The ten-business-day AEDT notice
New York City requires the notice to reach the candidate ten business days before the automated employment decision tool is used. Ten business days, not ten calendar days, and counted against the day the tool runs rather than the day a decision is made. That interval has to be planned for, because it cannot be created afterwards.
What DCWP says
New York City: jurisdiction and source status
- Jurisdiction
- New York City only — a municipal ordinance, not New York State law
- Law
- Local Law 144 of 2021, on automated employment decision tools (AEDT)
- Agency
- NYC Department of Consumer and Worker Protection (DCWP)
- Enforcement began
- July 5, 2023
- Core duties
- DCWP states that Local Law 144 prohibits employers and employment agencies from using an AEDT unless the tool has been subject to a bias audit within one year of its use, information about that audit is publicly available, and certain notices have been provided to employees or job candidates.
- Notice timing
- DCWP revised its roundtable materials in June 2023 to clarify that the notice must be provided 10 business days prior to use of an AEDT.
- Complaints
- Filed with DCWP; a complainant selects “Employment Agency” or “Other” as the business type, and no account is required.
- Last reviewed
- August 26, 2026
DCWP went back and revised its own presentation materials in June 2023 to make the ten-business-day point explicit, which tells you how often it was being misread.
Why business days change the arithmetic
Ten business days spans two full weekends at minimum. Add a public holiday and it stretches further. A team that counts calendar days will consistently issue notices around four days late, and will do it uniformly, across every candidate, without anything appearing to go wrong.
That uniformity is the risk. A one-off miss is an incident; a counting rule applied consistently is a pattern across every candidate processed under it.
Where the interval collides with a real pipeline
The notice has to precede the tool by ten business days, which means it has to be issued before anyone knows whether the candidate is worth the effort. High-volume recruiting is optimized in the opposite direction — screen first, engage the survivors.
There are only three workable shapes, and each is worth choosing deliberately rather than discovering:
- Notify at application. Everyone who applies gets the notice, so the interval is always satisfied by the time any tool runs. Highest volume, simplest to prove.
- Notify at the job posting stage, for roles known in advance to involve an AEDT.
- Hold the tool until the interval has elapsed for a given candidate, which requires the send date to be readable by whatever triggers the tool.
Which is appropriate is a question for counsel and for the client relationship. What they share is that all three depend on the send date being recorded as data rather than living in a sent-items folder.
What a defensible send record contains
To show an interval you need both ends of it, and the send date is the end that goes missing:
- The date the notice was sent, and the delivery outcome the provider returned
- The approved template version that was actually used at that time
- The candidate and the role or workflow reference
- Which automated tool the notice related to, and when it ran
A bounce matters especially here. If the notice never arrived, the interval a team believes it observed did not happen, and nothing about the workflow will have signalled it.
The other half: the bias audit
Local Law 144 has a second half, and this page does not reach it. The audit belongs with an independent auditor. For that side of the law, read DCWP's materials directly and work with your counsel.
Common questions
How many days notice does NYC Local Law 144 require?
Ten business days before the automated employment decision tool is used. DCWP revised its June 2023 roundtable materials specifically to clarify that point.
Is that ten calendar days or ten business days?
Business days. Over a period containing weekends and public holidays, ten business days is meaningfully longer than two calendar weeks, and counting them as calendar days produces a notice that is late.
What has to be in the notice?
DCWP describes the requirement as certain notices being provided to employees or job candidates, alongside the bias audit duties. For the specific content required in a given situation, read DCWP's own materials and take your counsel's view; this page does not supply notice language.
What happens if the notice went out late?
That is a legal question, and the answer depends on facts this page cannot know. What is within your control beforehand is whether the send date was recorded at all — a late notice you can date is a different problem from a notice nobody can date.
Notice Tracking keeps approved templates, delivery events and exports connected to the candidate record.
This page is general information about published government requirements, last reviewed August 26, 2026. Requirements change; confirm the current text with the agency and your own counsel before relying on it.