The Know Your Rights Notice: What Your California Employer Owed You by February 1, 2026
Since February 1, 2026, every employer in California has had to hand each of its employees a written Know Your Rights notice. Not a poster in the break room. Not a paragraph buried in the handbook. A stand-alone notice, given to you, and given again every year.
Most people we speak to have never seen one.
Labor Law PC represents employees only, never employers, from our offices in Santa Monica and Palo Alto. This is not the most dramatic law passed last year, but it is one of the few that hands you a written statement of what you are entitled to, and it is worth knowing what should have arrived.
What the Notice Has to Cover
The Workplace Know Your Rights Act requires the notice to describe your rights in five areas:
- Workers’ compensation. Disability pay and medical care for a work-related injury or illness, with contact details for the Division of Workers’ Compensation.
- Notice of immigration agency inspections. Your right to be told when an immigration agency inspects your employer’s I-9 forms or employment records.
- Protection against unfair immigration-related practices when you exercise a protected right.
- The right to organise or take part in concerted activity at work.
- Your constitutional rights if law enforcement comes to your workplace, including your Fourth Amendment protection against unreasonable searches and your Fifth Amendment rights to due process and against self-incrimination.
The notice must also describe new legal developments the Labor Commissioner considers material and list the agencies that enforce these rights.
There is no employer size threshold. A three-person business owes you this notice exactly as a three-thousand-person one does.
Two Details Worth Knowing
The inspection right is older than this law. The Know Your Rights notice has to tell you about it, but the right itself comes from a 2017 statute, Labor Code section 90.2. Under it, your employer must give notice within 72 hours of learning that an immigration agency will inspect its I-9 forms or employment records and must give affected employees the written results of that inspection within 72 hours as well. If your workplace has been inspected and nobody told you, that duty was already in force years before this new notice existed.
The emergency contact rule is separate and has its own deadline. The same Act requires employers to let you designate an emergency contact to be notified if you are arrested or detained, including at work. That obligation runs to March 30, 2026, not February 1, and it is a different section of the law. If your employer handled one and not the other, that is common.
What Your Employer Cannot Do
Your employer may not discharge, threaten, demote, suspend, or otherwise discriminate or retaliate against you for exercising, or attempting to exercise, rights under this law.
That is the provision worth remembering. The notice itself is paperwork. The protection attached to acting on it is not.
What Language It Should Be In
The notice must be given in the language your employer normally uses to communicate with you about employment, provided the Labor Commissioner has published its template in that language. The Labor Commissioner has published it in multiple languages, including in Spanish. If your employer communicates with you in one of those and handed you an English-only notice, that is not what the statute asks for.
If You Never Received One
Be clear-eyed about what this law does and does not give you, because a good deal of what is written about it overstates the position.
It is enforced by the Labor Commissioner and by public prosecutors. An earlier version of the bill contained a right for employees to sue directly. It was removed before the law passed. So a missing notice is a complaint you make to the Labor Commissioner, not a lawsuit you file yourself, and penalties of up to $500 per employee run to the state rather than to you.
What a missing notice is genuinely useful for is different, and it is the reason we mention it at all. It is evidence. An employer that never gave the required notice, never set up emergency contacts, and never told anyone about an inspection is an employer with a pattern, and that pattern tends to matter a great deal in a case about something else, which is usually why people call us.
And the retaliation protection stands on its own. If you raised the notice, asked why you never got one, or acted on something in it, and your hours changed or your reviews turned, that is the part worth a phone call.
Can I sue if my employer never gave me the Know Your Rights notice?
No, not under this law by itself. Enforcement runs through the Labor Commissioner or a public prosecutor. If something happened to you because you raised it, that is a different and stronger claim.
Does the Workplace Know Your Rights Act apply to small businesses?
Yes. There is no size threshold.
Is the Know Your Rights notice required every year?
No. It is required annually, and again for every new employee on hire.
My workplace was inspected by immigration and no one told us — is that legal?
That is a separate and older obligation, and a serious one. Your employer had 72 hours to give notice of the inspection, and 72 hours to give affected employees the results. Call us.
Knowing What You Are Owed Is the Point
If you never received the notice, or if raising it cost you something at work, call (877) 775-2267 or contact us online for a free, confidential consultation. No fees unless we win.
This article is general information about California law as of September 2026 and is not legal advice about your situation. Reading it does not create an attorney-client relationship. Deadlines in employment matters are short and vary by claim.
