for long days. All three are explained below. Those claims can be made against the contractor that actually paid you, whatever the courts decide about FedEx.
If you are already one of the drivers who sued, you have a lawyer. Questions about your case, including whether New York claims belong in it, should go to that lawyer.
If you joined the old Pennsylvania case years ago but didn’t refile this year, don’t assume your claim is gone, and don’t assume it’s safe. What’s left depends on dates, so have it checked soon.
Here is what New York law says about the rest.
Who is your employer, and why it may be more than one company
FedEx and Amazon do not usually hire route drivers directly. They contract with small companies that run a handful of routes each. FedEx calls them independent service providers. Amazon calls them delivery service partners. You are on that small company’s payroll, and that company is the one that decides your pay.
That matters in two ways.
First, your unpaid wage claim is against whoever employed you, and that is usually the contractor, not the brand on the van. Many drivers assume they have no case because they cannot sue a company the size of FedEx. That gets it backwards. The company that shorted you is the one that owes you.
Second, the bigger company can sometimes be on the hook as well. When one company sets the route, the schedule, the scanner, the delivery windows and the standards you are measured against, the law can treat it as your employer too. That is the argument in the FedEx cases described above. It is fact specific, it is fought hard, and it is not something to assume. But it is a real question worth asking about your own job.
The overtime rule, and the trap most drivers are told about
The basic New York rule is simple. Over forty hours in a week, you are owed time and a half.
Drivers are often told that rule does not apply to them, and there is a real federal provision behind that. Under the Fair Labor Standards Act, a driver whose work affects the safety of a vehicle over 10,000 pounds carrying goods across state lines can be exempt from federal overtime. It is called the motor carrier exemption, and employers of delivery drivers reach for it constantly.
Two things are usually left out when a driver is told this.
The exemption does not cover smaller vehicles. If the vehicle you drive is 10,000 pounds or less, the exemption does not apply and federal overtime does. Many delivery vans sit close to that line, and plenty fall under it. If you drive a mix of vehicles, the weeks you spend in the smaller one count.
In New York, the exemption does not end the claim. This is the part almost nobody is told. In 2020 the Second Circuit, the federal appeals court that covers New York, held that a driver who is exempt from overtime under the federal motor carrier rule is still owed overtime under New York law, at one and a half times the New York minimum wage, for every hour over forty. The case was brought by armored car drivers whose employer insisted they were exempt. They were exempt federally. They were still owed money.
So in New York a route driver is not left with nothing. The only question is the rate.
The extra hour nobody claims
New York has a rule called spread of hours. If more than ten hours pass between the start and the end of your workday, you can be owed an extra hour of pay at the minimum wage for that day.
There is a limit worth knowing. Outside restaurants and hotels, New York courts have generally held that the extra hour is owed only to workers paid at or close to the minimum wage. That still covers more drivers than you might think, because day rates and flat route pay hide the hourly number. A day rate of $200 for an eleven-hour day works out to about $18 an hour, close to the $17.00 minimum in New York City.
For 2026 the minimum wage is $17.00 an hour in New York City, Long Island and Westchester, and $16.00 in the rest of the state. Routes run long. A driver who starts loading at 7 and finishes at 6 has crossed the ten-hour line, even with a break in the middle.
In my experience this is one of the most commonly missed items in driver pay, because almost nobody knows it exists.
How far back it goes, and what it is worth
New York’s wage law reaches back six years. Federal law reaches back two, or three if the violation was willful. Most drivers use the six.
If a court finds the wages were not paid in good faith, New York adds liquidated damages equal to the amount owed. In plain terms, the unpaid wages can double. Interest and attorney’s fees are on top of that, which is why these cases are handled on contingency and cost you nothing up front.
Two more things worth saying plainly.
Immigration status does not matter. New York’s wage protections cover the work you did, not your papers. Employers know that workers are afraid to ask, and some of them count on it.
Being called a contractor does not settle it. Whether you are an employee is decided by how the job actually works, not by the label on your paperwork or what you signed at hire. If someone else sets your hours, your route and your standards, and the work is the core of their business, the label is not the end of the analysis. More on that on our employee misclassification page.
Where this does not go
App work is a different animal. If you deliver for DoorDash, Uber Eats, Grubhub or a similar app, picking up jobs when you choose, that is not the same situation as a route driver and the law treats it differently. Some of those arrangements are being challenged. Most are harder, slower and governed by arbitration clauses you agreed to in the app. I would rather tell you that at the start than after. If an app deactivated you, see our page on deactivated delivery workers in New York.
This article is about route delivery: a set schedule, an assigned route, a company van, a supervisor. If you deliver for a restaurant that employs you directly, see restaurant workers in New York.
What to do now
Start writing down your own hours. Today, not later. The date, the time you clocked in, the time you finished, and any unpaid time before or after the shift. A note on your phone is enough. In wage cases, the employer is the one required to keep accurate records, and when those records are missing or wrong, a worker’s own consistent account carries real weight.
Write down the vehicle. Note which van or truck you drive each week and, if you can see it, the weight rating printed on the label inside the driver’s door. Whether it is 10,000 pounds or less matters for federal overtime.
Keep what you already have. Pay stubs, the hire paperwork, scanner or route reports, group chats where a manager tells everyone what time to be there. Photograph anything you can only see at work.
Do not sign anything new without reading it. If a release, a settlement or a revised contractor agreement appears after you start asking about your pay, that timing is not a coincidence.
Ask before the six years starts running out. Every month that passes drops a month off the back end of the claim.
