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ARTICLE · 20 DECEMBER 2019

Pay Day, Every Day? Instant Pay Apps And Their Wage And Hour Implications

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As peer-to-peer payment applications proliferate and on-demand technologies reach new facets of people's lives, it is only natural that these programs now offer services geared particularly

United StatesEmployment and HR
Tyler Z. Bernstein
Tyler Z. Bernstein
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As peer-to-peer payment applications proliferate and on-demand technologies reach new facets of people's lives, it is only natural that these programs now offer services geared particularly for employees. On-demand, daily pay apps, also known as "instant pay" or "earned wage access" are the outgrowth of two fundamental truths: (1) millions of Americans live paycheck to paycheck; and (2) employees perform their actual work and earn their actual wages up to two weeks before they receive their paychecks.

Instant pay apps offer to bridge the gap between when one's expenses come due and one's paycheck issues, by allowing employees to withdraw the wages they have already earned for work performed in a pay period, before the regular pay date. Hailed as a panacea by employees, who otherwise would be vulnerable to predatory payday loans, these instant pay apps unsurprisingly implicate multiple California wage and hour laws that an employer must comply with. As a result,

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