Mamdani Claims Credit for $104 Million Tip Boost From a Law Passed Before He Took Office

Zohran Mamdani stood at a podium Wednesday and said his city hall put $104 million back in the pockets of delivery workers.

That's the headline number from a new city report on tipping practices at Uber Eats and DoorDash. Mamdani posted it on X: "Uber Eats and DoorDash hid tip buttons and set default tips below 10%. As a result, tips for delivery workers fell 79%. In January, we made these corporations change their apps." He added, "This is only the beginning."

Mamdani's post left out one detail. The law forcing those changes wasn't his. The New York City Council passed it last August, according to Fox News. Then-Mayor Eric Adams never signed it and never vetoed it either. Under city rules, that meant it became law automatically after 30 days, sitting on the books before Mamdani ever took office.

The rules didn't actually take effect until January 26, after Mamdani was already mayor, and his Department of Consumer and Worker Protection is the one that implemented and enforced them. His office is leaning on this distinction heavily.

"A law is only as good as its implementation," a Mamdani spokesperson told Fox News Digital. "We have been intentional about enforcing the laws on the books so that we are putting money back into the pockets of working New Yorkers."

Critics aren't buying the framing. Actor Michael Rapaport posted on X: "This guy is a fantastic lying politician. He had literally nothing to do with this. City Council passed the bill last August and Eric Adams never signed it. 30 days the bill became law. It went into effect when Mamdani was in office. He just taking the credit." Fox News reported that conservatives and commentators piled on with similar criticism.

The underlying numbers aren't in dispute. According to Business Insider, the city's Department of Consumer and Worker Protection found that Uber Eats and DoorDash hid tip buttons and set default tips below 10%, contributing to a 79% drop in tips for delivery workers before the law forced a change. Since the rules kicked in, the city says tips have doubled, and the roughly 70,000 delivery workers in New York are on track to earn an additional $2,287 each per year on average.

Mamdani also touted a separate $5 million settlement the city reached with delivery apps in January, part of which went directly to workers, and said the city boosted funding for the Department of Consumer and Worker Protection by more than $4 million in June to expand enforcement staff, according to Business Insider. "The days of city hall accepting corporate abuse as the cost of doing business here in New York City are over," Mamdani said at the press conference. "I am confident that more wins are on the way."

DoorDash isn't taking the city's findings quietly. John Horton, DoorDash's head of North America public policy, called the city's characterization of its tipping practices "flat out wrong," telling Business Insider that "moving tipping to after checkout isn't novel or nefarious. It's how tipping works in many areas of life." DoorDash and Uber both sued the city in December over the tipping law, arguing it violates federal and state law and improperly pressures customers into tipping. Neither company responded to requests for comment on the $104 million figure itself, according to Business Insider.

The lawsuit is the real unresolved issue. If DoorDash and Uber win in court, the tipping rules Mamdani is campaigning on could get struck down entirely, along with whatever future enforcement he's promising. There's also a fair question buried in the corporate pushback: forcing companies to display tip prompts before checkout does raise the odds customers tip under a kind of social pressure, which is DoorDash's actual legal argument.

What's clear is that Mamdani took a policy win built by the City Council and the outgoing Adams administration and wrapped it in his own branding, "this is only the beginning," as if it were the opening act of his mayoralty rather than the payoff of enforcement work that started under someone else's watch. His office's defense, that enforcement matters as much as passage, has merit. But it's not the same thing as authorship, and the timeline here is not close.

The pending DoorDash and Uber lawsuit against the city remains unresolved. No court date has been reported. Whatever the judge decides will determine whether the $104 million figure is the start of something bigger, as Mamdani claims, or the high-water mark before a legal reversal.