Employee monitoring notice laws by state (2026)

The 2026 dates, in one place

Five dates carry this year’s story.

• January 31, 2026 — California’s AB 1355 dies, per the Assembly’s bill history.
• February 2, 2026 — the dead bill is filed with the Chief Clerk, closing its record.
• June 4, 2026 — Connecticut approves Public Act 26-73, the rewrite of its monitoring-notice section.
• July 14, 2026 — Maine’s 26 M.R.S. § 620-A takes effect.
• October 1, 2026 — Connecticut’s rewritten requirements take effect, including for every employee hired on or after that date.

The rest of this page walks each state in turn: what the text says, where it stands, and — wherever the page goes into a text’s detail — the link to read that text yourself.

Connecticut is the one with a deadline

Connecticut has required employer notice of electronic monitoring for years, under Conn. Gen. Stat. § 31-48d. Public Act 26-73 (Senate Bill 472, approved June 4, 2026; the link is a PDF and opens in a new tab) rewrites that section, and the rewrite takes effect on October 1, 2026. Three things change in the text.

• The notice gets specific. Under the current section, the notice describes the types of electronic monitoring that may occur. Under the act, it also states the specific locations on the premises where monitoring may occur.
• The posting moves to where the monitoring is. The act requires the posting to appear in the monitoring locations themselves, not only in one central place.
• New hires get a written statement. Every employee hired on or after October 1, 2026 receives a plain-language written statement, before starting work, of which activities are prohibited and may be monitored without prior notice under the act’s misconduct exception.

The act writes carve-outs for airports and for monitoring on security and safety grounds, and it carries a stepped civil-penalty schedule: $500, then $1,000, then $3,000. All of that is in the act’s own text, linked above, which runs a few pages and is readable in one sitting.

Maine’s law is new, and its text has two carve-outs worth reading

Maine enacted 26 M.R.S. § 620-A as LD 61, chaptered as Public Law 2025, chapter 524 (the link opens the chaptered text as a PDF in a new tab). It has been in effect since July 14, 2026, which makes Maine the newest member of the notice-law family. Two details sit in the chaptered text and tend to get flattened in secondhand write-ups.

First, the definition section carves out GPS and safety devices on employer-owned vehicles. The carve-out is written for employer-owned vehicles; that is the scope its text gives itself. Second, subsection 6 of the section exempts surveillance installed in settings where personal care services are expected to be provided.

Both sentences above describe statutory text, and that is all they do. Whether either subsection reaches your vehicles, your job sites, or your clients’ homes is a scope question about your situation, and it belongs to a lawyer who knows it. The one thing worth taking from this page is that the text is short and primary: the chaptered law is linked above, and reading it beats reading three summaries of it.

New York and Delaware were already on the books

New York and Delaware round out the family: both states carry employer electronic-monitoring notice laws that predate this year’s activity, and neither is the reason this page exists. The 2026 movement our regulatory watch found sits in Connecticut and Maine, which is why the detail above sits there too. If you operate in New York or Delaware, the same habit applies — go to the statute’s text, not to a vendor’s summary of it.

California: the bill that would have gone furthest died in January

California’s dedicated location-privacy bill, AB 1355, is the one this page gets asked about most, and its status is settled for now: the Assembly’s own bill history records “Died pursuant to Art. IV, Sec. 10(c) of the Constitution” on January 31, 2026, and the bill was filed with the Chief Clerk on February 2. A bill that died can be reintroduced in a later session, so California stays on the watch list — but as of this page’s date, there is no new California monitoring-notice statute to read.

What the five regimes share, and where they differ

Strip the statutory language away and each of these is, at its core, a tell-the-worker rule: the state’s interest is that electronic monitoring not happen silently. Where they differ is in how much telling the text asks for, and when. Connecticut’s rewrite is the most specific of the family — its text layers three mechanisms, a notice that names locations, a posting that lives in those locations, and a written statement handed to each new hire before work starts. Maine’s section is younger and shorter, and does part of its work through what it carves out rather than what it commands: vehicles the employer owns, settings where personal care services are expected. New York and Delaware wrote their notice laws earlier and sat still this year. California, which had the most expansive bill of the group in play, ended the cycle with no new statute at all.

That spread is the reason a single national summary of “the monitoring law” is usually wrong somewhere. The texts are short; the differences between them are the content. Which is the quiet argument of this page’s format — primary sources and a date, over one confident paragraph claiming to cover them all.

What did not change this year

A reference page is only useful if it also says where the quiet is. Our regulatory watch swept for new state monitoring-notice and GPS-consent laws through late August 2026 and found no new state beyond the movement described above: Connecticut’s amendment and Maine’s new section. If a vendor page tells you a sixth state joined this year, ask it for the statute.

Why a photo-proof company keeps this page

Teams that photo-document field work with location data are the audience these notice laws speak to, and that is who LockProof serves — so we track the statutes and keep this page current. The product itself is deliberately narrow on this axis: it verifies field work without tracking employees. A worker taps a texted link, takes one live photo, and the record seals with a server-set time — plus GPS read on submission, when the worker shares location. Nothing is installed on the phone, and nothing reads location between jobs.

None of that answers a notice question. What notice any monitoring law requires of your operation is between you, the statute’s text, and your lawyer. If you are weighing always-on tracking against point-in-time proof on the merits, that comparison lives on our employee GPS tracking alternative page, and the wider field is laid out with the field-service teams we build for in mind.