My client is in a covered city but I work from somewhere else. Does the law reach the job?

It depends on which of three tests that jurisdiction wrote, and they are genuinely different. Illinois reaches work provided in Illinois or work for a contracting entity located in Illinois, so one end of the job inside the state is enough. Los Angeles goes the other way and looks only at where the work happens: its Office of Wage Standards publishes an example in which a Los Angeles hiring entity engages a freelancer who does the work at home in Idaho, and the answer is that the ordinance does not apply. California's Act attaches to a hiring party in the state. Seattle covers anyone who performs any part of the work in Seattle. Read the coverage clause before the damages clause, because a client mailing address tells you less than you would expect.

The job is under the threshold. Is there anything in these laws for me?

Check the aggregation window before deciding there is not. Every one of these thresholds is measured across the relationship, not the invoice. New York State counts $800 across the immediately preceding 120 days between the same hiring party and freelance worker, Illinois counts $500 the same way, Columbus counts $250 over 120 days, and Los Angeles and Seattle count over a calendar year. Four $200 jobs for one client inside a four-month window are over the Columbus line. Four $200 jobs for four different clients are not covered anywhere. If you clear the line only when the work is added up, keep the earlier invoices, because they are the thing that puts you inside the statute.

Is there a federal law that requires a written freelance contract?

No. Nothing in this piece is federal. The Fair Labor Standards Act governs employees rather than independent contractors, and the federal Prompt Payment Act at 31 U.S.C. chapter 39 governs payment by federal agencies to their own contractors rather than payment by a private company to you. That is why the answer to whether you are covered turns on geography, and why two freelancers doing identical work for the same client can be inside and outside the same statute. If none of the seven reaches your job, the deadline that binds your client is the one written in your contract.

The client sent a purchase order instead of a contract. Does that count as the written contract?

Possibly, and it is the wrong question to stop at. These statutes describe contents rather than a document type. New York General Business Law section 1412 wants the names and addresses of both parties, an itemisation of services with their value, the rate and method of compensation, the payment date or the mechanism for fixing it, and the date by which you have to submit your list of services. California, Columbus and Los Angeles ask for close to the same list. A purchase order carrying all of those is doing the work of the written contract. One carrying a number and a PO reference is not, and that gap is the hiring party's problem rather than yours, because under section 1412 the duty sits on them.

Freelance Contract Law by State: Who Must Put It in Writing

The first thing you find, searching whether a law covers your unpaid invoice, is a bulletin written for the person who owes you the money. Five compliance bullets, a paragraph on penalties, an offer at the bottom to review your contractor templates. Useful to somebody.

Underneath the bulletins is a plain question with a plain answer, and the answer changes when you cross a city limit. Seven jurisdictions in the United States now put a floor under freelance work: a written contract, a payment deadline, and a way to make both of those cost something when they are ignored. Each row below was read against that jurisdiction's own statute or its own enforcing agency on 14 September 2026. There may be an eighth I have not found, and there will be more next year.

Four things about the map are easy to get wrong, and each of them sits after the table, in this order. One city that nearly every roundup puts on the list is not on this one. One state law covers a closed list of occupations, and software development is not on it. One jurisdiction that appears on every roundup requires no contract at all. And two pairs of these laws overlap, which decides where your paperwork goes.

I am not a lawyer and this is not legal advice. Every figure below is linked to the text it came from, with the date I read it.

Seven places, four dollar figures, one shared deadline

Where	Law	In force	Threshold	Written contract?
New York City	Admin. Code tit. 20, ch. 10 (Local Law 140 of 2016)	15 May 2017	$800 / 120 days	Yes
Seattle	SMC 14.34	1 Sep 2022	$600 / calendar year	No — disclosures
Los Angeles	LAMC ch. XVIII, art. 10	1 Jul 2023	$600 / calendar year	Yes
Columbus, OH	City Codes ch. 2337	2023, replaced 2024	$250 / 120 days	Yes
Illinois	820 ILCS 193	1 Jul 2024	$500 / 120 days	Yes
New York State	Gen. Bus. Law art. 44-A	28 Aug 2024	$800 / 120 days	Yes
California	Bus. & Prof. Code 18100–18107	1 Jan 2025	$250 / 120 days, listed services only	Yes

Sources for each row, in order: DCWP · Seattle Office of Labor Standards · LA Office of Wage Standards rules, published 20 October 2025 · Columbus Ordinance 2401-2024, which carries the current chapter text as an attachment · Illinois Department of Labor · NYS Department of Labor · Business and Professions Code 18101.

The one number that does not move is thirty days. New York General Business Law section 1411 says that where the contract does not specify when the hiring party must pay or the mechanism by which that date will be determined, compensation is due "no later than thirty days after the completion of the freelance worker's services under the contract." Columbus puts the same rule in section 2337.03(a)(2) of its city codes. Rule 5 of the Los Angeles rules says thirty calendar days after services are rendered. Seattle, Illinois and California all land on thirty as well.

That convergence is the most useful thing on the page, because the gap these statutes are filling is the commonest defect in a freelance contract: a payment clause with no date in it. If you are weighing a client's contract terms against your invoice terms, a silent contract in one of these seven places is no longer silent.

The row that is missing, and why

Minneapolis is on almost every published list of freelance contract laws, usually at $600 over a calendar year with the Department of Civil Rights named as the enforcer. It is not in the table above, because I could not confirm it and would rather say that than pass a figure along.

Three things came back when I went looking on 14 September 2026. The city's Labor Standards Enforcement division, which is the part of the Department of Civil Rights those roundups point at, names the ordinances it enforces: sick and safe time, minimum wage, wage theft prevention. Freelance work is not among them. The city publishes a sitemap of 3,958 pages and not one of those addresses contains the word freelance. And its legislative records server refused every request from this machine, including the summary document most of the roundups link to, so the possibility that something sits on the books unadvertised and unstaffed is open rather than closed.

None of that proves a negative. What it means is that the row cannot go in a table whose other seven entries were read at source, and that a freelancer working in Minneapolis is better off putting the question to that department directly than trusting a line in somebody's summary. The habit generalises to every roundup of this kind, this one included: check whether the agency named in the row says what the row says.

California's Act covers a list, and it is shorter than you think

Every summary of California's Freelance Worker Protection Act leads with the $250 threshold, which is the lowest of the seven and makes the law sound close to universal. It is not, and the reason is one cross-reference.

Section 18101 of the Business and Professions Code defines a freelance worker as someone retained to provide professional services, and subdivision (c) gives that phrase "the same meaning as paragraph (2) of subdivision (b) of Section 2778 of the Labor Code." That paragraph is the professional-services carve-out written into AB 5, and it is a closed list lettered (A) to (O), which is a narrower thing to point at than the section as a whole. Read on 14 September 2026 at leginfo, it runs to marketing where the work is original and creative, human resources administration, travel agent services, graphic design, grant writing, fine art, enrolled agents, payment processing agents, still photographers and photojournalists and videographers and photo editors, freelance writers and translators and editors and copy editors and illustrators and newspaper cartoonists, content contributors and advisers and producers and narrators and cartographers, licensed estheticians and electrologists and manicurists and barbers and cosmetologists, specialist performers hired to teach a master class, appraisers, and registered professional foresters.

Software development is not there. Neither is bookkeeping, nor consulting, nor most of what a solo technical contractor sells. A freelance illustrator in San Diego is squarely inside the Act. A freelance backend developer on the same street, for the same client, at the same fee, is outside it. Nothing about the fairness of the two situations differs. The list does.

That limit is the single most consequential thing about the Act, and it lives one hyperlink away from the text everyone quotes.

Seattle is on every list and does not require a contract

Seattle's Independent Contractor Protections Ordinance turns up in every roundup of freelance contract laws, and it is a different animal. What SMC 14.34 requires, in the Office of Labor Standards' own words read on 14 September 2026, is disclosure: a notice of rights, "a pre-work written notice that identifies the proposed terms and conditions of work" including payment terms, and then "a written notice that gives specific itemized payment information each time that payment is made."

The distinction is not academic. A pre-work notice is something the hiring entity hands you. A contract is something you both agree to. If a Seattle client sends terms you never accepted, the disclosure duty has been discharged and you are back on ordinary contract law for the question of what was actually agreed.

What Seattle adds that none of the others do is the payment-time itemisation — a written breakdown supplied with each payment. That is precisely the document you want when a client pays $2,400 against a $3,000 invoice and will not say which line they took out. Coverage is $600 or more in total compensation between 1 January and 31 December, and the geographic hook is performing any part of the work in Seattle.

When two of these laws cover the same invoice

Two overlaps exist, and each is handled differently.

New York City and New York State. Both statutes are called the Freelance Isn't Free Act, the city's came first, and the state's did not switch it off. General Business Law section 1415(5) provides that Article 44-A is not to be construed to override or supplant chapter ten of title twenty of the city's Administrative Code. So a Manhattan job sits under both, at the same $800 measured over the same 120 days, and the choice you are making is procedural rather than substantive: the city route runs through the Department of Consumer and Worker Protection, the state route through the Attorney General. Which of the two to stand on, and why the answer is not obvious, is worked through separately.

Los Angeles and California. This one is resolved by rule, and the rule changed recently. The Office of Wage Standards republished its Rules and Procedures on 20 October 2025, and Rule 3 now reads in part that for contracts entered into on or after 1 January 2025 "the City's Ordinance continues to apply to eligible contracts not otherwise covered by State law." The rules then give a worked example: a hiring entity engages a freelancer on 23 May 2025 for a $4,500 graphic design job in Downtown Los Angeles, and the city ordinance does not cover it, because graphic design sits at Labor Code 2778(b)(2)(I) and the state Act takes it.

Turn that around and the city ordinance becomes the safety net for exactly the occupations the state list leaves out. The Los Angeles developer who falls outside California's Act is inside the LA ordinance at $600 in a calendar year, provided the work happens in the city. Two laws, and the one that helps you is the one the other cannot reach.

Whose address decides: yours, the client's, or the work's

Three different tests, and picking the wrong one is the most common way a claim dies before anyone looks at the money.

Where the work happens. Los Angeles and Seattle. The LA rules put it in an example: a hiring entity in Los Angeles, a freelancer working from home in Idaho, and the ordinance does not apply because the work was performed outside the city. A second example runs the other way — a hiring entity in Montebello, a freelancer living in Long Beach, a $650 job performed at an event in Downtown Los Angeles, and the ordinance applies.

Either end of the relationship. Illinois. Section 5 of 820 ILCS 193 covers work provided in Illinois and work for a contracting entity located in Illinois, and question 9 of IDOL's FAQ reads that the law "applies to freelance workers who are hired to provide products or services in Illinois and/or who are hired by a contracting entity located in Illinois." That is the widest of the three tests, and it is why the Illinois Act reaches out-of-state freelancers who assume it cannot.

Where the hiring party is. California. Section 18101 defines a hiring party as a person or organisation in the State of California, carving out federal, state, local and foreign governments and an individual hiring for their own personal or household benefit.

New York State's Article 44-A carries no express geographic clause of that kind. Its exclusions in section 1410 run to categories of person — sales representatives, attorneys in good standing, licensed medical professionals, construction contractors — rather than to place. On a live cross-border claim that is a question for a New York lawyer, not something to settle off a table.

All three tests ask about a place on a date: where the hiring entity's office was, where you were, where the work was physically performed. Two of the three Los Angeles examples turn on that last point alone. Contracts as a rule record none of it, and calendar entries and card statements make a poor substitute nine months later when the argument is whether the shoot happened in Burbank or Hollywood. A one-line note at the top of the job folder — client's registered address, your address at the time, where the work actually happened — is the cheapest evidence anywhere in this area.

The complaint goes to a different building in every one of them

Thresholds get the attention. Routing decides your afternoon.

New York State. Not the labour department, despite the labour department running the guidance page. NYS DOL's page, read on 14 September 2026, closes with the instruction that "if you are a freelance worker and you believe your rights under the law have been violated, you can file a complaint with the New York State Attorney General." The same page notes that the Department has published a model contract meeting the section 1412 requirements. Section 1414 gives statutory damages of $250 for the missing written contract, double damages plus reasonable attorneys' fees and costs for non-payment under section 1411, and damages equal to the value of the underlying contract for retaliation under section 1413. Limitation periods differ by claim — two years for the contract violation, six years for non-payment and retaliation — and there is a civil penalty of up to $25,000 where the Attorney General establishes a pattern or practice.

New York City. DCWP takes the complaint; the damages case is heard elsewhere. Its page states that "individual causes of action will be adjudicated in state court," and that where there is evidence of a pattern or practice the Corporation Counsel may bring a civil action for a penalty of not more than $25,000. DCWP also enforces publicly: the most recent settlement listed on that page, dated 5 June 2025, is with BuzzFeed over late payments to freelancers.

Illinois. The Department of Labor facilitates and does not collect. Question 12 of its FAQ says the Department "may help you communicate with the contracting entity that hired you regarding the compensation owed," but "the contracting entity must pay the freelancer directly." What the process produces is a dated record and, on a non-response, a presumption you carry into circuit court.

Los Angeles. Complaints go to the Office of Wage Standards and must be submitted "before the one-year anniversary of the alleged violation" — the tightest deadline of the seven. You are not required to complain before suing. If the hiring entity does not produce the requested documents within 20 calendar days, Rule 7 gives you a rebuttable presumption in court, with the burden shifting onto them.

California. No agency intake at all. Section 18106 puts enforcement in the hands of an aggrieved freelance worker or a public prosecutor, with $1,000 where the hiring party refused a written contract on request, up to double the unpaid compensation, reasonable attorney's fees and costs, and injunctive relief.

Columbus. Not the body most write-ups name. Section 2337.05 sends complaints to the Labor Commission under Chapter 377 of the city codes, and that name is recent: Ordinance 2401-2024, passed on 16 September 2024, repealed and replaced Chapter 2337 in its entirety and renamed what had been the Wage Theft Prevention and Enforcement Commission. Anything written before that autumn points you at the old one. The chapter now runs 2337.01 to 2337.07, with the $250 threshold and its 120-day aggregation window at 2337.02(a). The original enactment, Ordinance 1016-2023, passed on 1 May 2023 and was signed the following day, taking effect "from and after the earliest period allowed by law."

Seattle. The Office of Labor Standards, which takes complaints directly and also answers questions through a worker inquiry form.

Two of these routes — Illinois and Los Angeles — hand you a presumption rather than a cheque, which is worth more than it sounds when the alternative is proving the terms of an oral deal. Both belong one rung below the point where you decide about small claims rather than replacing that decision.

Checked against DCWP, NYS DOL, IDOL, Seattle OLS, LA OWS, the Columbus legislative record and the New York and California statutes on 14 September 2026. The row most likely to gain a neighbour is the bottom one, because bills modelled on these keep being filed, and the entry most likely to change is the Minneapolis question above. Next read due 13 December 2026. Whether the law in your row actually reaches your particular job is a question for a lawyer admitted in that jurisdiction, and nothing here is a substitute for asking one.