Two versions of PAGA are running in California right now, and which one governs a matter turns on when the notice was filed — not when the complaint was. Everything else in the conversation depends on that date, and it is the question people forget to ask.
There is a short conversation that should happen at the start of every discussion about a live PAGA matter, and it is the easiest one in the whole subject to skip.
When was the notice filed with the LWDA?
Not when was the complaint served. Not when did you first hear about it. When did the notice go up. Because Labor Code §2699(v) makes that date the dividing line between two materially different statutes, and a discussion conducted on the wrong side of it is a discussion about rules that do not apply.
The reformed statute — the version created by AB 2288 and SB 92, both signed July 1, 2024 as urgency measures — governs civil actions brought on or after June 19, 2024. With one exception that swallows a great many cases: it does not apply where the PAGA notice was filed before that date. Where the notice predates June 19, 2024, the whole matter litigates under the prior version of PAGA.
The complaint date is not the operative fact. A complaint filed in 2026 on a notice filed in May 2024 is an old-PAGA case, and will be for its entire life.
The procedural half moved on a separate schedule: the rebuilt §2699.3, which carries the notice and cure machinery, became operative October 1, 2024.
Three differences do most of the work.
Standing. Under the reformed §2699(c), the plaintiff must have been employed by the alleged violator and must have personally suffered each violation alleged, within the one-year limitations period of Code of Civil Procedure §340. Under the prior rule, suffering one violation opened the door to penalties for every violation any employee had suffered. That is the single largest structural change in the reform, and it converts many broad notices into narrow ones — but only prospectively.
There is a carve-out at §2699(c)(2): a qualifying nonprofit legal aid organization with at least five years' experience as PAGA counsel may file as counsel of record under the older, looser standard.
The caps. Old PAGA has no reasonable-steps caps. The 15 percent cap of §2699(g) and the 30 percent cap of §2699(h) exist only under the reformed statute. An employer with an immaculate reasonable-steps record, defending a matter on a May 2024 notice, does not have that argument available — the record still matters as evidence, but the cap mechanism is not there to be invoked.
The split. Old PAGA distributes 75 percent to the LWDA and 25 percent to aggrieved employees. The reform moved it to 65/35, which changes the arithmetic of what a settlement is worth to whom.
There is also a set of provisions that exist only in the new statute — the restructured penalty tiers, the anti-stacking limits on derivative claims, the halved penalty for weekly payrolls, the express manageability and injunctive-relief authority — none of which are available in an old-PAGA matter, in either direction.
Two years on from the reform, the ambient information environment is entirely about the new statute. Every summary, every webinar, every vendor deck, and every trade article describes the reformed version, because that is the news. The prior version is not news; it is simply what governs a substantial and slowly shrinking population of pending matters.
So the failure mode is predictable. An operator reads about the caps, reasonably concludes that a documented compliance program bounds the exposure, and carries that belief into a conversation about a matter where the mechanism does not exist. Nobody has misinformed anyone. The summary was accurate about the statute it described.
The same thing runs in reverse, and this version is more common on our side of the table: a vendor describing what its product does for cap eligibility, to a prospect whose live matter is an old-PAGA case. The product may be entirely worth buying for that employer — the reasonable-steps record has value as evidence in any matter, and it changes the posture of the next notice regardless of the current one. What it cannot do is supply a cap the governing statute does not contain. Saying so is not a concession; it is the difference between a claim that survives the first counsel conversation and one that does not.
Once the notice date is established, three more follow, and they are the ones that determine what is actually on the clock.
Was there a records request before the notice? Under §2699(g)(1), the 15 percent window closes when a request under §226, §432, or §1198.5 arrives, not only when a notice does. The letter usually comes first and rarely looks like the start of anything — we have written about that separately.
What is the headcount? The reformed §2699.3 splits the post-notice pathways by employer size: employers with fewer than 100 employees have the confidential LWDA cure track with its 33-day proposal window, and employers of 100 or more have the court stay and mandatory early evaluation conference. Both are in the reformed statute only.
What does the notice actually allege? Because the reformed cure machinery includes a separate track where the only noticed violation is a §226 wage-statement defect, and because standing under the new §2699(c) is now violation-by-violation rather than employee-by-employee.
Which of these is available to a given employer, whether any of them is worth invoking, and what the notice date means for a specific matter are legal conclusions applied to specific facts. They belong to your counsel. Nobody should compute a deadline or a strategy from a journal post — the shape is what we can offer here, and the shape is not the answer.
If someone is describing your PAGA exposure and has not asked when the notice was filed, they are describing a statute rather than your situation.
Bring your counsel to the discovery call. The regime question is theirs to answer; what your records would support under either version is the part we can help with.