EEOC Charges Filed, Fiscal Year 2021

New charges of employment discrimination individuals filed with the EEOC, by statute and basis.

EEOC charge volume is a demand-side signal, not a violation-rate signal: it measures how many individuals chose to file a claim with the agency in a given fiscal year, which is shaped as much by economic conditions, awareness of legal rights, and the reach of plaintiffs'-side employment counsel as by any change in underlying employer conduct. A company reading the aggregate charge count as evidence of how much discrimination is occurring misreads what the number captures, and the sharper, more decision-useful signal sits one level down: which bases — retaliation, disability, race, sex, age — are growing or shrinking as a share of the total, since that shift reflects where legal theories and enforcement attention are actually concentrating in a given year.

Duration for a charge is set almost entirely by EEOC's own investigative queue rather than by case complexity in the way court litigation duration is — a charge can sit in inventory for months awaiting an investigator's attention, and the pending-inventory figure the agency reports alongside its charge count is itself a leading indicator of how long a newly filed charge is likely to wait before it moves. A rising pending inventory in a given year should be read as an early signal of longer average time-to-resolution for charges filed that year and the next, independent of the merits of any individual charge.

For employers and their insurers, charge volume by basis is the most useful input for exposure modeling because EPLI pricing and litigation-budget planning both depend on which claim types are trending, not on the aggregate total. Retaliation has been the leading basis in every year on this site, and a retaliation charge carries a distinct resolution-path risk from a hiring-discrimination charge: retaliation claims frequently attach to an otherwise-defensible underlying personnel action, which changes how counsel should evaluate exposure at intake rather than waiting for the charge to mature into litigation.

Resolution paths from a filed charge branch three ways: administrative closure with no cause finding, a merit resolution (settlement, successful conciliation, or withdrawal with benefits), or, in a small minority of charges, referral toward litigation after conciliation fails. Criterica Intelligence frames charge volume and basis mix as an early-stage exposure signal that precedes — often by a year or more — the litigation and monetary-recovery data that eventually follows from it, for the employers, insurers, and funders that need the earliest possible read on where claims are concentrating.

Figures on this page are drawn from official agency publications, cited individually below, and reflect the agency’s own reporting as of the date shown for each figure. They are not Criterica Intelligence model outputs, are not predictions, and are not a measure of any party’s legal exposure or liability. Agencies periodically revise prior-year figures; where a revision is known, both figures are shown with their sources. This page does not constitute legal, investment, or compliance advice.