California Reparations Law: What Passed, Who Qualifies, How to Claim

California reparations law, as it stands today, is a patchwork of bills passed between 2020 and 2025 rather than a single statute. The state has issued a formal apology for slavery, created a cabinet-level agency and a bureau to handle future claims, and established a restitution process for property taken through racially motivated eminent domain. No direct cash payments to individuals have been authorized. Eligibility, where it has been defined, turns on lineage: being a descendant of someone enslaved in the United States, or of a free Black person living in the country before the end of the nineteenth century.

What’s Actually Been Signed Into Law

The framework starts with Assembly Bill 3121, which Governor Newsom signed on September 30, 2020. It created a nine-member Reparations Task Force to study the effects of slavery and systemic discrimination on Black Californians and recommend remedies.¹² The task force delivered its final report on June 29, 2023, containing historical findings and more than a hundred policy recommendations.

Four of those recommendations have since become law:

AB 3089 (2024): California’s formal apology for slavery, signed September 26, 2024. It acknowledges the state’s role in promoting, facilitating, and enforcing chattel slavery, and provides for a memorial plaque in the State Capitol.³
SB 1403 (2024): Creates the California American Freedmen Affairs Agency, a cabinet-level body under the governor. It houses a Genealogy Office to verify lineage and an Office of Legal Affairs to administer programs.⁴
SB 1050 (2024): Establishes restitution for property taken through racially motivated eminent domain. Dispossessed owners or their direct descendants can apply for the return of the property or financial compensation at present-day fair market value.⁵
SB 518 (2025): Creates the Bureau for Descendants of American Slavery, including a Genealogy Division that will verify descendant status. The bureau’s operation is contingent on the legislature appropriating funding.⁶

The most consequential proposal that did not pass was SB 1331, which would have created a dedicated Fund for Reparations and Reparative Justice in the state treasury, financed from the General Fund. It was moved to the inactive file in August 2024 and never received a final vote. The lack of a dedicated funding source remains the biggest gap between what the task force recommended and what the state is actually doing.

Who Qualifies

Eligibility is grounded in lineage, not racial identity in general. The task force defined the qualifying class as descendants of an African American person enslaved in the United States, or descendants of a free Black person living in the country before the end of the nineteenth century.¹ Tying eligibility to documented historical harm, rather than race broadly, is meant to help the program survive the strict scrutiny federal courts apply to race-based government programs.

The precise statutory definition of “descendant” is still being worked out. SB 437, introduced in the 2025–26 session, directs California State University to receive $6 million to research and develop a process for determining descendant status, with work expected to begin by the 2026–27 academic year.⁷ Once that process exists, the Genealogy Division created by SB 518 will use it to certify eligible individuals.

No general residency requirement has been written into law, though many of the task force’s compensation estimates were calculated on a per-year-of-California-residency basis. SB 1050 uses a narrower eligibility test of its own: you must be the person whose property was taken by racially motivated eminent domain, or a direct descendant of that person.⁵

Proving You’re a Descendant

Documenting a line back to enslaved ancestors is hard, and the task force recognized that explicitly. Slaveholders often did not record the births, marriages, or deaths of enslaved people as official vital records, and incomplete documentation continued to affect Black families long after emancipation. The task force recommended that the state provide genealogical assistance rather than placing the full burden on applicants.

Two offices are being built to do that work. The Genealogy Office within the California American Freedmen Affairs Agency, created by SB 1403, will conduct or verify genealogical research to confirm eligibility.⁴ The Genealogy Division within the Bureau for Descendants of American Slavery, created by SB 518, will establish the formal certification process once the California State University research under SB 437 produces a workable methodology.⁶

Neither office is fully operational yet, so there is no application window open to the general public. If you think you may qualify, you can start assembling your own records now: birth certificates, census records, Freedmen’s Bureau records, church records, and plantation documents are the common building blocks. Certified vital records typically cost between $10 and $31 depending on the state of issuance. State-funded genealogical help is designed to fill the gaps individual research can’t close, but having your own paper trail in order will shorten things when the certification process opens.

Payments and Compensation

No compensation payments have been authorized. The task force’s final report estimated monetary losses across several categories of harm as a basis for the legislature to set compensation. The figures are the task force’s calculations in 2020 dollars, not enacted amounts.⁸

Housing discrimination: up to $148,099 per person, or roughly $3,366 per year of California residency between 1933 and 1977, tied to the homeownership wealth gap caused by redlining and restrictive covenants.
Mass incarceration and over-policing: about $115,260 per person, or $2,352 per year of California residency from 1971 to 2020.
Health harms: about $13,619 per year of California residency, reflecting disparities in life expectancy, healthcare access, and environmental exposure.
Business devaluation: roughly $77,000 per person in missing business wealth linked to barriers against Black entrepreneurship.
Wage discrimination: an average of about $35,742 per worker in lost earnings from unequal pay and employment denial.

The task force asked the legislature to make an immediate “down payment” to eligible individuals while working out the full scope of compensation. None of these amounts have been appropriated, and the task force itself noted that the actual figures may need to exceed its estimates because of its deliberately conservative methodology.⁸

How any eventual compensation would be paid for is unresolved. With SB 1331 dead, every enacted bill carries a caveat that implementation depends on a future legislative appropriation.⁶ The task force’s total compensation estimates would run into hundreds of billions of dollars, against an annual General Fund budget in the $200–$300 billion range. Lawmakers have discussed General Fund appropriations, a wealth tax (AB 259 proposed a 1% annual tax on net worth over $50 million but did not pass)⁹, real estate transfer taxes modeled on San Francisco’s 2020 Proposition I, and general obligation bonds similar to the $7.5 billion water bond voters approved in 2014.¹⁰ None of these has advanced beyond the proposal stage.

Constitutional Limits on What California Can Do

Any race-conscious state program has to clear two hurdles: federal equal protection, which triggers strict scrutiny, and Proposition 209, the 1996 state constitutional amendment that bans preferential treatment based on race in public employment, education, and contracting.¹¹

The task force called Proposition 209 a significant barrier and recommended its repeal.¹² Voters rejected a repeal attempt in 2020 when Proposition 16 failed by a wide margin, so the ban still stands.

On the federal side, race-based government programs must serve a compelling government interest and be narrowly tailored. In City of Richmond v. J.A. Croson Co. (1989), the Supreme Court struck down a city’s minority contractor set-aside because the city could not show specific, documented discrimination in its own construction industry.¹³ Adarand Constructors, Inc. v. Peña (1995) confirmed strict scrutiny applies to all racial classifications by government, including federal programs.¹⁴ California’s lineage-based approach, grounded in the task force’s 500-page record of specific state-sanctioned harms, is designed with those cases in mind.¹² There is also a federal precedent for group-specific reparations surviving legal challenge: the Civil Liberties Act of 1988, which paid $20,000 to each surviving Japanese American interned during World War II.¹⁵

Litigation is already in motion, though not yet against the state’s legislation. In February 2026, the Californians for Equal Rights Foundation sued the city of San Francisco in San Francisco Superior Court over its separate local reparations plan, arguing the plan violates the Fourteenth Amendment, Proposition 209, and the California Constitution’s equal protection guarantee. The complaint contends that the plan imposes racial classifications on residents who neither experienced nor perpetrated slavery, does not identify specific victims of unlawful government conduct, and fails to consider race-neutral alternatives. The case is in its early stages, but its arguments preview the constitutional fights any state-level compensation program will face.

Filing a Claim Right Now

The eminent domain restitution program under SB 1050 is the only part of the framework with a live claims process. Claims go to the Office of Legal Affairs within the California American Freedmen Affairs Agency. If the office determines you qualify as a dispossessed owner or direct descendant, it assesses the property’s present-day fair market value and decides whether returning the property or paying compensation would better serve to redress the discrimination. If the office needs more documentation, you receive written notice and have 30 days to respond.⁵

For everything else, including any future direct payments, there is no application process to join, because the legislature has not authorized payments or appropriated money to run a program. The genealogy certification process the Bureau for Descendants of American Slavery will eventually administer is waiting on the California State University research under SB 437 and on funding. Formal appeals procedures for denied claims under future compensation programs have not been enacted either; the task force recommended a Reparations Tribunal to adjudicate claims, but that body does not exist yet.

If you believe you may qualify under the eligibility definition the task force used, the practical steps available today are gathering your own genealogical records and watching for the opening of the certification process once the bureau and agency are funded and operational.

1
California Department of Justice. AB 3121 – Task Force to Study and Develop Reparation Proposals for African Americans
2
Office of the Governor of California. Governor Newsom Signs Landmark Legislation to Advance Racial Justice
3
California Legislative Information. AB 3089 – Chattel Slavery Formal Apology
4
California Legislative Information. SB 1403 – California American Freedmen Affairs Agency
5
California Legislative Information. SB 1050 – Racially Motivated Eminent Domain Restitution
6
California Legislative Information. SB 518 – Bureau for Descendants of American Slavery
7
California State Senate Judiciary Committee. SB 437 Analysis – Weber Pierson
8
California Department of Justice. Final Recommendations of Task Force Regarding Calculations of Compensation
9
California Legislative Information. AB 259 – Wealth Tax
10
California Natural Resources Agency. Proposition 1 – CNRA Bond Accountability
11
Legislative Analyst’s Office. Proposition 209 – Prohibition Against Discrimination or Preferential Treatment by State and Other Public Entities
12
California Department of Justice. Chapter 18 – The California Reparations Report
13
Legal Information Institute. City of Richmond v. J.A. Croson Company
14
Legal Information Institute. Adarand Constructors v. Pena
15
United States Congress. H.R. 442 – Civil Liberties Act of 1987