California Pay Data Reporting Source Workbook

This workbook design follows CRD's Reporting Year 2025 handbook and 2025 Excel templates, checked September 5, 2026. CRD states that the 2025 reports were due May 13, 2026. These are verified 2025 preparation rules, not a forecast of later-year templates or deadlines. Refresh the official materials before preparing another cycle.

Create separate source workbooks or clearly separated controlled datasets for payroll employees and labor contractor employees. CRD requires separate report types with different upload templates. Document the employer and any integrated-enterprise reporting scope before importing data so employee records can be reconciled to the legal entities and establishments actually included.

Use an employee-level working dataset to calculate the eventual group-level report. Give each field a business definition, system of record, effective date, transformation and owner. Stable internal employee identifiers help join payroll and HR records; those identifiers are working controls and are not additional columns to add to CRD's upload template.

Keep the source definition alongside the field. A payroll export column called gross pay does not establish that it contains the annual earnings CRD requires.

For payroll employees, the handbook uses W-2 Box 5 annual earnings; where wages are not reported in Box 5, it directs use of Box 1. Do not substitute an annualized salary or the snapshot paycheck. Annual hours include actual work and paid time off under the handbook's rules. For exempt employees without tracked hours, document the permitted days-times-average-hours proxy and its basis.

In a fictional source row, employee P-17 has $45,500 of applicable annual earnings, 1,700 actual work hours and 120 paid-time-off hours. Total hours are 1,820, giving an individual annual hourly rate of $25.00. The earnings fall in the 2025 pay band of $41,080 through $53,039. Store the components so a reviewer can reproduce both results.

Within each establishment, the 2025 handbook groups California employees by job category, race/ethnicity, sex, pay band, exemption status and employment type. Use the current code lists, including the 2025 race/ethnicity taxonomy, rather than a saved earlier-year dropdown. HR should resolve classification differences before aggregation, with the decision linked to the underlying record.

The handbook and FAQ ask employers to include exemption status, employment type and annual weeks. Appendix C and the published templates mark those three fields as optional for file validation. Collect and reconcile them under the current guidance; do not mistake a field without an upload asterisk for information the preparation team can ignore.

Separate the nationwide threshold assessment from the California employee detail being reported. Under the 2025 FAQ, California employees include people assigned to a California establishment and those regularly performing work in California, including remote work for a non-California establishment. A home address is not an establishment and must not be uploaded.

Reconcile selected employees to establishment counts, then to the group counts. Track remote-location categories separately and verify that their counts reconcile to each group. Keep employees on qualifying leave visible in the snapshot review instead of relying only on positive paycheck rows. Document exclusions so the reviewer can see why an annual payroll record is absent from the snapshot report.

Keep the source workbook separate from the final upload file. The verified payroll template has 25 columns and the labor contractor template has 29. Preserve their headers and order, use the first worksheet for upload data and remove working identifiers or extra calculations from the export. Validate aggregated counts, annual hours, annual weeks, mean and median against the employee-level source.

CRD's handbook requires demographic information gathered for pay data reporting to be collected and stored separately from personnel records. Apply that separation to the working dataset and access permissions. Retain source versions, mappings, exception decisions and the final export reference for the employer's certifying official to review.