New York restaurant training: what the law requires

On harassment prevention, New York doesn't ask restaurants to juggle five different laws the way some states do: there's one core training requirement, and it applies to every employee, every year. Restaurants in New York City carry more on top, including a separate NYC Food Protection Certificate, which requires a certified supervisor on duty during all operating hours and comes from the NYC Health Department, not from us. This page covers the harassment-prevention requirement, who it covers, and how ny.gov's own free materials stack up against a done-for-you course. It's a practical guide, not legal advice; confirm current requirements for your situation.

The training every New York restaurant owes, every year

SwiftSCORM's locked New York working editions cover the topics in Labor Law §201-g in English and Spanish. You can preview them now. Assignment, certificates, and manager dashboard proof open only after the version completes its professional and operational release gates.

• Every employee, every year. NY Labor Law §201-g requires every New York employer, regardless of size, to give every employee, full-time, part-time, seasonal, temporary, interactive sexual harassment prevention training at least once every calendar year. There's no minimum headcount that exempts you.
• No supervisor/non-supervisor hour split. Unlike some states, New York doesn't set separate hour counts for managers versus everyone else. Supervisor-specific responsibilities are covered as a topic inside the same training every employee takes, not as a separate course.
• "Interactive" means more than a video. New York's own guidance is explicit that passively watching a training video isn't enough. The training has to include real employee participation, which the state says can be built-in questions employees answer, a way to submit questions and get a timely answer, or a live session.
• A written policy too. Separately from the training itself, every New York employer must give its own written sexual harassment prevention policy to every employee at hiring and annually.
• New hires get trained too. The state's guidance doesn't set a fixed number of days, just "as soon as possible" after hire, so build it into onboarding rather than waiting for the next annual cycle.

New York City layers on a 15-employee requirement

If your restaurant is in New York City, the city's own law adds requirements on top of the state law above, for employers with 15 or more employees, and independent contractors count toward that 15. Covered employers must also train on:

• Bystander intervention, by name. New York City's law specifically requires the training to cover bystander intervention, including resources on how to actually do it, a topic not spelled out the same way at the state level.
• NYC's own complaint channels. Training must also cover how to reach the NYC Commission on Human Rights, on top of the state channels described below.
• An individual 80-hour/90-day trigger. Separate from the 15-employee employer threshold, an individual employee generally must be trained once they work more than 80 hours in a year and have been employed at least 90 days.

The NYC Commission on Human Rights has said its own training is built to satisfy both the city and state requirement at once, you don't need to run two separate courses. SwiftSCORM's New York course is built the same way, with bystander intervention as its own dedicated section, so a single course covers a covered NYC employer's obligations under both laws. Outside New York City, this layer doesn't apply, just the statewide rule above.

What about ny.gov's own free training materials?

Fair question, and here's the honest answer. New York State does publish free model training slides and a model policy document at ny.gov, and NYC's Commission on Human Rights offers its own free training built to satisfy both city and state requirements at once. If that's genuinely all you need, you don't need us. Two things are worth knowing before you rely on it.

• It's static, and "interactive" is the actual legal requirement. The state's own materials are slides and a PDF. Using them as-is still leaves you responsible for making it interactive, which the state says a slide deck or PDF alone is not. You would need to add employee participation, such as built-in questions employees answer, a way to submit questions and get a timely answer, or a live session.
• Record-keeping is on you, and New York City is stricter. Statewide, New York's own FAQ recommends keeping training records but doesn't mandate a format. New York City is not informal about it: covered NYC employers must retain each training record for at least three years, and the record may be a certificate or a signed employee acknowledgment. There's no state-provided roster or dashboard, and in New York City, where an individual employee's obligation can hinge on hitting 80 hours and 90 days, tracking that by hand gets harder than just "did everyone take it."

So use whichever path fits: take ny.gov's free slides and build the interactivity and the tracking yourself, or run SwiftSCORM's course and get the interactive format, the completion record, and the NYC bystander-intervention section already built in.

Proof is what matters if a complaint gets filed

An employee can bring a complaint to the New York State Division of Human Rights generally within three years of the harassment, or to the EEOC within about 300 days. Either way, "we trained everyone" only holds up with a record behind it: who, which course, pass or fail, and the date. A sign-in sheet from two years ago rarely survives that kind of scrutiny. Every SwiftSCORM completion produces that record automatically, and the dashboard exports it any time. Here's what a defensible record needs →

This is training, not legal advice, and SwiftSCORM's course is not produced, reviewed, or endorsed by the New York State Division of Human Rights, the NYC Commission on Human Rights, or any other government agency. Sources: NY Labor Law §201-g and New York State sexual harassment prevention model training and policy materials (ny.gov/combating-sexual-harassment-workplace) · NYC Commission on Human Rights sexual harassment prevention training guidance (nyc.gov/cchr). Laws and city rules change, verify current requirements before relying on them.