How to File a Discrimination or Harassment Charge

Federal discrimination law is not one statute but several, and each sets its own coverage floor. Title VII of the Civil Rights Act (42 U.S.C. 2000e(b)), the Americans with Disabilities Act, and the Pregnant Workers Fairness Act each reach employers with 15 or more employees. The Age Discrimination in Employment Act requires 20. Section 1981 of Title 42, which covers race and ethnicity discrimination, has no employee threshold at all and reaches an employer of any size. Those are federal floors only, and state law frequently sets a lower one.

If your employer sits below the federal floor, the analysis is not finished. State fair employment statutes routinely cover employers too small for Title VII, which is why 15 employees is not the practical floor for a worker. New York covers all employers regardless of size. California covers employers with 5 or more employees generally, and 1 or more for harassment claims. Other states set their own numbers and some track the federal one. Check the statute in your state before concluding that a small employer is out of reach.

Federal government employees and applicants are on an entirely different track and should not wait for a charge form. You must contact an EEO Counselor at your own agency within 45 days of the discriminatory matter, or within 45 days of the effective date of a personnel action (29 C.F.R. 1614.105(a)(1)). There is no 180 or 300 day charge period in the federal sector, and missing the 45 day contact can end a claim before it starts.

The baseline deadline to file a charge with the EEOC is 180 calendar days from the discriminatory act (42 U.S.C. 2000e-5(e)(1)). That period extends to 300 days only in what is called a deferral jurisdiction, meaning a place where a state or local agency enforces a law prohibiting employment discrimination on the same basis. The extension is conditional, not the default. Whether you get 180 days or 300 depends on where you work.

Most states are deferral jurisdictions, and there the extension is usually automatic. The statute keys it to the worker having first started proceedings with the state or local agency, and in practice EEOC worksharing agreements with those agencies dual file the charge for you. Non deferral pockets remain. Alabama and Mississippi are commonly identified as having no statewide employment fair employment agency, and Arkansas as having no statewide enforcement agency, but agency rosters change and coverage can be basis specific, so a local ordinance may make a claim deferral eligible for one protected class and not another. Confirm the current position with your nearest EEOC field office instead of assuming, and treat 180 days as your working deadline until you have.

Age claims follow a parallel but separately codified set of rules. The ADEA has its own 180 and 300 day deadlines (29 U.S.C. 626(d)(1)(B), 633(b)), and its 300 day extension requires a state law prohibiting age discrimination and a state authority able to grant relief. A city or county ordinance alone does not extend an age charge to 300 days, even where it would extend a Title VII charge.

Which act starts the clock matters as much as how long the clock runs. Discrete acts such as a demotion, a failure to promote, or a termination each start their own 180 or 300 day clock and are lost if they are not charged in time (National Railroad Passenger Corp. v. Morgan, 536 U.S. 101 (2002)). A hostile work environment claim works differently: it is timely so long as at least one act contributing to the claim falls inside the filing period, and earlier acts that are part of the same unlawful practice can then be considered. Pay discrimination has its own rule. Under the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act an unlawful practice occurs each time compensation is paid pursuant to a discriminatory decision, so every affected paycheck restarts the charge filing clock (42 U.S.C. 2000e-5(e)(3)(A)).

Missing the deadline is serious, but it is not automatically the end. Title VII's charge filing requirement is a mandatory claim processing rule rather than a jurisdictional bar, so an employer that waits too long to raise your failure to exhaust can forfeit the objection (Fort Bend County v. Davis, 587 U.S. 541 (2019)). That is a fallback argument, not a filing plan.

Most states have their own fair employment practices agency, usually shortened to FEPA, and the EEOC maintains worksharing agreements with them so that a charge filed with one agency is generally dual filed with the other. Dual filing is what preserves both tracks at once, and it is the mechanism behind the 300 day extension in deferral jurisdictions.

The state deadline is set by state law and is frequently different from the EEOC's. The verified range is wide: California allows 3 years to file with its Civil Rights Department, New York allows 3 years with its Division of Human Rights, Florida allows 365 days with the Florida Commission on Human Relations, and many other states use 180 days. Alabama, Mississippi, and Arkansas are commonly identified as having no statewide employment FEPA at all. These deadlines are amended often, so confirm the current rule rather than relying on a secondary source or an older article.

Whether you must go through a state agency before suing under state law is itself a state law question with no national answer. Some states require an administrative charge first: California, for example, requires a right to sue notice from its Civil Rights Department before a state law claim can go to court. Others let a worker file directly. Arkansas is commonly identified as having no statewide enforcement agency, which would leave claimants to proceed straight to court, but agency rosters change, so confirm the current position before relying on it. The EEOC warns that FEPA deadlines, coverage standards, and available relief all differ from the federal ones, so the two tracks need to be checked separately. Federal Section 1981 claims never require exhaustion of any kind.

Discrimination law reaches harassment only when the conduct is because of a protected characteristic. A manager who is unpleasant to everyone is generally outside these statutes, however difficult the job becomes, because the statutes prohibit discrimination on a listed basis rather than bad management in general.

Under federal law the test is severe or pervasive, not severe and pervasive. The conduct must be severe or pervasive enough to alter the conditions of employment and create an abusive working environment, it must be objectively hostile to a reasonable person, and you must have subjectively perceived it as hostile (Harris v. Forklift Systems, Inc., 510 U.S. 17 (1993)). Psychological injury is not required. Because the test is written in the alternative, conduct that is not individually severe can still be actionable if it is pervasive enough, and a long run of individually smaller incidents can add up to a claim.

Several states have rejected that threshold for claims under their own statutes, and their standard can be easier to meet than the federal one. New York abolished severe or pervasive and asks only whether the conduct subjected you to inferior terms, conditions or privileges of employment, subject to an affirmative defense for petty slights and trivial inconveniences (N.Y. Exec. Law 296(1)(h)). California provides by statute that a single incident of harassing conduct can create a triable issue (Cal. Gov. Code 12923). The New York City Human Rights Law is broader still. Do not assume the federal standard is the only one available to you.

Who did the harassing changes how the employer's liability is analyzed. Under federal law an employer is vicariously liable for a hostile environment created by a supervisor. If the harassment culminated in a tangible employment action such as discharge, demotion, or an undesirable reassignment, no defense is available. If it did not, the employer may raise the two part Faragher/Ellerth affirmative defense: that it exercised reasonable care to prevent and promptly correct the harassment, and that you unreasonably failed to use its complaint procedures (Faragher v. City of Boca Raton, 524 U.S. 775 (1998); Burlington Industries v. Ellerth, 524 U.S. 742 (1998)). That is one reason a written internal complaint can matter so much later. State law can differ sharply here, and the next paragraph covers it: California imposes strict liability on employers for supervisor harassment, and New York provides that failing to complain internally is not determinative of employer liability.

The word supervisor is defined narrowly for this purpose. Under Vance v. Ball State University, 570 U.S. 421 (2013), it means someone the employer empowered to take tangible employment actions against you. For co-worker harassment the employer is liable only if it was negligent in controlling working conditions, which generally means it knew or should have known and failed to act. State law can be broader and stricter at the same time. California defines supervisor to reach anyone with authority to hire, transfer, suspend, lay off, recall, promote, discharge, assign, reward or discipline, or responsibility to direct other employees, adjust grievances, or effectively recommend such action, and California imposes strict liability on employers for supervisor harassment under its fair employment statute, with no equivalent complete defense, only a limit on avoidable damages. New York provides that an employee's failure to complain internally is not determinative of employer liability. The same harasser can be a supervisor under state law and a co-worker under Title VII.

One document you may still find quoted online is no longer agency authority. The Commission voted on January 22, 2026 to rescind its 2024 Enforcement Guidance on Harassment in the Workplace, and the document has been removed from eeoc.gov. The statutes and the Supreme Court decisions above are unchanged, and the rescission does not make harassment lawful, but as of this guide's last update the agency had issued no replacement, and its current position on several issues that guidance addressed has not been restated. Check eeoc.gov for newer guidance before relying on this.

For years many federal courts required a discrimination plaintiff to show significant or material harm. That is no longer the test for a discriminatory job transfer. In Muldrow v. City of St. Louis, 601 U.S. 346 (Apr. 17, 2024), the Supreme Court held that a Title VII plaintiff challenging a transfer under 42 U.S.C. 2000e-2(a)(1) must show some harm to an identifiable term or condition of employment, but that the harm need not be significant, serious, or substantial, and that it does not matter that rank and pay stayed the same.

Two limits are worth stating plainly. Some harm is still required, so Muldrow lowered the bar rather than removing it. And the Court stated its holding in transfer terms, so how far it reaches other kinds of discrimination claims is still being worked out in the lower courts and is not a settled national rule yet. You may also see the phrase more than trifling attached to Muldrow. That language comes from a concurring opinion, not from the majority, so it should not be quoted as the Court's standard.

Muldrow also left retaliation alone. Retaliation claims under 42 U.S.C. 2000e-3(a) continue to be measured by the separate standard in Burlington Northern and Santa Fe Railway Co. v. White, 548 U.S. 53, 68 (2006), which asks whether the employer's action was materially adverse, meaning it might well have dissuaded a reasonable worker from making or supporting a charge. Retaliation was alleged in 54,350 EEOC charges in fiscal year 2025, more than any other basis, so this is the standard a large share of charges are actually measured against.

For most federal discrimination claims a charge is a prerequisite to suit, not the lawsuit itself. On a Title VII or ADA claim, once the EEOC issues a Notice of Right to Sue you have 90 days from receipt to file in court (42 U.S.C. 2000e-5(f)(1); 42 U.S.C. 12117(a)). The window is short and it runs from receipt, so open the envelope, write the date on it, and keep it.

You do not have to wait for the investigation to finish. Under 29 C.F.R. 1601.28(a)(1) a charging party may request a Notice of Right to Sue in writing at any time after 180 days have passed since the charge was filed. Whether to ask early involves real tradeoffs, because the request ends the agency's work on your charge, so it is worth deciding with a lawyer rather than on instinct.

Age claims once again work differently. An ADEA plaintiff does not need a right to sue notice at all: suit may be filed 60 days after the charge is filed, and a 90 day clock runs only from an EEOC dismissal or termination notice (29 U.S.C. 626(d)(1)(B), (e); 29 C.F.R. 1601.28(e)).

Federal sector complainants have four separate routes into court under 29 C.F.R. 1614.407: within 90 days of receiving the agency's final action, after 180 days from filing the complaint if the agency has not acted, within 90 days of receiving the EEOC's final decision on an appeal, or after 180 days from filing the appeal if no decision has issued.

Finally, a right to sue notice does not control everything on your calendar. Section 1981 race and ethnicity claims run on their own limitations period that does not depend on the EEOC at all, and state law claims run on independent state clocks that can be shorter or much longer than 90 days.

Most charges are resolved by the agency rather than by a federal judge, and the scale of the system is worth knowing before you file. In fiscal year 2025, which ran from October 1, 2024 to September 30, 2025, the EEOC received 88,201 new charges of discrimination, essentially flat against 88,531 in fiscal year 2024, and resolved 90,743 charges, a 4% increase over the previous year. It filed 107 lawsuits that year, 94 of them merits suits, and resolved 132.

Across all of its program areas in fiscal year 2025 the EEOC reported recovering approximately $660 million for 17,680 people: $528 million through pre litigation enforcement such as mediation, conciliation, and pre cause settlements, $27 million for 2,505 individuals through litigation, and $104.6 million for 1,824 federal employees and applicants. Read those figures as what one year of the agency process produced in the aggregate, not as a prediction about any individual charge. The numbers move every year, which is why the fiscal year should always be named alongside them.

The bases alleged in fiscal year 2025 charges, as reported in EEOC Table E1a, were retaliation 54,350, disability 36,256, race 29,338, sex 26,941, age 16,353, national origin 7,856, color 6,738, religion 3,710, Pregnant Workers Fairness Act 3,448, Equal Pay Act 928, and GINA 449. Stated as shares, retaliation was alleged in 61.6% of charges, disability in 41.1%, race in 33.3%, and sex in 30.5%. Those shares add to more than 100% because a single charge can allege several bases at once, so they are not slices of a pie, and race and color are tracked separately rather than combined. The retaliation share jumped from 47.8% in fiscal year 2024, a sharp single year move that should not be read as an established trend until later data confirms it.

Two caveats on all of the above. The EEOC's charge count excludes charges filed with state and local fair employment agencies, which handle tens of thousands more each year, so it understates total US discrimination filings. And what you can actually recover turns on which statute your claim arises under and, for any state law claim, on your state, because the EEOC itself notes that state agency coverage standards and available relief differ from the federal ones. That is a question to work through with a lawyer against the law of the state where you work.