Industry Compliance Requirements Checklist

Most compliance checklists are written to apply to any small business, which means they read the same whether a reader has 4 employees or 400. That is not how the underlying law works. Title VII and the ADA apply only once an employer has maintained 15 or more employees for 20 or more calendar weeks in the current or prior year. That is a specific numeric test, not a blanket rule, and a business below it is reading requirements that do not yet apply to it at all.

Millrace Facilities Group is a fictional commercial janitorial and grounds-maintenance contractor headquartered in Spokane, Washington. It crossed its federal thresholds one at a time as it grew: 15 employees in 2020, 20 in 2021 when an Oregon site opened, and 50 in 2023 when an Idaho site opened. Its revenue crossed a separate line years earlier, in year one, at $650,000 with only 6 employees on payroll. At 62 employees today, the 100-employee threshold behind the WARN Act's notice requirement sits 38 employees away, not urgent yet, but worth watching rather than ignoring.

The sharper case arrived when Millrace signed its first California contract and assigned six employees to a client site in Sacramento, its fourth state. Federal FMLA eligibility requires 50 employees within 75 miles of the employee's own worksite, and Sacramento sits hundreds of miles from Millrace's nearest other office, so that crew fails the federal test entirely. California's own family leave law applies at five employees anywhere the employer operates, with no distance test at all, so the same six were covered from the day the site opened.