How to File an EEOC Complaint: Evidence Checklist

• Employees, former employees, applicants and, in many circumstances, trainees and temporary workers. You do not need to still be working there, and you do not need to have complained internally first — although a dated internal complaint is useful evidence of notice.
• Someone else on your behalf. A charge can be filed by an individual, or on behalf of another person to protect their identity, and organizations can file too.
• Subject to employer-size thresholds. The main statutes reach employers above a minimum headcount — commonly 15 or more employees under Title VII and the Americans with Disabilities Act, and 20 or more under the Age Discrimination in Employment Act. Smaller employers may still be covered by state or local law, which is one reason to ask about a parallel state filing rather than assuming you have no route.
• Federal employees and applicants follow a different process. Instead of filing a charge in the same way, they normally have to contact an EEO counselor at their own agency within a much shorter window — commonly 45 days from the discriminatory act. If you work for the federal government, treat that as urgent and check the rule immediately.

One useful exception: under the Equal Pay Act you may generally go directly to court without filing a charge first. Even then, many people file anyway, because the agency process is free. Ask an attorney which route fits your facts.

The deadlines: 180 or 300 days

This is the part that ends more real claims than any argument about the merits. A charge commonly must be filed within 180 calendar days of the discriminatory act. That extends to 300 calendar days where a state or local agency enforces a law prohibiting employment discrimination on the same basis — which is the case in most, but not all, of the country.

Four things about how the clock runs:

• It starts on the day the discriminatory act happened — the day of the demotion, the termination, the refusal to promote — not on the day you realized it might be unlawful or the day your internal grievance was rejected.
• An internal complaint does not pause it. Waiting for HR to finish an investigation is one of the most common ways people run out of time. The two processes run in parallel.
• A continuing hostile environment is treated differently from a discrete act. For an ongoing hostile work environment, a charge is generally timely if at least one act contributing to it falls within the filing period. Discrete acts — a firing, a failure to promote — each have their own deadline. This distinction is technical and worth an attorney’s five minutes.
• Deadlines for age claims and for state-law claims can differ, and a state claim may have a shorter or longer limit than the federal one. Filing with the EEOC does not necessarily protect a separate state-law deadline.

Do this first: write down the date of the act, count the days, and write the expiry date at the top of your file. If you are close to it, file a charge now and refine the details later — a timely charge that needs amending is infinitely better than a perfect one filed a week late.

How to file: the Public Portal, step by step

1. Start an inquiry in the EEOC Public Portal. The online route begins with an inquiry, not with the charge itself: you provide your details, your employer’s details, what happened and when. You can also start by phone, by mail, or in person at a field office — the portal is the fastest, not the only, way in.
2. Attend the intake interview. The agency schedules an interview — by phone, video or in person — to work out whether your situation is one the EEOC can handle and to help frame the charge. Bring your chronology. This conversation is much shorter and much more useful if you can give exact dates rather than search your memory.
3. Review and sign the charge. The charge is drawn up from the interview and your inquiry. Read it closely before signing: check the dates, the bases you are alleging (race, sex, age, disability, retaliation and so on), and that every claim you want covered actually appears. A basis left out of the charge can be a problem later.
4. Keep your copy and the charge number. You will need the number for every subsequent contact, and your dated copy is proof of when you filed.
5. Ask explicitly about dual filing. Confirm in writing which agencies your charge has been filed with — see the next section.
6. Keep your contact details current. Notices from the agency, including the right-to-sue notice with its short deadline, go to the address on file. A notice that reaches an old address still starts the clock.

Dual filing with a state or local agency

Most states and many cities have their own fair employment practices agency — a FEPA — enforcing a state or local anti-discrimination law. Many of them have work-sharing agreements with the EEOC, which means a charge filed with one is generally treated as filed with the other, so you do not lose either route by choosing a door.

Two reasons to care. First, the state law is sometimes broader than federal law: it may cover smaller employers, additional protected characteristics such as marital status or arrest record, or a lower severity threshold. Second, the deadlines differ, and the state deadline can be shorter than the federal one. Ask which agencies your charge has been filed with, get the answer in writing, and ask an attorney whether filing separately under state law gives you anything the federal charge does not.

The evidence checklist: what to attach and what to hold

A charge is not a trial, and the agency is not going to read a thousand pages. The goal is a charge that is specific, dated and referenced — with an organized file behind it that you can produce on request. Organized and referenced beats voluminous, every time.

Your chronology (the single most useful document)

One page, dated entries, oldest to newest, one line each: what happened, who did it, who was present, and which document proves it. Everything else in your file hangs off this. If you build only one thing before filing, build this.

Identity and employment basics

• Your dates of employment, job title, pay rate and reporting line.
• The employer’s legal name, address and approximate number of employees — headcount determines coverage.
• Your offer letter, contract or handbook acknowledgment if you have them.

The conduct itself

• Complete message threads — texts, emails, chat exports — not cropped screenshots. Include the surrounding context, including your own replies.
• Voicemails as audio files, with a short transcript alongside so the words can be quoted without anyone playing the audio.
• Call logs: date, time, duration and number. In an out-of-hours pressure claim the metadata is often the evidence, independently of what was said.
• Verbatim quotes with dates for anything said out loud, from your contemporaneous log.
• Photographs of anything physical — a note left on a desk, a display, a whiteboard — with the original file and its date intact.

Notice: what you reported and what came back

• Every internal complaint, in the form you sent it, with the date.
• Any response, investigation outcome or meeting invitation — and a note of the silence where there was no response.
• The employer’s harassment policy and reporting procedure, saved while you still had access.

Comparative and pattern evidence

• How colleagues outside your protected group were treated in comparable situations — assignments, discipline, pay, schedules.
• Names and roles of witnesses, with what each person saw or heard personally.
• Whether others have complained about the same person, if you know it as fact rather than rumor.

The retaliation timeline

• The date of each protected complaint you made.
• Performance reviews from before and after — a clean history followed by a sudden reversal is one of the strongest documents you can produce.
• Every adverse change with its date: discipline, schedule, projects removed, exclusion, transfer, termination.

Damages and effect

• Pay records, bonus history, benefits statements, and anything showing lost income.
• Medical or counseling documentation if the situation affected your health — dated, from your own provider.
• Your job-search record if you were terminated or resigned, since mitigation can matter later.

What not to do with the file

Do not attach documents you took from company systems without advice — forwarding confidential internal material to a personal account can be a disciplinary offense in its own right and has damaged otherwise strong cases. Do not edit, annotate or re-crop originals; keep them untouched and put your commentary in a separate document. And do not submit a recording without first checking your state’s consent rule and your employer’s policy: our call recording laws by state guide gives the rule for all 50 states and D.C., and our chain-of-custody form is the one-page template that keeps a digital item defensible from the day you capture it.

If most of your evidence lives on a phone — the late-night calls, the voicemails, the texts that get deleted — the practical problem is capturing it in a form that is hard to dispute. Copareo Secure Line gives you a dedicated U.S. number to hand out instead of your personal one: every call, text and voicemail that reaches it is time-stamped as it arrives, hashed so any later alteration is detectable, and exportable as a single structured file you can hand to an investigator or an attorney. One flat $9.90, no subscription.

What happens after you file

The process is not fast, and the range of outcomes is wide. In broad terms:

• Notice to the employer. The employer is notified of the charge, generally within a short period of filing, and is usually asked to provide a written position statement responding to the allegations.
• Your chance to respond. You may be given an opportunity to reply to the employer’s position statement, commonly within about 30 days. Diary it the moment it arrives — this is where your chronology and your complete threads earn their keep, because the position statement is where the employer’s version of events first appears in writing.
• Mediation. The agency may offer mediation, which is voluntary, confidential and free, and can resolve a charge in weeks rather than months. Going to mediation does not waive anything if it fails.
• Investigation. The agency may request documents, interview witnesses, or ask for information from the employer. It may also dismiss a charge without a full investigation, which is not a finding that you were lying — it frequently reflects priorities and resources.
• Outcome. The process ends in a determination, a settlement, a dismissal, or, rarely, agency litigation. In most cases it ends with a notice of right to sue.

Throughout, keep doing the boring thing: log every contact with the agency, keep every letter, and keep documenting anything new that happens at work — retaliation during a pending charge is both common and legally serious.

The right-to-sue notice and the 90-day clock

A notice of right to sue is the document that lets you file a lawsuit in court. It typically arrives when the agency closes its process, and you can also request one yourself — generally once at least 180 days have passed since you filed the charge, if you would rather move to court than wait.

The critical point: the notice starts a short deadline, commonly 90 days, to file in court. That period is applied strictly, it runs from receipt rather than from when you get around to opening the envelope, and missing it usually ends the claim regardless of its merits. If you receive one, contact an employment attorney immediately — not next month.

Requesting an early right to sue has trade-offs: you give up the remainder of the agency investigation and any mediation it might have produced, and you take on the cost of litigation. It is a decision to make with an attorney, not alone.