LA faces $9.5M payout for unpaid firefighter OT — on top of $1.2 billion already spent

The city of Los Angeles has reached a deal with firefighters and paramedics to pay up to $9.5 million to settle a legal dispute about unpaid overtime from 2020 to 2024.

That money comes on top of $1.2 billion in overtime already paid out to fire department employees over those same four years, according to an LAist analysis of city payroll data. The settlement was approved by L.A. Mayor Karen Bass on March 3 and now goes to a U.S. District Court judge for final approval, scheduled for next month.

The lawsuit, and the city’s decision to settle it at a time of dire warnings about the state of city finances, underscores ongoing tension over the size of a department serving more than 4 million people who live and work in Los Angeles. The Los Angeles Fire Department (LAFD) — about 9% of the city workforce in 2024 — accounted for about 38% of all overtime paid out to city workers last year.

About 8% of firefighters received as much in overtime pay as regular pay in 2024, according to LAist's city payroll data analysis.

Critics, including the lead plaintiff in the lawsuit, say the massive amount of overtime is evidence that LAFD is understaffed.

The lawsuit claims that the fire department required employees for years to work unpaid overtime hours, totaling $14.3 million. In all, plaintiffs sought up to $28.6 million in overtime and damages.

The January wildfires brought national attention to the LAFD, and firefighters and paramedics say they are finally seeing movement on fixing chronic payroll issues. Bass and the City Council approved adding 15 administrative positions at the fire department to help manage ongoing back-pay issues that are separate from the lawsuit. 

LAFD officials declined to comment on the lawsuit and settlement, saying they do not talk about pending litigation. Bass and the city attorney’s office also did not respond to multiple requests for comment.

Firefighters spray flames from the Palisades Fire burning a business on January 8, 2025 in the Pacific Palisades neighborhood of Los Angeles.

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Eric Thayer

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Getty Images

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Lawsuit's scope

Ultimately, about one third of LAFD personnel — more than 1,100 workers — signed on to the lawsuit filed by a veteran firefighter against the city in 2023.

Daniel Gonzalez, the lead plaintiff, said he grew up in a family of firefighters and has served 22 years at the LAFD as a firefighter and paramedic in some of the city’s busiest fire stations.

He now works as a paramedic at Fire Station 63 in Venice, where Gonzalez told LAist he runs between 10 and 15 advance-level emergency calls per shift, including responding to heart attacks, car accidents and other traumatic events.

Gonzalez and others who joined the lawsuit typically work 10 shifts per month, each lasting 24-hours.

On top of that, he said he usually picks up another four to six days of overtime, hours he said are needed to close staffing gaps.

LAist's analysis of payroll data shows that the LAFD has paid significantly more overtime per employee in recent years than any other city department.

Gonzalez told LAist he believes understaffing in the department has caused firefighters and paramedics to routinely work up to 1.5 hours beyond a normal 24-hour shift on most days. Gonzalez said the extra time is nowhere to be seen in his paycheck or in the paychecks of colleagues.

Gonzalez said understaffing issues have worsened in recent years causing unpaid overtime in the department to jump “from maybe once a month to almost every day.”

How LAFD shifts work

Firefighters work “a rotating series of three 24 hour shifts over a five day period, then have four days off.”

Or as the department has explained in the past:

ON - OFF - ON - OFF - ON - OFF - OFF - OFF - OFF (the cycle then repeats)

Department officials acknowledge that while 24-hour shifts start at 8 a.m., there is a long-standing practice of reporting at 6:30 a.m. ahead of that handoff. That represents the 1.5 hours over the 24-hour standard shift that’s at the center of the 2023 lawsuit.

LAFD staffing issues

A CNN analysis published in January following the fires found that the LAFD is “less staffed than almost any other major city,” with less than one firefighter per resident — half the ratio in Chicago, Dallas and Houston.

Daniel Gonzalez leans against an LAFD firetruck. Gonzalez has been a firefighter at the department for over two decades.

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Courtesy Daniel Gonzalez

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Gonzalez said he doesn’t mind working longer hours during emergencies, but the extended days have turned from a contingency measure into business-as-usual.

Gonzalez said many of his colleagues at the LAFD were hesitant to push for compensation for the extra hours they worked due to fear of retaliation. Union representatives told LAist they're not officially involved with the lawsuit, though members are.

Gonzalez said he experienced pressure first hand. In December 2022, he said he and another paramedic tried to only work the hours for which they were being paid. They were then called into their supervisor’s office, he said, and told that if they didn’t work the extra hours they would no longer be able to trade shifts with other paramedics.

Gonzalez and his lawyers told LAist they hope the settlement leads the LAFD to change their policy and pay employees for all the work they do moving forward.

“When a firefighter or paramedic is on duty,” Gonzalez said, “we can be in a situation where we're risking our lives. And if we're doing that for the citizens of L.A., we should be getting paid properly.”

Oshea Orchid, his attorney, told LAist the city could be looking at another lawsuit if policies don’t change.

Ongoing payroll technical difficulties

To fix separate overtime payroll problems, the city is paying out even more OT: Thirty administrative staff members from departments across the city were tapped in January to untangle recurring issues. Officials at the city’s Information Technology Agency reported that faulty software has caused payroll inaccuracies that need to be manually corrected. Another 15 new temporary positions have been approved by the city to help in the coming months.

At a city personnel committee meeting earlier this month, Rich Ramirez, a firefighter and spokesperson for the United Firefighters of Los Angeles City, said during the public comment period that “members are still owed money from years ago.”

He noted that additional payroll staff have made a difference, but said there are still major issues with pay, as well as sick days and vacation time.

Tim McOsker, the City Council member for District 15 and chair of the city’s personnel committee, told LAist that communication problems between two systems used by the fire department to organize scheduling and payroll have led to some paychecks not including the full amount of money employees earned.

McOsker said that when the committee began hearings on the issue in January, they started loaning personnel from other departments and authorizing new positions to correct previous underpayments. The City Council has also started looking into long-term solutions to fix the technical issues that caused the problem, but that may take a while, he said.

Sam Hinojosa, chief information officer for the fire department, told the personnel committee last week that it would take at least nine months to make the needed changes once they have been approved by the City Council.

McOsker said his committee and the whole City Council are working “to make sure that we fix these payroll issues as quickly as possible and remedy the past issues that we inherited when we came to this job.”

In an email to LAist, Ramirez, the union spokesperson, said the pay discrepancies have severely affected union members and their families, and that the union hopes the city will find a permanent solution.

LAFD officials did not provide comments about the underpayments or plans for next steps.