DOL Workers Owed Wages database: full record
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Get The Wage Theft Files: $7
How to search every employer you've worked for, and what to do next if you find a match.
Get the guide: $7 instant download →If you think we may have recovered unpaid wages for you, use our Workers Owed Wages application to search and claim them. The Wage and Hour Division enforces key labor laws to protect workers' rights. When we find violations, we work to recover unpaid wages on behalf of employees. We make every effort to locate and notify every employee due back wages.
If we cannot find an employee, we hold their back wages for three years while we continue our efforts to locate them. After this period, if we remain unable to find the person, we are required to send the money to the U.S. Treasury.
In fiscal year 2025, our enforcement efforts resulted in more than $259 million in back wages for nearly 176,957 employees. The impact of our wage recoveries averaged $1,465 per worker.
DOL recovered $234.3 million for workers in fiscal year 2021, $213.1 million in fiscal 2022, and $212.3 million in fiscal 2023, for a total of $659.8 million across those three years. Total wage theft recovered for workers by the U.S. Department of Labor, state agencies, and class action litigation from 2021 to 2023 reached $1.5 billion.
This transcription covers the DOL's own description of the WOW database function, its holding period policy, and its most recent published enforcement statistics. State-level databases, including New York's separate Wage Theft Investigation Dashboard, provide additional search capability not reflected in the federal totals above.
Database: Workers Owed Wages, U.S. Department of Labor. webapps.dol.gov/wow.
Data: DOL Wage and Hour Division enforcement data, FY2025. dol.gov/agencies/whd/data.
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