Washington Lets a Job Applicant Collect Up to $5,000 for a Posting With No Salary Range. Two Settlements Close Three Days Apart — Red Robin on September 25, Zales and Sterling on September 28

Washington’s RCW 49.58.110 requires employers with 15 or more employees to state, in each covered job posting, either “the wage scale or salary range” or “the fixed wage amount”, plus “a general description of all of the benefits and other compensation”.

What makes it unusual is the remedy. The statute does not merely allow a regulator to fine the employer — it gives the applicant a private claim with a floor: “A prevailing job applicant or employee is entitled to statutory damages of no less than $100 and no more than $5,000 per violation, plus reasonable attorneys’ fees and costs.”

A guaranteed minimum, a five-thousand-dollar ceiling and recoverable fees is an unusually clean fit for class treatment: the violation is visible on the face of the posting, and every applicant who saw it was injured in the same way. A run of class actions followed.

Rummell v. Red Robin International, Inc., Case No. 24-2-01225-34, is pending in Thurston County Superior Court before Judge John Skinder. The settlement fund is stated at up to $1,674,500.

The official settlement site sets one date for everything: “The deadline to submit a Claim Form is September 25, 2026” — and the same day applies to requesting exclusion and to objecting. The final approval hearing is January 29, 2027 at 9:00 a.m., so approval, and therefore any money, is months behind the claim deadline.

The class covers applicants for Red Robin positions in Washington where postings allegedly failed to disclose wage scale or salary range information. Secondary coverage of the preliminary-approval filings puts the eligibility window at January 1, 2023 to June 12, 2026, roughly 1,970 identified class members and an estimated payment near $573 each; those three figures come from settlement trackers rather than the official site, and should be treated as indicative.

Lynch v. Zale Delaware, Inc., Case No. 24-2-24820-0 SEA, sits in King County Superior Court before Judge John McHale, and covers applications to Zale Delaware, Inc. and/or Sterling Jewelers Inc. — the group behind Zales, Kay Jewelers and Jared.

Its class period is January 1, 2023 to July 26, 2025, split into two subclasses: a Minimum Wage Settlement Class, where the posting disclosed a range starting below the applicable Washington minimum wage, and a No Pay Settlement Class, where the posting disclosed no pay or benefits information at all. Claim, exclusion and objection deadlines are all September 28, 2026; the final approval hearing is October 23, 2026 at 10:00 a.m.

Three details from the official FAQ are worth carrying into a decision. Payments are an equal share of the fund, and “your estimated payment amount is on the Claim Form you received with the Notice” — the site publishes no single per-person figure. Payments are characterised as non-wage damages, reported on a 1099. And settlement cheques expire 180 days after issuance.

Both cases are built from the employers’ own applicant records, and both route claiming through a mailed notice. The Zale site is explicit that filing online requires the LoginID and PIN found in the Notice sent to you.

That is the honest limit on both of these settlements: they are not open to the general public, and a Washington applicant who never received a notice cannot simply file. If you applied to either employer in the relevant window and believe you were missed, the route is the administrator — Simpluris handles both cases (Zale: (833) 421-7315; Red Robin: (833) 421-7299) — not the claim form.

It is also why the gap between the statutory headline and the real cheque is so wide. $5,000 is the maximum a court may award per violation to a prevailing individual claimant; a class settlement divides a negotiated fund among everyone who files, which is how a $5,000 ceiling becomes an estimate in the hundreds.

Two further Washington job-posting settlements have already closed this year — ACV Auctions (claims closed June 29, 2026) and Delphinus Engineering (July 28, 2026), per settlement trackers. The two now open are the visible tail of the same statute.

The reason the pipeline is likely to thin is written into the law itself. For postings made between July 27, 2025 and July 27, 2027, an employer that receives written notice of a violation has five business days to correct it before penalties apply. Cases still being filed today mostly concern postings from 2023 to mid-2025, before that cure period existed. Anyone waiting for a claim window on a recent posting should not assume one is coming.