Correction, not just mitigation
The reasonable-steps caps reduce a penalty; the cure provisions can eliminate the claim. That is the difference worth fixing at the outset. Where the caps reward compliance with a percentage discount, a sufficient cure — correcting the violation and making the affected employees whole — can remove the cured violations from the action entirely, before any merits adjudication. The 2024 reform turned what had been a narrow, rarely useful cure right into a genuine off-ramp by expanding the curable set to include the violations restaurants are most often noticed for, and by building two procedures, keyed to employer size, for getting a cure approved.
The early-resolution provisions became operative on October 1, 2024; the amendments themselves apply to notices filed on or after June 19, 2024, with a transition rule for the window between. The structural logic is the same across both tracks and connects directly to the previous page: cure and the reasonable-steps caps are the two halves of the reform's compliance incentive. The caps reward what the employer did before and just after the notice; the cure rewards fixing the specific noticed violations and making employees whole. Used together, the realistic exposure on a curable claim can collapse toward the cost of the make-whole payment itself.
The expansion reached the claims that matter
The reach of the cure right is what makes it useful. Before the reform, the curable set was narrow enough that cure was rarely a live option in a typical wage-and-hour matter. The amendments expanded it to include several of the most frequently alleged violations — which, in the restaurant context, are precisely the high-volume claims that drive exposure. The table below states the expanded set and the standard a cure must meet.
Fig. 1. The expanded curable provisions (AB 2288 / SB 92) and the make-whole standard. The list is not the entire universe of curable claims, and curability does not by itself decide sufficiency — the agency or the court evaluates whether the particular cure, including the payment, is adequate.
A cure is not a promise to do better. It is correction plus payment — the violation fixed and the affected employees made whole for the period.
The path turns on headcount — and on whether suit has been filed
The reform created two procedures, and which one applies turns on the size of the employer during the PAGA period — with a corresponding difference in when the cure is pursued. A smaller employer acts before litigation, through the agency; a larger employer acts after the suit is filed, through the court and a neutral evaluator. Select the path:
Within 33 calendar days of receiving the notice, a small employer may submit to the LWDA a confidential proposal to cure one or more of the alleged violations. The agency may set a conference with the parties to decide whether the proposed cure is sufficient, what additional information it needs, and the deadline to complete the cure. If the LWDA finds the cure sufficient, a PAGA action on those violations cannot be brought, subject to limited exceptions. If it finds the proposal insufficient or does not act, the employee may file in court.
Fig. 2. The cure tracks under amended § 2699.3. The small-employer proposal runs pre-litigation through the LWDA; the large-employer early evaluation conference runs post-filing through the court and a neutral evaluator. The 100-employee line is measured over the PAGA period.
Sufficiency is decided on the payment, not the promise
Whichever track applies, the cure has to be real. The agency or the court evaluates whether the proposed cure is sufficient, and sufficiency turns on two things: the violation has to be corrected going forward, and the aggrieved employees have to be made whole for the period in which it occurred. For a wage-statement claim that means issuing fully compliant statements and, where the defect caused a shortfall, paying it; for a meal-or-rest-premium or overtime claim it means computing and paying the owed amounts, with interest where required, across the affected population. The large-employer track adds a useful feature for contested cases: the employer may move the court to approve a cure even where the plaintiff or the neutral does not agree it is sufficient, so a defensible cure is not held hostage to the plaintiff's consent.
The practical discipline this imposes is front-loaded forensic work. A cure cannot be scoped until the affected population and the per-employee shortfall are quantified — which is the same forensic exercise that sizes the exposure in the first place. That overlap is the point: the audit that quantifies the claim is the audit that scopes the cure and, done before the notice, also earns the reasonable-steps cap. One body of work serves all three functions, which is why the forensic analysis is the foundation of the defense rather than a downstream step.
The two halves of the same incentive
Cure and the reasonable-steps caps are designed to work in sequence, and reading them together is where the realistic figure comes from. The proactive fifteen-percent cap rewards the compliance record built before the notice; the reactive thirty-percent cap rewards all reasonable steps within sixty days after it; and the cure provisions reward fixing the specific noticed violations and making employees whole. The timelines overlap deliberately — the small-employer thirty-three-day proposal window and the sixty-day reactive-cap window both run from the notice — so prompt, documented correction can simultaneously support the cap and effect a cure. Where a cure is accepted as sufficient, the cured violations leave the case; where it is not, the same correction still counts toward the reactive cap on what remains. Either way, the conduct that follows a notice is doing double work, which is why the response to a notice is a coordinated compliance-and-cure operation on a clock, not a litigation answer filed in the ordinary course. The penalty mechanics those efforts reduce are developed on the default-penalty and caps pages.