California SB 1343: Training Hours, Deadlines, and Penalties

California SB 1343 requires every employer with five or more employees to provide sexual harassment prevention training to all workers, not just supervisors. Supervisors get at least two hours of interactive training; everyone else gets at least one hour. The cycle repeats every two years. The law is codified at Government Code section 12950.1, and the California Civil Rights Department (CRD) enforces it.¹

Which Employers Have to Train

The five-employee threshold is broader than most people assume. You count every worker on your payroll, including part-time, temporary, and seasonal staff, plus independent contractors who regularly provide services to your business. The count is nationwide. If your company has five or more workers anywhere in the country, you must train your California-based employees, even if fewer than five of them actually work in California. The CRD employer FAQ makes this explicit: the obligation applies “so long as it employs 5 or more employees anywhere.”²

You also need to classify every worker as supervisory or non-supervisory before you assign training, because the hours differ. A “supervisor” is anyone with authority to hire, fire, promote, discipline, assign, reward, or direct other employees’ daily work.³ Get this wrong and you’ll either under-train someone who needed two hours or waste time and money on someone who needed one.

Hours and the Two-Year Cycle

The minimums are simple:

Supervisors: at least two hours of interactive training.
Non-supervisory employees: at least one hour of interactive training.

Both categories must repeat training every two years. You can track compliance individually (two years from each person’s last training date) or pick a company-wide “training year” and retrain everyone by the end of the next training year, two years later.⁴ The company-wide approach is easier to administer once you’re past your first cycle.

Deadlines for New Hires

When someone starts (or steps into a supervisor role) mid-cycle, the clock resets for that person:

New non-supervisory employees: trained within six months of hire.
New supervisors: trained within six months of taking on the supervisor role.
Temporary and seasonal employees hired for less than six months: trained within 30 calendar days of hire or within 100 hours worked, whichever comes first.²

The seasonal rule trips up a lot of employers. A worker you bring on for a three-month holiday rush still needs the full training, and you have a much shorter window than you do for a permanent hire. If your business runs on seasonal labor, build the training into onboarding so it happens automatically.

Remote workers count where they physically work. If an employee works from California, they need California-compliant training regardless of where the company is headquartered or where its offices sit.² For multistate employers, California’s training is among the most detailed in the country, so a California-compliant program will often (though not always) satisfy other states’ rules too.

What the Training Must Cover

Content isn’t optional. The statute requires training to address:

Federal and state harassment law, how to prevent and correct harassment, and the remedies available to victims.
Practical, scenario-based examples of how to recognize and prevent harassment, discrimination, and retaliation at work.
Abusive conduct, which California defines as workplace behavior carried out with malice that a reasonable person would find hostile, offensive, and unrelated to legitimate business interests. A single act generally doesn’t qualify unless it’s especially severe.
Harassment based on gender identity, gender expression, and sexual orientation, with practical examples, delivered by trainers with expertise in those areas.¹

The abusive-conduct and gender-identity components are the ones off-the-shelf programs most often shortchange. If a vendor’s materials don’t cover both in real depth, you’re not compliant no matter how polished the rest looks.

Delivery Format

The statute calls for “classroom or other effective interactive training.” Interactivity is the point. Reading a pamphlet or passively watching a video doesn’t satisfy the law.

Acceptable formats include in-person classroom sessions, live webinars, and e-learning programs. For e-learning, California requires the program to allow participants to submit questions and receive answers from a qualified trainer within two business days.⁴ Training doesn’t have to happen in one sitting: classroom and webinar segments must each run at least 30 minutes, and e-learning can use bookmarking so employees can pause and return later, as long as they hit the total hours.

Training must be in a language the employee understands. The CRD offers its own free online courses in English, Spanish, Chinese, Korean, Tagalog, and Vietnamese, which are a workable option for small employers watching costs.⁵

Who Can Deliver the Training

Not everyone is qualified to lead the session. The trainer must have the knowledge to cover the full scope of required content, including FEHA definitions, complaint procedures, investigation obligations, and retaliation prevention. On top of that, the trainer has to fall into at least one of these categories:

Attorneys licensed for at least two years in any U.S. state whose practice includes employment law under FEHA or Title VII of the federal Civil Rights Act of 1964.
HR professionals or harassment prevention consultants with at least two years of practical experience designing or conducting harassment prevention training, handling complaints, conducting investigations, or advising on discrimination and harassment prevention.
Law school, college, or university professors or instructors with either 20 instruction hours or two years of experience teaching employment law under FEHA or Title VII.⁴

Someone who doesn’t meet these criteria can still co-teach, but only under the direct supervision of a fully qualified trainer who stays present the whole time. You can also use multiple trainers who collectively cover the required qualifications.

Records You Have to Keep

Keep training documentation for at least two years. Your records should include the names of everyone trained, the date, sign-in sheets (if used), copies of certificates of completion, the type of training, copies of all written or recorded training materials, and the name of the trainer or provider.² For webinars, keep a copy of the webinar itself and all written materials used. For e-learning and webinars, trainers must also retain every written question received and every response given for two years after the date of the response.⁴

These records are your proof. If a harassment complaint triggers a CRD investigation or a lawsuit, the first request is going to be for the training file. Clean records are the easiest way to show you did what the law required.

What Happens if You Don’t Train

The CRD (the same agency you may know by its pre-2022 name, DFEH) handles enforcement. If it finds an employer skipped the required training, it can seek a court order compelling compliance.¹ Investigations can start from an employee complaint or a broader compliance review.

One nuance matters. The statute says a failure to train, by itself, doesn’t make an employer liable to an employee in a lawsuit.¹ That’s less reassuring than it sounds. FEHA independently requires employers to take “all reasonable steps to prevent harassment from occurring.”³ When a harassment claim is filed and the employer never provided the training the state specifically mandated, that failure becomes powerful evidence at trial. It undercuts the standard employer defense, which relies on showing the company took reasonable preventive measures.

The financial exposure comes from the underlying harassment case, not the training gap. FEHA remedies include back pay, front pay, reinstatement, emotional-distress damages, punitive damages, and the employee’s attorney fees and costs.⁶ In CRD administrative proceedings, actual damages for emotional harm plus administrative fines are capped at $150,000 per aggrieved employee per respondent.⁷ In civil court, FEHA sets no cap on emotional distress or punitive damages. Skipped training rarely stays a standalone problem. It usually surfaces as the fact that turns a defensible harassment claim into a losing one.

1
California Legislative Information. California Government Code 12950.1
2
Civil Rights Department. Sexual Harassment Prevention Training For Employers FAQ
3
California Legislative Information. California Government Code 12940
4
New York Codes, Rules and Regulations. California Code of Regulations Title 2 Section 11024 – Required Training and Education Regarding Harassment
5
California Civil Rights Department. Sexual Harassment Prevention Training
6
Civil Rights Department. Employment
7
California Legislative Information. California Government Code 12970