Key Findings
Wage theft is the largest category of theft in America by dollar value, yet it is rarely prosecuted and almost never reported per case. This analysis uses the federal government’s own enforcement record — every concluded Department of Labor Wage and Hour Division case since 2005 — to show its real shape.
- 86% of recovered wage theft is unpaid overtime, not sub-minimum pay. The data holds $2.97B in overtime back wages against just $494.4M in minimum-wage violations. The classic wage-theft case is a worker pushed past 40 hours without the time-and-a-half the law requires — usually via “salaried” misclassification, off-the-clock work, or shaved hours.
- It is high-volume and low-dollar: the median case recovered $4,412. For any one worker that is often too little to justify a lawyer — which is exactly why wage theft is under-reported and why a free federal complaint is the realistic remedy. Across 5,413,387 workers, the small amounts total $4.79B.
- Construction, accommodation & food services, and health care & social assistance lead. Construction tops recovered back wages ($732.1M); among named industries, full-service restaurants are #1 ($478.4M) and fast food & limited-service restaurants appear separately below that.
- The highest theft per case is in home health care ($10,848 median). Care work — home health aides, nursing and residential care — combines large staffs, low pay, and heavy overtime, producing the biggest per-case recoveries of any major industry.
- Federal enforcement volume has fallen for over a decade. Concluded cases per year dropped from more than 11,000 in the mid-2000s to a few thousand recently. Recent years are still filling in as cases conclude, but the long-run decline in case count is real — even as recovered dollars held up, meaning enforcement shifted toward larger cases.