Unpaid hours · the Labor Commissioner · checked August 2026
You were not paid for the notes.
In short
My supervisor doesn’t pay me for notes or supervision — is there anything I can actually do?
The wage claim the Board cannot help with: how to file it, what it costs, and the five statutes that decide what it is worth
$0 to file, 3 years to do itThe Board of Behavioral Sciences does not regulate what your supervisor pays you. Somebody else does, the claim costs nothing to file, and the law may double part of what you are owed.
Why the Board declinedHow the claim worksWhat it is worthPer-session is piece rateThe volunteer problemDo the hours still count?
The post, and eighty-six comments of guesses
I’m an associate at a private practice. I get paid per session. I don’t get paid for notes, for no-shows, for the staff meeting, or for the supervision the Board requires me to attend. I asked the BBS. They told me they couldn’t help and that I should file a wage claim — against my own supervisor.
The short version
The Board was right, and it was not brushing you off.
Two different systems govern your associateship and they do not overlap. One decides whether your hours count toward licensure. The other decides whether you have to be paid for them. The Board runs the first and has no part in the second, which is why its answer sounded like a shrug and was not one.
Business and Professions Code §4980.43.3(a) requires an associate to be an employee or a volunteer, never an independent contractor. That is as far as the Board’s statute goes into your pay. It does not set a rate, it does not require that any particular hour be paid, and the Board publishes nothing that says otherwise.
California’s Division of Labor Standards Enforcement takes unpaid-wage claims from any employee against any employer, with no fee, no lawyer required, and no minimum amount. A therapy practice is an employer like any other. Being supervised by the person you are claiming against changes nothing about your standing.
This is the part that decides most of these cases. Under Labor Code §226.2 an employer paying by the piece must pay separately for time that is not spent on the piece — and may not average the session rate across it. Notes, no-shows, meetings and the supervision your registration requires are that time.
Minimum wage cannot be waived by agreement, and an agreement to work unpaid does not become lawful because a licensing board permits volunteers. Those are two different bodies of law giving two different answers, and the section at the foot of this page is about what happens where they collide.
Established by absence
What the Board publishes about your pay: nothing.
This is a claim about what is not in a set of documents, so here are the documents. Each was read in full, and none of them mentions the supervisee’s wage, the rate, or whether any hour must be paid at all.
| What was read | What it covers | On paying the supervisee |
|---|---|---|
| Consumer Complaint form (comp-2a) | The form the Board gives the public and licensees for reporting a licensee. Lists the conduct it wants reported. | Silent |
| Complaints and the courts flyer | The Board’s own explanation of what its enforcement program can and cannot do for a complainant. | Silent |
| MFT Supervisor Responsibility Statement (mfrespon) | Seventeen numbered attestations a supervisor signs, covering everything the Board holds them to. | Silent |
| Supervision Agreement, 37M-300 | Signed by both parties within 60 days. Item 16 requires the supervisor to confirm W-2 employment or volunteer status. | Employment status only |
The Board’s statute reaches your classification and stops. That is not a gap in enforcement; it is the division of labor between a licensing board and a labor agency, and it is the reason the Board sent you somewhere else instead of nowhere.
The mechanism
What actually happens after you file.
The instrument is the Initial Report or Claim, DLSE Form 1, revised July 2025. You can file it online, by post, or in person at a district office. Nothing on the form and nothing in the filing system mentions a fee — the word does not appear on it. You do not need a lawyer, and the hearings are designed on the assumption that most people will not have one.
| Stage | The statutory clock | What it is |
|---|---|---|
| File | Within 3 years for unpaid minimum wages and unpaid hours | Form 1, with your own record of the hours. There is no threshold amount; small claims are routine. |
| Determination | 30 days from filing | Labor Code §98(a). The Commissioner decides whether to hold a hearing, refer the claim to court, or take no further action. |
| Conference | Usually first | An informal settlement conference. Not under oath, and not a hearing — but failing to appear at it can dismiss your claim, which is the single most common way these are lost. |
| Hearing | Within 90 days of the determination | Sworn testimony before a hearing officer, on the record. Both sides may bring witnesses and documents. |
| Decision | 15 days after the hearing | An Order, Decision or Award. Either side may appeal it to the superior court, which then hears the matter afresh. |
On appeal §98.2(c) assesses the other side’s costs and fees against whoever brought the appeal and did not do better, and the statute says an employee “is successful if the court awards an amount greater than zero”. In practice that makes appealing a small award expensive for an employer, which is worth knowing before you decide the amount is too small to bother with.
What to have before you fill in the form
- Your own hours record. The employer is required to keep one; if theirs is missing or wrong, yours is what the hearing works from. Reconstruct it from your calendar and your notes if you have to, and say that you reconstructed it.
- Every pay stub you were given. Itemized-statement penalties are separate money and depend on what the stubs did or did not say.
- The written offer, contract or handbook, and anything that states the per-session rate or the admin rate.
- Which hours you are claiming for. Notes, no-shows, cancelations inside the notice window, staff meetings, required training, and the supervision hour itself — listed separately, because they are separately arguable.
- Your registration number and dates. Not because the Labor Commissioner needs them, but because the answer to “why were you attending supervision?” is that your registration required it.
The money
Five separate things you can be owed.
The unpaid wage is the smallest of them. Each line below is its own statute with its own conditions, and they stack.
| Statute | What it gives | The condition |
|---|---|---|
| §1194 | The unpaid wages themselves, plus interest, reasonable attorney’s fees and costs. | Any unpaid minimum wage or overtime. Cannot be waived by agreement. |
| §1194.2 | Liquidated damages equal to the unpaid minimum wages — in effect doubling that portion. | Expressly available in a §98 claim before the Labor Commissioner, not only in court. Form 1 has a tick box for it. |
| §218.6 | Interest at 10% on all unpaid wages from the date each was due. | Automatic on an award of unpaid wages. |
| §203 | Your daily rate for every day the final wages were late, up to 30 days. | Only if the employment has ended, and only if the failure to pay was wilful. |
| §226(e) | $50 for the first pay period and $100 for each one after, capped at $4,000. | A knowing and intentional failure to give an accurate itemized wage statement, causing injury. |
Form 1 item 37 has boxes for §203 and §1194.2 specifically. If you do not tick them, you have not claimed them.
What the claim is worth on its face
Enter the hours and the weeks. Everything is computed in your browser and nothing is sent anywhere.
This estimator is arithmetic on the statutes above, not a prediction. It assumes every hour you enter is compensable and that the failure was wilful, and a hearing may find neither. It is here because the thread that prompted this page was full of people who thought the amount was too small to be worth a form, and it usually is not.
The argument that wins these
Per-session pay is piece rate, and piece rate has its own statute.
Most of the argument in a per-session case is not about whether you worked the hours. It is about whether the session rate was meant to cover them. Labor Code §226.2 answers that, and the answer is no.
Labor Code §226.2
Employees paid on a piece-rate basis must be compensated for rest and recovery periods and other non-productive time separately from any piece-rate compensation.
“Other non-productive time” is defined as time under the employer’s control, exclusive of rest and recovery periods, that is not directed at the activity being compensated on a piece-rate basis. Writing the note is not the session. Sitting in supervision is not the session. Waiting for a client who does not arrive is not the session.
The Department of Industrial Relations’ own page defining piece rate gives, as one of its worked examples, nurses compensated by the number of procedures performed. A therapist paid by the session is the same structure with a different license on the wall. Form 1 asks about it directly: item 34 is a straight question about whether you were paid on a piece-rate basis.
What “separately” means in practice
- Non-productive time must be paid at no less than the applicable minimum wage — the local one where you work, which in several California cities is well above the state figure.
- The employer may not take a high per-session rate and argue it already covers the notes. That is exactly the averaging §226.2 forbids.
- The wage statement has to show the total non-productive hours and the rate paid for them, as separate line items. If yours never did, that is the §226(e) claim in the table above.
- None of this depends on you being right about the total. Bring the hours you can evidence; the hearing decides the rest.
Where the two systems collide
A licensing board’s permission is not a wage-and-hour exemption.
This is the part of the thread that nobody resolved, and it is genuinely unresolved — not a thing somebody had failed to look up. Two agencies say two things and neither has reconciled them in writing.
| Who says it | What they say | What it means for you |
|---|---|---|
| California Board of Behavioral Sciences | BPC §4980.43.3(a) permits experience to be gained as a volunteer, and adds that employers are “encouraged to provide fair remuneration” to associates. | Unpaid hours are creditable toward the 3,000. The Board will not reject them for being unpaid. |
| United States Department of Labor | On its own compliance advisor for the Fair Labor Standards Act: “employees may not volunteer services to for-profit private sector employers.” | A private practice is a for-profit private sector employer. The federal position is that the arrangement is not a volunteer arrangement at all. |
Both statements are current and both are published by the body that made them. “Encouraged to provide fair remuneration” is a licensing board declining to set a wage, not a federal agency granting an exemption — and only one of those two bodies enforces the minimum wage. A non-profit or public agency is a different question, with its own answer; this row is about the private practice the thread was describing.
The fear underneath the thread
Filing does not cost you the hours.
The reason most people in that thread said they would not file was not the money. It was that the person they would be claiming against signs their Verification of Experience. That is a real problem and this page will not pretend otherwise — but two things are worth being precise about.
Nothing in the Board’s statute conditions creditable experience on being paid. Hours already worked and already supervised do not become uncreditable because you later asked to be paid for them.
And §4980.43(c) counts up to 1,250 non-clinical hours toward the 3,000 — the category that covers writing records, attending meetings and workshops, and the administrative work of the caseload. The unpaid hours in these threads are almost always hours the Board already credits.
An employer may not discharge or discriminate against an employee for filing a wage claim. That does not make retaliation impossible; it makes it a second claim rather than an unanswerable one. If the practical risk to your signature is what is stopping you, that is a legitimate reason to wait until the hours are verified — and the 3-year limit is long enough that waiting is often possible.
Nothing here is legal advice, and this page is not a substitute for talking to an employment lawyer. Many take wage cases on contingency and consultations are commonly free, which is worth knowing before you decide the case is too small for one. If it is the hours rather than the money you are worried about, the licensure hours calculator and the job advisor both work from your own numbers and send nothing anywhere.
Where every figure came from
Sources.
The Board, and what it does not cover
- BPC §4980.43.3 — employee or volunteer, never an independent contractor
- BPC §4980.43 — the hour categories and the 1,250 non-clinical cap
- BBS Consumer Complaint form — read for what it does not list
- BBS complaints and the courts flyer
- MFT Supervisor Responsibility Statement — the seventeen attestations
- Supervision Agreement 37M-300
Filing the claim
What can be recovered
Piece rate
Volunteering
Every statute above is linked to the text of the law rather than to a summary of it, because summaries of §226.2 in particular disagree with each other. Where this page describes what a document does not say, the document is listed so you can check the absence yourself.
