This bill directs the California Employment Development Department (EDD) to expand employer wage reporting to include hours worked, occupational classification, industry, worker type, and total monthly wages, and to create procedures to share that information with state benefit and workforce systems.
The change aims to give policymakers, training programs, and benefit administrators the granular labor market information they currently lack so the state can evaluate program outcomes, verify benefit eligibility more efficiently, and target workforce investments — while the bill requires EDD to streamline reporting and minimize employer burden.
At a Glance
What It Does
Instead of a separate new program, the bill folds new data elements into existing wage reporting and requires EDD to modernize intake (electronic filing, APIs, aligned definitions) and build data‑sharing procedures with CalSAWS and other agencies. It authorizes the department to accept hours data separately or more frequently than quarterly and to consult relevant stakeholders while implementing technical changes.
Who It Affects
Payroll-reporting entities (employers, payroll service providers, and agents), EDD and its IT contractors, county welfare agencies operating CalSAWS, education and workforce agencies that use longitudinal data, and workforce researchers and planners who rely on state wage records.
Why It Matters
If implemented cleanly, the added fields will enable evaluation of job quality, training program outcomes, and benefits eligibility with less manual verification. The bill locks in an interagency approach that could reduce administrative costs long term but creates a significant near‑term IT and operational workload for public and private actors.
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What This Bill Actually Does
The bill adds a new section to California’s Unemployment Insurance Code setting definitions and practical steps for expanding the state wage file. It defines "hours worked" (with a 40‑hour per week convention for full‑time employees and an allowance for reasonable estimates for part‑time workers), "occupation" (SOC code or job title), and "worker type" (full‑time, part‑time, intern, apprentice).
Those definitions frame what employers must submit and how the department will interpret the incoming data.
Operationally, the bill requires employers or their reporting agents meeting a size threshold to submit industry, occupation, worker type, hours worked, and total monthly wages in a department‑approved format and electronically unless an employer secures a waiver. To reduce friction, EDD must align definitions with federal standards where possible, provide APIs and user‑friendly tools, and may require hours to be supplied separately or more frequently than quarterly (up to monthly).To make the data usable for benefits verification, the department must adopt procedures for sharing hours‑worked and employment data with Medi‑Cal and CalFresh eligibility systems, working with the State Department of Social Services, Department of Health Care Services, CalSAWS, and county welfare partners.
The bill instructs EDD to coordinate with the Office of the California Education Interagency Council, the California Workforce Development Board, and other entities so the same data serve workforce analytics and education outcomes reporting.Finally, the bill sets implementation markers and funding expectations: EDD must develop procedural and data‑sharing rules by mid‑2027 and begin the automated CalSAWS verification process by January 1, 2028 (or when CalSAWS can perform the automation). It directs the department to use existing federal and state grants as available to cover implementation costs but does not appropriate new state funds within the text.
The Five Things You Need to Know
The bill establishes standard definitions for "hours worked," "occupation" (SOC code or job title), and "worker type" (full‑time, part‑time, intern, apprentice) that employers must use when reporting employment data.
Employers or reporting agents covering 10 or more employees must file industry, occupation, worker type, hours worked, and total monthly wage data electronically in a department‑approved format, with limited waiver options.
EDD must adopt procedures for interagency data sharing to support benefit eligibility verifications by July 1, 2027, and begin automated verification with CalSAWS on January 1, 2028, or when CalSAWS automation is ready.
To reduce burden, the department must align definitions with federal standards, deploy APIs and streamlined reporting tools, and it may require hours to be reported separately or more often than quarterly, up to monthly.
Implementation is to rely on existing federal and state grant funds where available; the bill contains no new appropriation language but sets firm internal deadlines for the department.
Section-by-Section Breakdown
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Findings and legislative intent
This opening section compiles studies and recent state reports to justify why hours and occupation are "core" data elements missing from California’s wage file. It frames the change as necessary for program evaluation, labor shortage identification, and federal benefit verification, and expresses legislative intent that EDD minimize employer burden while improving data quality.
Key definitions that determine reporting content
This subsection prescribes the exact meaning of the data elements: "hours worked" (with a 40‑hour per week convention for full‑time staff and a reasonable estimate allowance for part‑time), "occupation" (use SOC codes or a job title), and "worker type" (categorical employment status). Those definitions will control how employers prepare files and how EDD maps employer-submitted text fields into standardized codes for analysis.
Streamlining and technical modernization duties for EDD
Here the bill requires EDD to mitigate employer burden by aligning definitions with federal law where feasible, promoting a single reporting pathway, deploying APIs, and otherwise simplifying the reporting experience. Practically, this creates a design brief for EDD’s IT modernization: specification documents, validation rules, help tools, and a plan to accept common payroll file formats or direct API submissions.
Who must report, how often, and format requirements
This operative subsection sets the reporting threshold (employers and agents reporting for 10 or more employees), requires industry, occupation, worker type, hours, and monthly wages in a department‑approved electronic format, and preserves a waiver route for employers who cannot file electronically. It also gives the director authority to require hours submitted separately or on a more frequent cadence (monthly), which affects payroll cycle integration and vendor workflows.
Data sharing for benefits verification and CalSAWS integration
These clauses direct EDD to create procedures and technical interfaces to share hours and other employment data with Medi‑Cal and CalFresh eligibility systems and to work with CalSAWS to perform automated verifications. The provisions compel interagency consultations and place the operational burden of building automated verification on EDD and CalSAWS rather than on county caseworkers doing manual checks.
Cross‑agency coordination for workforce analytics
The bill requires EDD to coordinate with the Office of the California Education Interagency Council, the California Workforce Development Board, Labor and Workforce Development Agency, and the Office of Cradle‑to‑Career Data. That coordination is intended to ensure a single set of employment fields supports workforce program reporting, education outcome tracking, and public dashboards, which increases reuse but necessitates careful governance over access and definitions.
Implementation timeline and funding expectation
This subsection sets deadlines (procedures by July 1, 2027; CalSAWS verification process to begin January 1, 2028, or later when automation is ready) and instructs EDD to use existing federal and state grants where available. It creates a statutory expectation of progress within specified dates but does not provide a new appropriation or penalty system for noncompliance.
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Explore Employment in Codify Search →Who Benefits and Who Bears the Cost
Every bill creates winners and losers. Here's who stands to gain and who bears the cost.
Who Benefits
- Learners and job‑seekers — better ability for education and training programs to demonstrate whether participants obtain employment in their field and the quality of those jobs, which can inform program design and individual choices.
- Workforce planners and higher‑education institutions — access to occupation‑level and hours data improves program evaluation, regional labor market analytics, and alignment between curricula and employer demand.
- State benefit administrators (EDD, DHS, DSS, county caseworkers using CalSAWS) — automated access to employer‑reported hours can reduce manual verification, lower error rates in eligibility determinations, and speed benefit processing for applicants.
Who Bears the Cost
- Medium and large employers (and payroll agents) — must adapt payroll and reporting systems to include new fields, map job titles to occupation codes, and possibly submit hours monthly, creating one‑time and ongoing compliance costs.
- Payroll processors, professional employer organizations, and agent filers — must update software, validation rules, and client workflows; agents that report for many employers will face heightened integration work.
- EDD, CalSAWS, and county welfare IT teams — responsible for significant system changes and coordination; implementation will consume staff time and grant funding and may compete with other modernization priorities.
Key Issues
The Core Tension
The bill balances two legitimate aims that pull against each other: the public interest in more granular, auditable labor data to evaluate programs and verify benefits versus the administrative, technical, and privacy costs of collecting, standardizing, and sharing that data. Better data can improve services and reduce manual work, but collecting it risks mismeasurement, creates near‑term burdens for employers and IT systems, and raises privacy and error‑impact concerns for benefit recipients.
The bill takes a practical, technical approach, but several operational and policy challenges remain. First, the approach to "hours worked" (counting 40 hours for each week with any duties performed by a full‑time employee and allowing "reasonable estimates" for part‑time staff) is administrable but risks systemic measurement error.
That error will propagate into program evaluations and could lead to flawed policy conclusions unless EDD builds clear validation, audit, and correction mechanisms.
Second, occupational classification is notoriously messy. Employers record free‑text job titles; mapping those to the Standard Occupational Classification at scale requires sustained investment in code‑mapping tools, validation logic, and human review.
Without rigorous mapping and documented crosswalks, state analysts may draw incorrect inferences about workforce pipelines. Finally, the bill relies on existing federal and state grant funding and sets hard deadline dates without appropriating resources; meeting the timelines will depend on EDD’s project capacity and CalSAWS’ readiness, creating a realistic risk that technical debt, interoperability gaps, or privacy controls will delay full realization of the bill’s objectives.
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