CA AB 1825: Covered Employers, Training Rules, and Deadlines

Under California’s AB 1825 sexual harassment training requirements, as expanded by later legislation and now codified at Government Code section 12950.1, any employer with five or more workers must provide interactive harassment prevention training to every California employee: two hours for supervisors and one hour for everyone else, repeated every two years.¹ AB 1825, the 2004 law that started the mandate, originally applied only to employers with 50 or more employees and only to supervisors.² Senate Bill 1343 in 2018 lowered the threshold to five employees and extended training to the full workforce.³ The current statute is what you need to comply with.

Which Employers Are Covered

If you have five or more workers, you are covered.¹ The count includes full-time, part-time, and temporary employees, and the workers do not all need to be in the same location or even reside in California.⁴

The threshold is broader than most employers expect. Unpaid interns, unpaid volunteers, and individuals providing services under a contract all count toward the five-person total.⁴ They push you over the threshold, but you only need to train your actual employees. A business with three W-2 employees and two unpaid interns is covered, and the three employees need the training.

Who Needs Training and How Long

Every California-based employee of a covered employer must be trained. The length depends on the role.

Supervisors: Two hours.¹
Nonsupervisory employees: One hour.¹

Who counts as a supervisor is broader than the job title suggests. Under FEHA, a supervisor is anyone with authority to hire, transfer, suspend, promote, discharge, assign, reward, or discipline others, or to effectively recommend those actions, where the role calls for independent judgment rather than purely clerical work.⁵ A team lead with real authority over assignments qualifies even without “manager” on the business card.

Employees physically located outside California do not have to be trained, even if the employer is based in California.⁶ Those out-of-state workers do still count toward the five-employee threshold.

The employer pays. Because the statute says the employer “shall provide” the training, the California Civil Rights Department reads this to mean employees cannot be required to complete it on their own time; it must happen during paid working hours.⁷

When Training Must Happen

After an employee completes training once, they must repeat it every two years, measured from the date of the last completed session.¹ That means tracking individual completion dates, not just a company-wide training month. Nothing stops you from running annual all-hands sessions to simplify tracking.

New workers have tighter deadlines:

New nonsupervisory employees: trained within six months of hire.¹
New or newly promoted supervisors: two-hour training completed within six months of assuming the role.¹
Temporary and seasonal employees hired for less than six months: trained within 30 calendar days of hire or 100 hours worked, whichever comes first.¹

The temp-and-seasonal rule catches employers off guard. If you bring on seasonal staff, waiting for the next company-wide session will miss the deadline.

What the Training Must Cover

Training must address harassment, discrimination, and retaliation under both California’s Fair Employment and Housing Act and federal Title VII. The statute and 2 CCR section 11024 lay out the specific topics.

Every session must cover:

Sexual harassment, including both unwanted-sexual-favors scenarios and hostile work environment situations, with concrete examples drawn from real cases or realistic hypotheticals.¹
Abusive conduct, defined by statute as workplace behavior carried out with malice that a reasonable person would consider hostile, offensive, and unrelated to legitimate business interests. Think repeated insults, derogatory remarks, threatening behavior, or sabotage of someone’s work. A single act generally does not qualify unless it is especially severe.¹
Harassment based on gender identity, gender expression, and sexual orientation, with practical examples.¹
Complaint processes and remedies: how employees report harassment, the employer’s obligation to investigate, and the legal remedies available to victims.
Retaliation: what it is and how to prevent it.

Supervisor training carries extra content. It must address the supervisor’s own obligation to report harassment they become aware of, how to respond to a complaint, what to do if the supervisor is accused, and the essential elements of the company’s anti-harassment policy.⁸ Each supervisor must also receive the employer’s anti-harassment policy and acknowledge receipt.

How Training Must Be Delivered

The statute requires “effective interactive training.” Employees have to actively participate, not passively watch a video. Acceptable formats include live classroom instruction, real-time webinars, or interactive e-learning with built-in questions and assessments.¹ Employees can take training individually or in a group, and can break it into shorter segments as long as they hit the required total.

The California Civil Rights Department offers free online courses for both supervisors and nonsupervisory employees that satisfy the statute. They are available in English, Spanish, Chinese, Korean, Tagalog, and Vietnamese.⁶ For small employers without a training budget, the free CRD courses are the obvious starting point.

Qualified Trainer Requirements

Not just anyone can lead this training. The regulations require a “qualified trainer” with the knowledge to teach harassment, discrimination, retaliation, and abusive conduct, who also fits into at least one of three professional categories:⁸

Attorneys admitted to the bar of any U.S. state for at least two years, with a practice that includes employment law under FEHA or Title VII.
HR professionals or harassment prevention consultants with at least two years of practical experience designing training, responding to complaints, conducting investigations, or advising on prevention.
Professors or instructors with at least 20 instruction hours or two years of experience teaching employment law at an accredited law school, college, or university.

Multiple trainers can collectively meet the qualifications. A trainer still building experience can co-teach with a fully qualified one.⁸ This exception matters for CRD e-learning courses, where qualified individuals created the content and a trainer must be available to answer employee questions within two business days.

Language

The statute does not explicitly require training in each employee’s primary language. The CRD’s free courses, though, come in six languages, and the “effective” and “interactive” standards suggest employees need to actually understand the material.⁶ An employer with non-English-speaking workers should provide training in a language those employees understand, both for genuine compliance and to blunt the argument in later litigation that the training was ineffective.

Recordkeeping

Keep training records for at least two years. The regulations specifically require employers to retain webinar recordings, written training materials, and written questions and responses from training sessions for two years after the training date.⁴ Trainers who provide e-learning content must also keep records of employee questions and written responses for two years.

In practice, maintain:

Each employee’s name and completion date
Whether they took the one-hour or two-hour course
Copies of training materials, sign-in sheets, and completion certificates

These records become critical if an employee later files a harassment complaint. An employer that can produce proof of timely, compliant training is in a far stronger position than one scrambling to reconstruct it. The CRD is required to let employees save and print their own completion certificates, so encourage employees to keep their copies as well.¹

What Happens if You Don’t Comply

Section 12950.1 does not set a specific fine for failing to train, which sometimes leads employers to treat the requirement as optional. The real exposure is litigation. When an employee files a harassment lawsuit, one of the first requests from their attorney will be proof the employer provided compliant training. Skipping training, or using a program that did not meet the statutory requirements, costs the employer a significant defense.

California courts and the CRD can also weigh training failures when deciding whether an employer took reasonable steps to prevent harassment under Government Code section 12940. A complete absence of training makes that duty very hard to establish. The CRD has authority to investigate and seek remedies including injunctive relief ordering compliance. The cost of non-compliance in a single harassment lawsuit will outstrip whatever the training would have cost.

1
California Legislative Information. California Code GOV 12950.1
2
California Legislative Information. California Assembly Bill 1825
3
California Legislative Information. California Senate Bill 1343
4
New York Codes, Rules and Regulations. California Code of Regulations 2 CCR 11024
5
California Legislative Information. California Code GOV 12926
6
California Civil Rights Department. Sexual Harassment Prevention Training For Employees FAQ
7
California Civil Rights Department. Sexual Harassment Prevention Training Information For Employers
8
Legal Information Institute. California Code of Regulations 2 CCR 11024