How long do I have to file a race discrimination claim?

The Texas number people get wrong

Texas workers are often told the deadline is 300 days. For a race claim, it is not. The statute reads that a complaint "must be filed not later than the 180th day after the date the alleged unlawful employment practice occurred." The 300-day figure comes from a separate subsection that applies to sexual harassment complaints only.

The consequence is unforgiving by design. The same section says the commission "shall dismiss an untimely complaint." There is no discretion written into it.

So if you are working a race case in Texas, 180 days is your number. The federal 300-day window still exists alongside it, but a federal charge is a different filing with a different remedy scheme, not a rescue for a blown state deadline.

Sources [1]

Racial harassment: a narrow exception, not a general rescue

A single slur, then months of nothing, then a poster on a locker, then a joke in a meeting. Workers commonly assume the early incidents are dead and the case with them.

For an ongoing hostile environment, the EEOC says otherwise: "In harassment cases, you must file your charge within 180 or 300 days of the last incident of harassment, although we will look at all incidents of harassment when investigating your charge, even if the earlier incidents happened more than 180/300 days earlier."

Read the limits on that carefully, because this is where people lose claims they thought were safe. The agency frames it as "one exception to this general rule," and the general rule is that each act you want to challenge needs its own timely charge. The exception depends on the recent incident being part of the same continuing hostile environment as the older ones. A recent incident that belongs to a different problem, or that involves different people and a different kind of conduct, may not pull the old ones back in.

It also does nothing for discrete decisions. A write-up, a denied promotion, a demotion, a pay cut, a suspension, a termination: each of those has its own date and its own deadline. The EEOC's own example is a demotion followed later by a discharge, where only the discharge is timely and "you must have filed a charge challenging the demotion within 180/300 days from the day you were demoted." A slur last month does not revive a demotion from two years ago.

That is why a dated log matters more in a harassment case than almost anywhere else. It fixes the last incident, it shows whether the pattern is one continuing environment or several separate events, and it preserves the earlier conduct as context for the investigation.

The EEOC treats race harassment as covered conduct, listing "racial slurs, offensive or derogatory remarks about a person's race or color, or the display of racially-offensive symbols" as examples.

Sources [2] · [3]

California, Washington, Nevada and Colorado windows

California gives three years from the unlawful practice to file with the Civil Rights Department, the longest state agency window of the four. Long is not the same as safe. Witnesses move, badge records get purged, and text threads get wiped when a phone is replaced.

Washington gives six months to file with the Human Rights Commission. Do not read that as six months to hit send. The commission's route runs from an online intake questionnaire to a perfected charge that its own staff draft for you to sign, and it says the signed charge has to be completed within the limitations period to protect your filing rights. It also flags an eight-to-ten-week backlog before new complaints reach an intake investigator. Washington also lets a person injured by a violation bring a civil action directly in court instead of going through the commission, which is a separate route with its own timing.

Nevada gives 300 days to file with the Equal Rights Commission, and its statute treats a complaint as timely if it was filed with an appropriate federal agency inside that period.

Colorado gives 300 days to file with the Colorado Civil Rights Division, a window a 2022 law extended from six months. CADA generally requires exhausting the CCRD process before a lawsuit, and it covers Colorado employers of all sizes, which matters in small-shop cases federal law cannot reach.

None of these state windows, and neither federal window, belongs to a federal agency employee. The EEOC routes federal workers and federal job applicants through their own agency instead, and its rule for that group is contact with an agency EEO Counselor generally within 45 days of the discriminatory act. Forty-five days can run out before most people have finished deciding whether to say anything at all, so if you work for a federal agency, act on that number and not on anything else in this guide.

Sources [4] · [5] · [6] · [7] · [2] · [8] · [9] · [10] · [11]

Hair texture and protective hairstyles count as race

These states have written this into the statute, which matters because grooming-policy cases are often dismissed by employers as neutral dress code enforcement.

California: race "is inclusive of traits associated with race, including, but not limited to, hair texture and protective hairstyles," and protective hairstyles include braids, locs and twists.

Texas: discrimination on the basis of race "includes discrimination because of or on the basis of an employee's hair texture or protective hairstyle commonly or historically associated with race."

Washington: race "is inclusive of traits historically associated or perceived to be associated with race including, but not limited to, hair texture and protective hairstyles," listing afros, braids, locks and twists.

Nevada: race "includes traits associated with race, including, without limitation, hair texture and protective hairstyles," with protective hairstyle defined to include natural hairstyles, afros, bantu knots, curls, braids, locks and twists.

These are race claims, so they run on the race deadlines above. A grooming write-up has a date on it. Use that date.

Sources [12] · [1] · [13] · [14]