Employer Cheat Sheet

Employer Cheat Sheet: Workplace Laws Taking Effect July 1, 2026

Published by Faulkner HR Solutions | Employment Law and HR Compliance

If you run payroll, sign separation agreements, or post a job in more than one state, the back half of 2026 is going to keep you busy. The changes landing on or around July 1 are not the splashy kind that make headlines. They are the quiet, technical kind that show up later as an audit finding, a chargeback, or a class action. Here is what is changing and what it means for the people who actually have to comply.

Texas: workers' comp gets a remote-work code, and the state grabs the food truck rules

Start with the one nobody saw coming until the filings hit. As of July 1, the Texas Department of Insurance signed off on a brand-new workers' compensation class code, 8871, built specifically for the clerical employee who works from home. The old assumption was that a clerk was a clerk whether they sat in your office or at their kitchen table. That assumption is gone.

Code 8871 covers an employee whose duties are strictly clerical and who works remotely at least half the time, and only if the company's main classification does not already bundle clerical staff into it. The old code, 8810, still exists, but it now means something narrower than it used to. It is reserved for clerical people who physically show up at your premises. So you have two boxes now where you used to have one, and putting somebody in the wrong box is exactly the kind of thing an auditor lives for.

Texas Mutual tried to get the new code stretched to cover out-of-state telecommuters whose employer has no other physical footprint. The commissioner said no, citing the mess it would make of the standard exception rules. For now, 8871 carries the same loss costs as 8810 because there is not enough remote-work claims data yet to price it on its own. That will change once the numbers pile up.

A few more comp items worth knowing. NCCI moved everything to three decimal places on Texas policies for precision on pricing. The department also accepted an advisory filing that drops the average statewide loss cost by 3.8 percent. And carriers filing rates have to use either their own numbers or the new July 1 NCCI loss costs. Pointing back at last year's figures is off the table.

Then there is House Bill 2844, which is a bigger deal than it sounds. The 89th Legislature decided that mobile food vendors should answer to one master, the Texas Department of State Health Services, instead of every city health department in the state. Local governments can no longer require their own food safety permits or block a vendor who holds a valid DSHS license. Cities keep zoning, fire, noise, and traffic, but the permitting itself is now a state job. If you run a food truck or a catering operation that crosses city lines, this is the difference between one license and a dozen.

A couple of things from earlier in the year are still biting. House Bill 3699 quietly rewrote how Texas decides which employer is on the hook for an unemployment claim. The legislature's stated goal was to close a loophole, since the old 30-hours-a-week test let a claimant work a single short stint for a neighbor and claim that as their "last employer" to dodge a disqualifying separation from their real job. The bill passed unanimously. With the 30-hour test gone, the "last work" employer is now simply whoever the claimant worked for last in the TWC tax system. The practical catch for businesses that lean on short-term or casual labor is that your name now lands on more of those notices, so your chargeback exposure goes up. And the state's AI hiring law, live since January, keeps its anti-discrimination and disclosure rules in place for anyone running automated tools to screen or promote staff.

Texas minimum wage: still $7.25, except where it isn't

The statutory floor in Texas is still the federal $7.25, and that has not moved since 2009. But that number is increasingly fiction in certain places. Austin's contracted living wage sits at $22.05. The airports are their own world: Austin-Bergstrom runs $20.00, Dallas Love Field hits $23.06 in October, and the Houston aviation facilities are at $15.00. These are contract-driven floors, not citywide mandates, but if you hold one of those concession agreements they are very real.

The tip-credit math has not changed. You can pay a tipped worker $2.13 in direct cash as long as the tip credit of $5.12 gets them to $7.25. If a slow week leaves them short, you cover the gap. And you still cannot dock pay for walkouts, register shortages, or broken dishes, and you cannot charge employees for required uniforms.

Washington level: the agencies are pulling back

The federal agencies are openly changing direction. The EEOC rolled out a new National Enforcement Plan that walks away from systemic disparate-impact theory as far as it can and refocuses on individual merit. In practice that puts corporate DEI programs squarely in the agency's sights. The EEOC is going after race- or sex-based hiring and promotion quotas, mandatory diverse candidate slates, structured diverse interview panels, required diversity statements from applicants, and executive pay tied to demographic targets. It is also targeting employers who favor visa holders over domestic workers, and it is hunting for test cases to chip away at Bostock and the limits of religious accommodation. The agency formally pulled its 2024 harassment guidance too, though your underlying obligations under the anti-discrimination statutes have not changed.

The Department of Labor is heading the same direction. On February 26 the Wage and Hour Division proposed scrapping the 2024 independent contractor rule and going back to the older economic-reality analysis, the one centered on control and the worker's shot at profit or loss. Federal contractor wages shifted too: with Executive Order 14026 rescinded, certain older contracts now run at $13.65 an hour, with a $9.55 tipped cash wage, as of May 11. And on July 1 the DOL finalized new union financial reporting forms, including a Long Form LM-2 for labor organizations pulling in $40 million or more a year.

The courts are adding to the pile. A Texas federal court in Aunt Bertha d/b/a Findhelp v. NLRB permanently blocked an NLRB unfair-labor-practice case, ruling that the removal protections shielding the Board's judges and members keep them too far from presidential control. And the Sixth Circuit, in Kerwin v. Trinity Health Grand Haven Hospital, leaned on the Supreme Court's Starbucks v. McKinney standard to throw out a 10(j) injunction, telling the Board it needs actual evidence of irreparable harm instead of a friendly presumption.

The multistate headache

If your people are scattered across state lines, the centralized employee handbook you have been getting away with is no longer enough. The gap between states is widening, and not just on wage rates. States are now regulating how you monitor people and how you write a job posting, which is a much harder thing to standardize than a dollar figure.

Here is the short version of what is landing around July 1, state by state.

Alaska bumps its minimum wage to $14.00 with no tip credit, and raises the white-collar exempt salary threshold to $1,120 a week.

Virginia is doing a lot at once. Non-competes are void for anyone fired without cause unless they got severance that was disclosed up front, and there is now a flat ban on non-competes for healthcare workers. The Human Rights Act now covers employers with five or more workers, down from fifteen. Pay stubs have to be kept for three years. There are new protections for volunteer emergency responders and some child-labor exceptions for culinary and IT apprenticeships.

Maine wants pay ranges disclosed in good faith on every posting, and it is tightening the rules on electronic monitoring of workers. Its drug-testing standard moves from probable cause to reasonable suspicion. The state's paid family and medical leave is collecting premiums, with a weekly benefit cap of $1,249.12.

Connecticut now requires overtime pay-code guides in multiple languages for employers with 100 or more people, arbitrators have to be Connecticut bar members in good standing, and its sick-leave law expands to give workers 32 hours of unpaid safe and sick time on day one.

Georgia is phasing out the disability subminimum wage, moving to a 50 percent floor through mid-2027 and then to 100 percent. Gig workers can take portable benefits without forfeiting their contractor status, and childcare background checks are getting broader.

Illinois adds unpaid NICU leave, ten days for employers with 16 to 50 workers and twenty days for 51 and up. Nursing mothers have to be paid at their regular rate during lactation breaks.

California's Warehouse Performance Standards Act forces written quota notices, three years of data retention, and a 90-day presumption that any adverse action against a worker who raised a quota concern was illegal. A separate law reins in how attorneys and arbitrators can hand work off to generative AI.

Florida tightens the screws on plaintiffs: civil actions under its Civil Rights Act now have to be filed within one year of a cause determination or a right-to-sue notice.

Washington's Immigrant Worker Protection Act requires a five-day written posting in multiple languages after a federal I-9 audit notice, plus new limits on criminal-history questions.

Nebraska now wants 90 days' notice from employers with 100 or more workers before a mass layoff or closing.

New York adds Narcan to required first aid kits, expands its statewide credit-check ban, and updates the JFK and LaGuardia wage floors.

Put it together and the lesson is blunt. A Texas company with remote staff in Maine, California, or Connecticut cannot run one nationwide job posting and call it a day, because that single posting now has to satisfy Maine's and Virginia's disclosure rules at the same time. Maine's monitoring limits also dictate how your IT team is allowed to watch remote productivity. Virginia's non-compete rule means you have to build the severance into the deal at hire, not at exit, or the covenant is worthless. And Washington's I-9 timeline means you need a plan to translate a federal audit notice into as many as five languages inside five days, which is not something you improvise the morning it arrives.

What to actually do about it

A few moves that will save you grief.

Audit your remote and hybrid people against the new comp codes. Confirm who clears the 50 percent remote threshold so your clerical telecommuters land under 8871 and your in-office clerks stay under 8810. Get payroll ready for three-decimal billing and the 3.8 percent loss-cost drop. If you run food service in Texas, sort out the move to DSHS licensing before July 1 and figure out what happens to your existing city permits.

Take a hard look at your DEI programs, interview panels, and screening criteria against the EEOC's new posture, and strip out anything that functions as a quota or ties manager pay to demographic numbers. While you are at it, review your contractor agreements for the return of the older economic-reality test.

For your out-of-state staff, fix your job postings so good-faith wage ranges actually appear, and rebuild your restrictive-covenant templates to kill healthcare non-competes in Virginia and to get severance signed and disclosed at hire.

Finally, handle the physical and procedural stuff: the Illinois NICU leave notices, the Narcan in New York kits, the multilingual overtime guides in Connecticut, and a rapid-response process for Washington's I-9 translation window.

None of this is exciting work, but it gets expensive fast when you get it wrong. The rules keep diverging, and the employers who treat July 1 as a paperwork drill tend to be the ones explaining themselves to a regulator a year later.