SB 1343: California Sexual Harassment Training Requirements

California’s SB 1343 sexual harassment training requirements apply to any employer with five or more employees: supervisors must receive at least two hours of interactive training and nonsupervisory staff at least one hour, with new hires trained within six months and everyone retrained every two years. The rules sit in Government Code Section 12950.1 under the Fair Employment and Housing Act, and the state’s Civil Rights Department enforces them.

Which Employers Have to Comply

The threshold is five employees anywhere in California.¹ The count includes full-time, part-time, temporary, and seasonal workers. It also picks up independent contractors, volunteers, and unpaid interns when you are deciding whether you have hit the five-person mark.²

Multi-location employers count everyone together. A company with three employees in Los Angeles and two in San Francisco is covered. The threshold applies to the legal entity, not to any single office.

One boundary worth naming: for workers placed through a staffing agency, the staffing agency is responsible for training, not the client business where the worker performs the job.²

Supervisor or Nonsupervisor, and the Hours That Follow

Supervisors get two hours; nonsupervisors get one hour. Those are minimums, and either session can be delivered in a group or individually, and split into shorter segments as long as the total time is met.¹

Who counts as a supervisor is broader than the job title suggests. Under FEHA, a supervisor is anyone with authority to hire, fire, promote, transfer, discipline, or direct other employees, or to effectively recommend those actions, provided the authority calls for independent judgment rather than routine clerical work.³ A lead technician who writes performance reviews or a shift manager who assigns schedules can fit the definition. Slotting one of those workers into the one-hour nonsupervisory track puts you out of compliance even if their business card doesn’t say “manager.”

Deadlines and How Often to Retrain

New nonsupervisory employees must complete training within six months of hire. New supervisors must complete it within six months of stepping into the supervisory role.¹ Every employee then retrains once every two years.

Short-term workers move on a tighter clock. Anyone hired for fewer than six months must be trained within 30 calendar days of hire or within 100 hours worked, whichever comes first.² Workers who put in fewer than 30 calendar days and fewer than 100 hours don’t have to be trained at all.

What the Training Has to Cover

The statute requires practical guidance on federal and state laws prohibiting sexual harassment, including the remedies available to victims.¹ Three additional topics must appear:

Abusive conduct, sometimes called workplace bullying, meaning conduct a reasonable person would find hostile or offensive and that isn’t tied to a legitimate business interest.
Harassment based on gender identity and gender expression, with practical examples.
Harassment based on sexual orientation, again with practical, scenario-based examples.

The training also has to be interactive. California’s regulations define that: instruction must include questions that check learning, skill-building activities, and hypothetical harassment scenarios with discussion questions.⁴ A slide deck employees click through without engaging does not qualify.

Formats You Can Use

Four delivery methods are approved:⁴

Classroom instruction delivered in person by a qualified trainer.
E-learning, meaning individualized computer-based training built by a qualified trainer and an instructional designer. Employees must be able to reach a trainer with questions and get a response within two business days.
Webinar, meaning a live internet seminar taught in real time, with documentation that each remote participant attended the full session and engaged with quizzes, polls, and discussion questions.
The Civil Rights Department’s free online course, which the state offers at no cost.

Audio, video, and similar tools can supplement any of these formats but can’t be the entire training on their own. E-learning is the common pick for smaller employers, and the two-business-day trainer response rule is the piece most often missed when businesses buy a training product off the shelf.

Who Can Deliver the Training

A qualified trainer must fit at least one of three categories:⁴

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.
HR professionals or harassment prevention consultants with at least two years of practical experience designing training, responding to complaints, conducting investigations, or advising on harassment prevention.
Professors or instructors with at least 20 hours of instruction time, or two years teaching employment law at a law school, college, or university.

You can use several trainers who together meet the requirements, and someone without the minimum experience can co-teach alongside a qualified trainer. At least one person delivering the material has to have genuine employment-harassment expertise.

You Have to Pay for the Training Time

Harassment prevention training is work time. Employees can’t be told to complete it on their own hours, and the employer covers the cost, including regular wages for the hours spent training.²

Federal wage-and-hour rules line up with this. Under Department of Labor regulations, employer-required training is compensable unless attendance is voluntary, occurs outside regular working hours, is unrelated to the employee’s job, and involves no productive work.⁵ Mandatory harassment training fails those tests, so there is no lawful way to make employees absorb the time unpaid.

Records You Need to Keep

You have to document that each employee finished the required training. The state provides a way for employees to save or print a certificate of completion.¹ Webinar training carries a heavier documentation load: keep a copy of the webinar, all written materials used, every question submitted during the session, and every written response from the trainer, for at least two years.⁴ E-learning trainers must likewise retain all written questions and responses for two years.

Keep the records organized and reachable. If the Civil Rights Department opens an audit or investigates a complaint, producing clear documentation quickly is the cleanest way to show compliance, and gaps in the paperwork can create trouble even when the training actually happened.

What Happens If You Don’t Comply

California doesn’t attach a set monetary fine to a training failure. The Civil Rights Department works with employers to bring them into compliance, and if that fails, the department can seek a court order compelling it under Government Code Section 12950.1.¹

The larger exposure shows up in litigation. If a harassment claim is filed against your company, missing training records weaken one of the strongest employer defenses available. Under the federal framework from Faragher v. City of Boca Raton and Burlington Industries v. Ellerth, an employer can avoid certain harassment liability by showing it took reasonable steps to prevent and correct harassing behavior, and courts have held that a written policy alone isn’t enough. An employer with no training records has effectively given up that defense before the case starts.

1
California Legislative Information. California Government Code 12950.1
2
California Civil Rights Department. Sexual Harassment Prevention Training – Information for Employers FAQ
3
California Legislative Information. California Government Code 12926
4
Cornell Law Institute. California Code of Regulations Title 2, Section 11024
5
eCFR. 29 CFR 785.27 – General