PPL agrees to pay $162M to caregivers in historic NY class action settlement

by Liza Berger

A total of 200,000  personal assistants in New York’s beleaguered Consumer-Directed Personal Assistance Program (CDPAP) scored a major victory last week after a federal judge approved a proposed $162 million wage-and-hour class action settlement in the case involving Public Partnerships LLC (PPL), the controversial fiscal intermediary installed to oversee the program in 2025.

Under the terms of the settlement — believed to be the largest wage-and-hour class action settlement in New York to date and one of the largest nationally — each personal assistant will receive an average of $680 — more than a full week’s pay. Some 50,000 people will receive between $1,000 and $1,800 from the settlement. Also as part of the agreement, PPL agreed to end a health plan that failed to provide adequate coverage and was unnecessarily costly for workers, attorneys Michael Diller, of The Legal Aid Society, and Hugh Baran, of Katz Banks Kumin LLP, who represented the plaintiffs, told McKnight’s Home Care Daily Pulse on Wednesday.

“We’re just very proud of the overall results and, most importantly, just thrilled that personal assistants who provide such important work caring for some of the most vulnerable disabled and elderly New Yorkers across our state are going to be receiving a really significant benefit from the settlement once it’s approved,” Baran said.

In the case, Calderon v. Public Partnerships, LLC, the plaintiffs alleged that personal workers were not being paid on time when PPL began overseeing the program in 2025.

“One of our plaintiffs who helped us bring the case, Philip Calderon, for example, he didn’t receive any paycheck until around five weeks into the transition class,” Diller said.

Lawyers also brought claims under the New York Home Care Worker Wage Parity Law, which requires that home care workers receive both slightly higher cash minimum wage and a supplemental compensation component, which can be paid in either cash or benefits. PPL chose to fulfill the benefit supplement with a health plan.

“We alleged first that that plan provided little or no value to the personal assistants because it only covered the most basic of preventive healthcare and didn’t provide any coverage for things like illness or injury or hospitalization,” Diller said. “And then we also alleged that PPL was essentially overcharging personal assistants for that plan because it was allocating around 40 cents per hour compensation to that plan, which was a self-funded plan and we alleged cost PPL much less to actually provide.”

The class represented by the suit includes downstate personal assistants in New York City, and Westchester, Nassau and Suffolk counties — where the Wage Parity Law applies. A separate class-action suit is pending in other areas of the state.

PPL has been under fire since the state of New York chose it to replace hundreds of fiscal intermediaries overseeing the program. The federal government recently filed a lawsuit against the state, alleging that its process for choosing PPL was corrupt. Under CDPAP, a Medicaid program, older adults and people with disabilities can choose their own caregivers to administer care in their homes. 

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PPL agrees to pay $162M to caregivers in historic NY class action settlement