Hold both numbers at once, because each is the answer to the other.
$162 million is, plaintiffs' counsel believes, the largest wage-and-hour class action settlement in New York history. Hugh Baran of Katz Banks Kumin put it in institutional scale: 'The $162 million is larger than the combined recoveries of the state Department of Labor, the state Attorney General, and the Department of Consumer and Worker Protection in the last year' [1].
A private lawsuit out-recovered the state's three enforcement agencies combined.
$680 is what the average aide actually gets [1]. For a home care worker in New York, that is roughly one week's pay - against months in which workers reported being paid late or not at all.
The gap between those two numbers is what happens when a genuinely large sum is divided among 200,000 people.
How it got here matters for what comes next.
In April 2025 the Hochul administration handed New York's Consumer Directed Personal Assistance Program - the Medicaid programme through which disabled New Yorkers hire their own aides, very often their own relatives - to a single contractor, Public Partnerships LLC [1].
The core allegation is elemental: people worked, and the cheques came late or not at all.
The settlement's own structure records what was lost: $40.5 million for wage-and-hour claims, $25 million for the lost value of a preventative care programme, $92 million for paid time off [1].
PPL's position is categorical: 'We categorically deny the allegations in this lawsuit, and the settlement reflects no admission of liability or wrongdoing' [1]. It also still runs the programme, and faces a separate Department of Justice lawsuit this settlement does not touch [1].
Two caution flags belong in any honest account.
Preliminary approval, granted July 1 by Magistrate Judge Lara Eshkenazi, is not final approval - that decision sits with Senior Judge Frederic Block and is not expected until November, so no one has been paid [1].
Legal fees also come out of the fund, so the realised average will land below $680.
The aides who kept New York's disabled bathed, fed and alive through a botched transition are, for now, holding a record-setting number and an unpaid balance.
