Recordkeeping Requirements: How Long to Keep Time and Payroll Records by State

Federal recordkeeping is the load-bearing duty under every wage-hour statute on the books. 29 USC §211(c) requires every covered employer to "make, keep, and preserve" records of the persons employed, hours worked, wages paid, and other employment conditions; 29 CFR Part 516 is the operative regulation. The retention windows are short — 3 years for payroll records, 2 years for the underlying time cards and wage-rate tables — but the consequences of failing them are not. Anderson v. Mt. Clemens Pottery Co., 328 U.S. 680 (1946), is the 1946 Supreme Court rule that converts every recordkeeping failure into a damages multiplier: when records are inadequate, the employee's burden of proof drops to "just and reasonable inference," and the burden then shifts to the employer to disprove it. Tyson Foods, Inc. v. Bouaphakeo, 577 U.S. 442 (2016), extended that rule to class actions — representative evidence becomes admissible at class certification when the employer's records can't disprove the inference. Small per-employee claims become large class claims when records are absent.

State law layers on top, and the federal statutes layer on top of state — ERISA pulls benefit-plan records to 6 years, IRC pulls employment-tax records to 4, Davis-Bacon adds 3 years from prime-contract completion. The defensive posture for any employer with multi-jurisdictional exposure is to retain to the strictest applicable window, because the marginal storage cost of long retention is small and the marginal cost of one Mt. Clemens defense gone wrong is large. This guide covers what §516 actually requires, the Mt. Clemens cascade that drives the litigation, the federal layered statutes, state-by-state retention with the 6-year outliers (NY and HI), industry-specific rules (trucking HOS vs. HIPAA PHI — they are not the same window), electronic records, litigation-driven retention (spoliation, the EEOC charge extension, the UCL 4-year window), and the 2024–2026 developments including Washington's SHB 1308.

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Quick reference

• Federal floor (29 CFR §516): payroll records 3 years (§516.5); time cards, work schedules, and wage-rate tables 2 years (§516.6); records may be kept electronically (§516.7) if retrievable on 72-hour notice.
• California (Labor Code §1174): 3 years for payroll. Layered on top: §226(c) requires production within 21 days of an employee request; §226(f) imposes a $750 penalty for non-compliance. Practitioner standard for California employers is 4 years to cover the Unfair Competition Law statute of limitations (Bus. & Prof. Code §17208).
• New York (NYLL §195(4) + §661): 6 years for payroll records — the longest in the country. Matches NY's 6-year wage-hour statute of limitations under NYLL §198(3) exactly.
• Hawaii (HRS §387-6 + DLIR Wage Standards Division): 6 years per agency rule; the second six-year-retention outlier.
• Federal layered statutes: IRC §6001 (employment-tax records) 4 years; ERISA §107 (benefit plan records) 6 years; OSHA Form 300 logs 5 years; FMLA 3 years; EEOC 1 year (indefinite after a charge is filed).
• The Mt. Clemens cascade: inadequate records flip the burden of proof. Tyson Foods (2016) extended this to class actions. Poor records are the multiplier that turns $50/employee claims into $500/employee verdicts.

The 5 Most Expensive Recordkeeping Mistakes

The patterns that drive litigation. Each has produced eight-figure exposure across the cluster.

1. The Mt. Clemens burden-shift. Anderson v. Mt. Clemens Pottery Co., 328 U.S. 680 (1946), is doctrinal bedrock — quoted, paraphrased, or relied on in every major off-the-clock, rounding, and missed-break class action since. The mechanism: when the employer fails the §211(c) / §516 duty to keep records, the employee's burden of proof drops to "just and reasonable inference," and the employer is left with no records to rebut. Tyson Foods v. Bouaphakeo, 577 U.S. 442 (2016) — a $2.9M jury verdict doubled to $5.8M under FLSA liquidated damages — extended the rule to class certification: representative evidence (averages across the workforce) becomes admissible when individualized proof is impractical due to recordkeeping failure. The substantive claim per employee might be modest; the recordkeeping failure makes it a class action. The burden-shift cuts both ways — an employer that discovers buddy punching also has unreliable records, and the same Mt. Clemens logic now hurts the employer's recovery posture. See our buddy punching guide for the inverse-problem framing.

   Cited cases

   • Anderson v. Mt. Clemens Pottery Co., 328 U.S. 680 (1946)
     US Supreme Court — Inadequate records flip the burden of proof — employee meets the burden by "just and reasonable inference"
   • Tyson Foods, Inc. v. Bouaphakeo, 577 U.S. 442 (2016)
     US Supreme Court — ~$5.8M total recovery; representative evidence admissible at class certification under the Mt. Clemens framework

2. Purging raw time-clock punches after payroll close. §516.2(a)(7) requires recording "hours worked each workday and total hours worked each workweek." A rounded total is NOT the actual hours worked. Many timekeeping systems retain only the rounded total, purging raw punches after payroll close — typically driven by a vendor's default "data retention" tier set to the cheapest storage. When a class action lands three years later, the employer cannot prove what the actual hours were. The recordkeeping cascade is documented in detail in our time clock rounding rules guide; the operative §516.6 retention is 2 years for time cards minimum, but practitioner standard is 3 years (covering the FLSA willful-violation SOL) — and California / New York employers should hold them longer.

3. Conflating HIPAA's 6-year window with FLSA recordkeeping. Healthcare employers routinely confuse the two: HIPAA's 45 CFR §164.530(j) requires 6-year retention for PHI documentation (consent forms, breach notifications, policy/procedure records), but it does NOT cover time-and-attendance records. FLSA §516 governs the time-and-attendance side independently. Hospitals that retain PHI for 6 years but purge time records at 2 are exposed on the FLSA side and don't know it.

4. Missing the §226(c) 21-day inspection deadline in California. Plaintiffs' bar uses Labor Code §226 records requests as a litigation tactic. A current or former California employee can demand inspection or copies of payroll records; the employer has 21 calendar days to comply. Failure triggers a $750 penalty under §226(f), plus injunctive relief, plus admissible evidence of bad faith for the broader case. The fix is operational: name a person responsible, document the response, build a 14-day internal deadline to buffer against the 21-day statutory cap. See the pay stub requirements by state guide for the §226(a) itemization requirements that feed into the same litigation pattern.

5. Continuing routine deletion after litigation is anticipated (spoliation). The duty to preserve records attaches when the employer knows or reasonably should know that litigation is probable — not when a complaint is served. Zubulake v. UBS Warburg LLC, 220 F.R.D. 212 (S.D.N.Y. 2003), is the leading preservation-duty case; Fed. R. Civ. P. 37(e) (2015 amendment) governs sanctions for failure to preserve electronically stored information. The trap: a demand letter, a DOL audit notice, or even an internal HR complaint can trigger the litigation hold. Routine 3-year-rotation deletion that destroys relevant records after the hold attaches is sanctionable spoliation — courts may instruct juries to draw adverse inferences against the employer or, for intentional destruction, dismiss claims entirely.

Federal Baseline: 29 USC §211(c) and 29 CFR Part 516

§211(c) is the recordkeeping mandate. Every employer subject to any provision of the FLSA must "make, keep, and preserve such records of the persons employed by him and of the wages, hours, and other conditions and practices of employment maintained by him." 29 CFR Part 516 — particularly §§516.2, 516.5, 516.6, and 516.7 — fleshes out the duty.

29 CFR §516.2(a) — required records for every non-exempt employee

For each non-exempt employee, the employer must keep:

1. Name in full, and on the same record the employee identifying symbol or number used in place of name on any time/output/earnings record
2. Home address, including ZIP code
3. Date of birth if under 19
4. Sex and occupation in which employed
5. Time of day and day of week on which the employee's workweek begins
6. Regular hourly rate of pay for any workweek in which overtime is due, basis of wage payment, and any payments excluded from the regular rate under §7(e)
7. Hours worked each workday and total hours worked each workweek
8. Total daily or weekly straight-time earnings (exclusive of premium pay)
9. Total premium pay for overtime hours
10. Total additions to or deductions from wages paid each pay period
11. Total wages paid each pay period
12. Date of payment and the pay period covered

§516.3 carves out a narrower list for exempt employees (no daily/weekly hours required, but enough to establish the exemption).

§516.5 — 3-year retention for payroll records

The §516.2(a) list above must be preserved for 3 years. Same window for collective bargaining agreements, certificates of age, sales and purchase records (for the "wage" computation), and other payroll records.

§516.6 — 2-year retention for time cards and wage-rate tables

The underlying records — basic time cards (punch records, daily time-sheet entries), work schedules, wage-rate tables, order/shipping/billing records used to compute wages, and records of additions/deductions from wages — must be preserved for 2 years. The shorter window reflects the regulation's origin: paper records, where 2 years of dated time cards was a meaningful storage commitment in 1947. Modern electronic records carry no marginal storage cost, and practitioner standard is to retain time records for the same 3 years as payroll records — covering the FLSA willful-violation statute of limitations (3 years under 29 USC §255(a)).

§516.7 — place of records and electronic retention

Records may be kept at the place of employment or at a central recordkeeping office, including electronic systems. The records must be made available within 72 hours of a DOL request. There is no federal preference for paper over electronic; the requirement is retrievability.

Mt. Clemens — Why Bad Records Become Damages Multipliers

The reason §516 is load-bearing for every other wage-hour claim is the 1946 Supreme Court rule that converts a recordkeeping failure into a damages multiplier.

Anderson v. Mt. Clemens Pottery Co., 328 U.S. 680 (1946)

Pottery workers sued under the FLSA for unpaid pre-shift and post-shift walking time and preparation time. The employer kept no records of the contested time. The Supreme Court (Murphy, J.) held:

"An employee has carried out his burden if he proves that he has in fact performed work for which he was improperly compensated and if he produces sufficient evidence to show the amount and extent of that work as a matter of just and reasonable inference. The burden then shifts to the employer to come forward with evidence of the precise amount of work performed or with evidence to negative the reasonableness of the inference to be drawn from the employee's evidence."

The mechanism: when the employer fails the §211(c) / §516 duty to keep records, the employee's burden of proof drops to "just and reasonable inference," and the employer is left with no records to rebut it. Effectively, poor records flip the burden of proof.

Tyson Foods, Inc. v. Bouaphakeo, 577 U.S. 442 (2016)

Pork-processing workers at Tyson's Iowa plant performed donning-and-doffing of protective gear that the company did not record. Plaintiffs used a Dr. Mericle study averaging donning/doffing time across observed workers as representative evidence for the class. The jury returned a verdict of approximately $2.9M in compensatory damages, doubled to approximately $5.8M in total FLSA recovery under the liquidated-damages provision. The 8th Circuit affirmed. The Supreme Court (Kennedy, J.) affirmed: representative evidence is admissible at class certification when the employer's recordkeeping failure makes individualized proof impractical, expressly grounding the holding in Mt. Clemens.

The practical effect: Mt. Clemens — formerly an individual-claim doctrine — becomes the class-certification doctrine. Recordkeeping failures don't just create individual claims; they create class actions.

Federal Layered Statutes — Recordkeeping Beyond the FLSA

The FLSA / §516 sets the floor. Several federal statutes layer additional, longer, or differently-scoped retention duties on top. Employers must keep the maximum applicable window for each category of record.

The practical answer for most employers: keep everything for the longest applicable window. For an ERISA-covered employer that issues W-2s, the floor is 6 years for benefit-plan records, 4 years for tax records, and 3 years for payroll. The savings from honoring the §516.6 2-year floor for time cards almost always lose to the cost of one Mt. Clemens-shaped defense gone wrong.

The Davis-Bacon trap is worth flagging: the 3-year clock starts at prime-contract completion, not at record creation. A 4-year construction project followed by 3 years of retention means actual records-keeping windows of 7 years from the start of work.

The ACA §4980H statute of limitations was codified at 6 years by the Employer Reporting Improvement Act (signed December 2024) for assessments after December 31, 2024. Before ERIA, the IRS had taken the position that §4980H had no SOL at all. Practitioner standard for ALE reporting records is now firmly 6 years.

State-by-State Retention Windows

Most states default to or mirror the federal §516 framework. The outliers — and the states with additional layers like inspection-on-request or statutory penalties — are below.

The state-level pattern is consistent: most states either mirror federal or add an inspection-on-request mechanism with a statutory penalty for non-compliance. The two genuine outliers are New York and Hawaii at 6 years; the rest of the country sits between 2 and 4 years.

Things California Employers Consistently Miss

• The §1174 vs §17208 mismatch. Labor Code §1174 sets the recordkeeping floor at 3 years. Bus. & Prof. Code §17208 — the Unfair Competition Law statute of limitations — runs 4 years. A California employer that honors §1174's 3-year floor exactly is exposed in year 4 to a UCL claim with no records to defend it. Practitioner standard is 4 years for California payroll records.
• The §226(c) 21-day clock is shorter than most internal HR cycles. Plaintiffs' bar files a records request, the request lands in an HR queue, the response gets routed for legal review, and the 21-day deadline blows by — triggering the §226(f) penalty (above), plus admissible bad-faith evidence for the larger §226(a) case. The fix is operational: name a person responsible, document the response, build a 14-day internal deadline.
• §1174 protects the employee's right to keep personal records. Labor Code §1174 explicitly forbids employers from prohibiting an employee from maintaining a personal record of hours worked — a statutory acknowledgment of the Mt. Clemens dynamic. Policies that restrict employees from photographing their own time records or keeping personal logs are non-enforceable and admissible as evidence of bad faith.
• Raw time-clock punches must be preserved alongside the rounded totals. §516.2(a)(7) requires actual hours worked. California courts post-Camp go further: the source-of-truth raw punches are what the employer needs to defend any rounding-related claim. See our time clock rounding rules guide for the Camp v. Home Depot doctrine.
• The waiting-time penalty cascade extends the practical retention window. Labor Code §203 imposes up to 30 days of waiting-time penalties per terminated employee on any unpaid wages. The §203 claim can be brought within 3 years of separation, so records supporting the final wage payment effectively need to be retained for at least that period — more if §226 derivative claims are in play.

Industry-Specific Retention

Trucking — 49 CFR §395.8(k): 6 months HOS records

FMCSA Hours of Service records (driver logs, supporting documents) are retained 6 months under 49 CFR §395.8(k) — shorter than FLSA payroll retention, but DOT regulators expect immediate access during roadside inspections. The Electronic Logging Device (ELD) mandate (enforced April 2018) requires electronic capture for most commercial drivers operating over 100 air-mile / 150 air-mile radius. ELD data itself flows to the carrier for the 6-month retention window; supporting documents (fuel receipts, dispatch records, on-duty/off-duty attestations) carry the same 6-month rule.

Healthcare — HIPAA's 6 years is NOT the FLSA window

HIPAA's 45 CFR §164.530(j) requires 6-year retention for PHI documentation — privacy policies and procedures, breach notifications, business associate agreements, consent forms, complaint logs. It does NOT cover time-and-attendance records. Healthcare employers routinely conflate the two: a hospital that retains its HIPAA policies and procedures for 6 years but purges time-clock records at 2 years is exposed on the FLSA side and doesn't know it. The two windows are independent statutes; both apply.

Federal contractors — Davis-Bacon + Service Contract Act

Federally-funded construction (Davis-Bacon, 29 CFR §5.5(a)(3)(i)) and federally-funded service contractors (SCA, 29 CFR §4.6(g)(1)) carry 3-year retention from prime-contract completion — see the Davis-Bacon trap noted above. WH-347 certified payroll forms must be submitted weekly during the project AND retained for the 3-year post-completion window.

Electronic vs. Paper Records

29 CFR §516.7 explicitly permits electronic records as long as they are retrievable within 72 hours of a DOL request. Modern timekeeping platforms (Clockspot included) store records electronically with audit logs and supervisor-approval workflows. The federal requirement is retrievability, not format.

The post-cloud-migration trap: records stored on a SaaS vendor that an employer no longer subscribes to. When the employer cancels service, the vendor may delete the data on a timer. Practitioner guidance is to export-on-termination — pull a complete data export at any change of vendor or before any contract expiration. This is also the litigation-hold posture: once litigation is anticipated, the export-on-termination becomes a preservation obligation regardless of the vendor's default deletion timer.

Multi-State Employees and Remote Workers

Recordkeeping compliance follows the employee's work location, not the employer's HQ. Same rule as the rest of the wage-hour cluster (see overtime rules by state, meal and rest break laws, pay stub requirements).

• A California-based remote employee triggers the §1174 3-year retention + the §226(c) 21-day inspection-on-request rule, regardless of where the employer is headquartered.
• A New York-based remote employee triggers the §195(4) 6-year retention, regardless of where the employer is headquartered.
• An employee splitting time between multiple states triggers each state's retention rule for hours worked there.

The practical implication: multi-state employers should retain records to the strictest applicable state's window. For employers with any New York or Hawaii workforce, that's 6 years — even if 99% of the workforce is in 3-year states. The marginal storage cost of 6-year electronic retention is small; the cost of a New York §195(4) claim with insufficient records is large. The same work-location records that prove §1174 compliance also defend against California §2802 mileage and expense reimbursement claims — when the records can't establish where the work was performed, the employer faces both retention-penalty exposure AND default-judgment exposure on unreimbursed-expense claims.

Litigation-Driven Retention — Keep Longer than the Regulatory Minimum

Several rules push the practical retention period beyond what §516 alone requires:

• FLSA SOL (29 USC §255(a)): 2 years; 3 years for willful violations. Keep at least 3 years to cover the willful-violation window — which §516.5 already requires.
• California UCL (Bus. & Prof. Code §17208): 4-year statute of limitations. Practitioner advice for California employers: 4 years of payroll records, one year beyond §1174's 3-year floor.
• New York Labor Law (NYLL §198(3)): 6-year SOL — matches §195(4)'s 6-year retention exactly. NY is the rare jurisdiction where the regulatory and litigation windows are coterminous.
• EEOC charge (29 CFR §1602.14): the 1-year baseline goes indefinite once a discrimination charge is filed; all relevant personnel records must be preserved until final disposition.
• Litigation hold (the spoliation doctrine): the duty to preserve attaches when litigation is reasonably anticipated, not when a complaint is served. Zubulake v. UBS Warburg LLC, 220 F.R.D. 212 (S.D.N.Y. 2003), is the leading preservation-duty case. Fed. R. Civ. P. 37(e) (2015 amendment) governs sanctions for failure to preserve electronically stored information — including adverse-inference jury instructions for intent-to-deprive destruction.

The trap most employers miss: a demand letter, a DOL audit notice, or an internal HR complaint can trigger the litigation hold. Routine 3-year-rotation deletion that destroys relevant records after the hold attaches is sanctionable spoliation. The defensive posture is to suspend automated deletion on any plausible litigation signal.

Recent Changes (2024–2026)

• Washington SHB 1308 (effective July 27, 2025). Substitute House Bill 1308 amended RCW 49.12.240 and 49.12.250 to extend personnel-file access to former employees within 3 years of separation. The new law defines "personnel file," requires production within 21 calendar days, and imposes graduated statutory damages: $250 (delay past 21 days), $500 (past 28 days), $1,000 (past 35 days), plus a $500 catch-all penalty for any other violation. Layered on top of WAC 296-126-050's underlying 3-year retention.
• ACA §4980H 6-year SOL codified (ERIA, December 2024). The Employer Reporting Improvement Act codified a 6-year statute of limitations for §4980H Employer Shared Responsibility assessments imposed after December 31, 2024 — running from the later of the form's due date or actual filing date. Before ERIA, the IRS Office of Chief Counsel had taken the position that §4980H had no SOL at all. Practitioner standard post-ERIA: retain ALE reporting records for at least 6 years.
• Colorado HB 22-1118 — strengthened §8-4-103 penalties. The 2022 amendment (which carried forward through 2024–2026 without further change) raised the per-employee-per-month penalty for recordkeeping violations and broadened the records-on-request rule.
• California AB 2188 (Cal. Gov. Code §12954, eff. Jan 1, 2024). Tangential to recordkeeping: prohibits discrimination based on off-duty cannabis use and restricts employer use of pre-employment drug-screening records that detect non-psychoactive metabolites. Does NOT change §1174 / §226 retention windows but adds a recordkeeping-adjacent constraint on certain off-duty conduct records.
• No major federal §516 amendments through May 2026. DOL WHD continues to enforce §516 as a routine part of every Tier-1 wage-hour investigation; no proposed amendment to the 3-year payroll / 2-year time-card windows is on the regulatory agenda.

Frequently Asked Questions

If You Discover Your Records Are Inadequate

The unwinding playbook when a records audit (internal or DOL-driven) reveals gaps:

1. Stop the automated deletion immediately. Most timekeeping and HRIS systems run a default rotation that purges records past a configurable window. The first response to any records-shortfall finding is to extend the retention floor for ALL active employees to the longest applicable window (6 years if you have New York / Hawaii / ERISA-covered workforce; 4 years for California; 3 years federal minimum) and verify the change took effect at the vendor level.

2. Audit by record category. §516.2(a) lists 12 categories. Map each to your system: are name + address + workweek + hours-worked-per-day + total-weekly-hours + regular-rate + premium-pay + deductions + gross-wages + payment-date all present and retrievable for every non-exempt employee for the full retention window? If any category is missing, the §516 violation is independent of any underlying wage claim — and the Mt. Clemens cascade kicks in if challenged.

3. Reconstruct what you can from secondary sources. Bank deposit records (4-year retention by most banks), payroll-provider archives (typically longer than employer-side retention), and tax-return records (4 years under IRC §6001) can often supply derived data for the time period where primary records are missing. Reconstruction is admissible for FLSA compliance, but the reconstruction process itself must be documented.

4. Verify the §516.6 underlying records, not just §516.5 payroll totals. Raw time-clock punches, work schedules, and wage-rate tables (the §516.6 list) are what defeats Mt. Clemens burden-shifting. Many employers have clean §516.5 payroll records but missing §516.6 underlying records. Both windows matter.

5. Document a written records-retention policy. A formal policy stating "all FLSA records retained for 4 years (CA), 6 years (NY/HI), with electronic archival at <vendor>" — and the actual operational practice that matches it — is admissible as good-faith evidence and (in California, post-Naranjo) supports the objectively-reasonable-good-faith defense to §226 statutory penalties.

6. Consult counsel before responding to any §226(c) records request, EEOC charge, or DOL audit notice. Each of these triggers the litigation hold; the response window is short (21 days for §226(c); typically 30 days for DOL); and any automated deletion that runs in the interim is potentially sanctionable spoliation under FRCP 37(e).

The Through-Line

Recordkeeping is the only wage-hour compliance area where the duty has zero operational upside. Tracking time helps operations; following minimum wage helps recruiting; itemizing pay stubs helps employee trust. Keeping payroll records for 3 years past the year they relate to does nothing for the business until the day a plaintiff or a DOL investigator asks for them — at which point it does everything. That asymmetry is why recordkeeping is the cluster's most under-resourced compliance area and its most leveraged litigation risk. The duty is mechanical; the windows are short; the consequences of failing are not.

Mt. Clemens converts every recordkeeping gap into a damages multiplier — when the employer can't disprove the inference, the employee's "just and reasonable" reconstruction becomes the floor of the verdict. Tyson Foods makes that multiplier class-wide. The substantive wage-hour claim might be modest; the inability to disprove it turns it into the settlement valuation curve that produces eight- and nine-figure recoveries.

The defense is mechanical: capture every minute, capture each rate separately, capture each policy decision in writing, preserve the records past the longest applicable window. For multi-state employers, retain to the strictest applicable window everywhere — 6 years if any worker is in New York or Hawaii or any plan is ERISA-covered, 4 years if any worker is in California, 3 years federal minimum. The complexity of per-state retention configurations is rarely worth the marginal storage savings; the per-employee per-pay-period exposure under Mt. Clemens is. Electronic storage is cheap. Mt. Clemens is not.

Sources and Authorities

Federal

• 29 USC §211(c) — FLSA recordkeeping mandate
• 29 CFR Part 516 — Records to be kept by employers
• 29 CFR §516.2 — required records list (Cornell LII)
• 29 CFR §516.5 — 3-year retention
• 29 CFR §516.6 — 2-year retention
• 29 CFR §516.7 — place of records
• DOL Fact Sheet #21 — Recordkeeping Requirements Under the FLSA
• 29 USC §255(a) — FLSA statute of limitations
• Federal Rule of Civil Procedure 37(e)

Federal layered statutes

• IRC §6001 + Treas. Reg. §31.6001-1 — employment-tax recordkeeping
• ERISA §107 (29 USC §1027) — benefit plan recordkeeping
• Davis-Bacon recordkeeping (29 CFR §5.5(a)(3)(i))
• OSHA Form 300 retention (29 CFR §1904.33)
• EEOC retention (29 CFR §1602.14)
• FMLA retention (29 CFR §825.500)
• FMCSA Hours-of-Service recordkeeping (49 CFR §395.8(k))
• HIPAA (45 CFR §164.530(j))

State (selected)

• California Labor Code §1174
• California Labor Code §226
• California UCL — Bus. & Prof. Code §17208
• New York Labor Law §195
• New York Labor Law §661
• Massachusetts G.L. c. 151 §15
• Washington WAC 296-126-050
• Washington SHB 1308 — bill summary (WA Legislature)
• Washington SHB 1308 — personnel-file access (Ogletree summary)
• Oregon ORS 653.045
• Colorado CDLE INFO #3A — Timing of Wage Payments and Required Recordkeeping
• Connecticut C.G.S. §31-66
• Hawaii HRS §387-6
• Hawaii DLIR Wage Standards Division FAQs

Case law

• Anderson v. Mt. Clemens Pottery Co., 328 U.S. 680 (1946) — burden-shifting when employer recordkeeping is inadequate.
• Tyson Foods, Inc. v. Bouaphakeo, 577 U.S. 442 (2016) — representative evidence admissible at class certification when records are inadequate; ~$5.8M total recovery (jury verdict + FLSA liquidated damages).
• Zubulake v. UBS Warburg LLC, 220 F.R.D. 212 (S.D.N.Y. 2003) — duty to preserve attaches when litigation is reasonably anticipated.