The Private Attorneys General Act was rewritten in 2024 by Senate Bill 92. Two years in, plaintiff and defense counsel have settled into a new operating rhythm. The high-level changes are familiar; the day-to-day procedural friction is where 2026 practice actually lives.
The 60-Day Cure Window
Pre-SB 92, an aggrieved employee sent a PAGA notice to the Labor Commissioner and the employer; the employer had a limited cure window for a narrow set of violations; everything else proceeded to court. The current statute (Lab. Code § 2699.3, as amended) extends the cure window to 60 days for a much broader set of Labor Code provisions and ties the cure to specific remedial steps including back-pay calculation and wage-statement reissuance.
What that means in practice: plaintiff counsel structures the pre-suit notice with cure-eligible and non-cure-eligible counts segmented. Employers who do not cure within the window face standard PAGA exposure on every count, including the previously cure-eligible ones.
Standing and the “Aggrieved Employee” Floor
The aggrieved-employee standing question survived SB 92 with sharpened edges. The named plaintiff must have personally experienced each Labor Code violation pleaded. Cases like Estrada v. Royalty Carpet Mills, 15 Cal.5th 582 (2024), settled the contours: trial courts have discretion to limit the scope of representative actions if individualized issues make the case unmanageable, but they cannot strike the action outright on manageability grounds.
Manageability and Trial Plans
The post-Estrada trial-plan field produces longer pretrial briefing schedules. Plaintiff counsel files an early trial plan addressing how representative liability will be tried (statistical sampling, common-question subsets, named-plaintiff testimony). The defense bar litigates manageability before merits.
Settlement Posture
Carriers reserve PAGA cases differently than pre-2024 because the cure mechanic flips much of the early exposure to the employer side. Cases that previously settled in mediation now often turn on the cure-period record: what the employer did, what wages it paid back, what wage statements it reissued.
For California plaintiff employment counsel, the practical takeaway is that the first 60 days after notice are the most consequential window in the case — not the discovery period that follows.