Summary and analysis. Sources: Chapter 9 of the Acts of 2025 (malegislature.gov), G.L. c. 149, § 148, Reuter v. City of Methuen, 489 Mass. 465 (2022), and Massachusetts Lawyers Weekly reporting from August 8, 2026. Positions of the parties are attributed as such; this article takes no side.
A Budget Rider With a Long Reach
Buried at Section 113 of the fiscal 2026 state budget, signed June 30, 2025, is a single paragraph that wiped out a category of pending Wage Act lawsuits. The provision grants nonprofit colleges and universities, along with nonprofit health care delivery systems, immunity from “any claim or cause of action” commenced between July 1, 2024 and September 30, 2028 alleging that paying employees monthly, or on a written academic-term schedule, violated G.L. c. 149, § 148. The immunity comes with one condition: the wages must have been paid in full within six days of the end of that monthly or term-based pay period.
Notice what that window does. Beyond protecting future payroll practices, it reaches back and covers suits that were already on file when the Governor signed the budget, because the trigger is when the claim was commenced, not when the paychecks went out. A worker who sued in the fall of 2024 over a monthly pay schedule had a live case one day and a statutory wall in front of it the next.
According to Massachusetts Lawyers Weekly, the fight over whether the Legislature could do that has now reached the Supreme Judicial Court, with Martin v. Amherst College serving as the lead vehicle. Hampshire Superior Court Judge James Manitsas dismissed the Martin plaintiffs’ claims on October 31, 2025, holding Section 113 immunized the college; the SJC took the case on direct appellate review on February 26, 2026, and a companion case against a health system, Oettinger v. Massachusetts General Physicians’ Organization, is seeking the same track. Argument could come as soon as September 2026. The appeal sits atop a cluster of pay-frequency class actions against private colleges. The workers say Section 113 unconstitutionally destroyed claims that had already accrued. The institutions say the Legislature fixed a technical trap before it bankrupted the state’s nonprofit sector.
What Section 148 Actually Requires
The pay-frequency rules sit in the first paragraph of the Wage Act, G.L. c. 149, § 148, and they are older than anyone’s payroll software. Employers must pay employees weekly or biweekly, within six days of the close of the pay period. Salaried employees, and those employed in a bona fide executive, administrative, or professional capacity, “may be paid bi-weekly or semi-monthly unless such employee elects at his own option to be paid monthly.”
Read that clause again. The election to be paid monthly belongs to the employee. An employer who simply sets a monthly payroll and enrolls everyone in it has never obtained the election the statute describes. Higher education did exactly that for decades. Monthly pay is the default at colleges nationwide, and faculty contracts spread over an academic year fit poorly into a biweekly grid. Nobody treated it as a live legal problem.
Then the SJC decided Reuter v. City of Methuen, 489 Mass. 465 (2022). Beverly Reuter’s accrued vacation pay arrived three weeks late; the city argued the damages should be limited to interest for the delay. The court disagreed and held that the Wage Act means what it says: late payment is a completed violation, liability is strict, and the mandatory remedy is treble the late wages plus attorney’s fees. Good faith does not matter. Paying up before suit does not cure it.
Reuter transformed pay-frequency claims from a curiosity into a weapon. If a professor’s September wages were due on a biweekly schedule but arrived on September 30 under a monthly one, the second half of that paycheck was arguably “late” every single month, and under the plaintiffs’ reading of Reuter, every late dollar gets trebled. Multiply that by thousands of employees, a three-year limitations period, and payroll running into the hundreds of millions at the larger institutions, and the arithmetic explains both the wave of class actions filed beginning in 2024 and the intensity of the lobbying that followed. The defendants have contested that damages theory, arguing that where workers ultimately received every dollar, the real loss is the time value of a few weeks’ delay. No appellate court had resolved the measure of damages for pure frequency violations when the Legislature stepped in.
Where the Cases Stand
After Section 113 became law, the defendant institutions moved to dismiss the pending suits on immunity grounds, and the plaintiffs answered with constitutional objections rather than folding. That posture, a statutory defense meeting a constitutional counterattack, is what put the issue on the appellate track. Per the Lawyers Weekly report, the SJC is positioned to decide the question during the coming term, which would settle the fate of every suit filed inside the 2024 to 2028 window at once. Until it rules, the trial court cases sit in limbo: discovery largely frozen, class certification unresolved, and both sides briefing a question about the boundary between the Legislature and the courts rather than about anyone’s paycheck.
The Institutions’ Argument for the Rescue
The employers’ position, reflected in their filings and in the testimony that accompanied the budget rider, starts from proportionality. These employees were paid in full. Nobody missed rent because Amherst ran payroll on the last business day of the month; monthly schedules were disclosed in offer letters and handbooks, and in some units negotiated with unions. The claimed injury is that money arrived on the 30th instead of the 15th, and the demanded remedy is three times the wages themselves rather than three times any actual loss. On that view, the litigation is a windfall built on a drafting relic, and treble damages designed to protect workers stiffed by fly-by-night contractors would instead transfer endowment and hospital operating funds to people who suffered, at most, a few weeks of foregone interest.
The Legislature has fixed Wage Act overreach retroactively before, the institutions add, and curative statutes responding to unexpected judicial interpretations are a routine part of lawmaking. Section 113 is narrow. It protects only nonprofits, only for frequency claims, and only where workers actually received full pay within six days of the disclosed schedule. An employer who shorted anyone a dollar gets no protection at all.
The Workers’ Argument Against It
Workers’ counsel answer that a claim that has accrued is a form of property. Their clients held causes of action that were valid under the statute’s plain text and under Reuter on the day they filed. A law that extinguishes those vested claims, they argue, violates the due process protections of the Massachusetts Declaration of Rights, and because Section 113 was written to control the outcome of identified, pending lawsuits, it also crosses the separation-of-powers line drawn by Article 30. The Legislature may change the law going forward; deciding cases is the judiciary’s job.
The challengers also press the process point. The immunity never appeared as a standalone bill, never received a public hearing on its own terms, and surfaced as an outside section of a 700-plus section appropriations act. A provision that selects a class of defendants, in litigation the sponsors could name, and hands them a complete defense, looks to the plaintiffs less like general legislation and more like a private favor enacted at the expense of people with cases already docketed.
Retroactivity Doctrine, Translated
Massachusetts law does not flatly forbid retroactive statutes. The framework comes from American Manufacturers Mutual Insurance Co. v. Commissioner of Insurance, 374 Mass. 181 (1978): a retroactive law survives due process review if, on balance, it is a reasonable response to a legitimate public problem. Courts weigh the public interest the Legislature was serving, the extent to which people reasonably relied on prior law, and how severely the statute disturbs settled rights. Retroactivity that adjusts remedies or revives claims tends to fare better than retroactivity that annihilates them.
Sliney v. Previte, 473 Mass. 283 (2015), shows the doctrine’s permissive side: the SJC allowed a lengthened statute of limitations for child sexual abuse claims to apply retroactively, reasoning that defendants have no vested right in a limitations defense. The workers here will say their case is the mirror image and the harder one for the state, since Section 113 does not adjust a deadline or a procedure; it erases the substantive claim of one identifiable group for the benefit of another. The institutions will answer that the reliance interests cut their way for once. For fifty years, every college in the Commonwealth ran monthly payroll openly, with no enforcement action suggesting illegality, and the Legislature was entitled to protect that reliance once Reuter revealed the trap. Both readings fit inside the same balancing test, which is precisely why the case is worth watching.
Stakes and What Comes Next
Neither side has placed a verified aggregate exposure number in the public record, and estimates floated in coverage should be treated as advocacy. The structural stakes are easier to state. If Section 113 stands, the Legislature has a proven template for retroactively defusing any Wage Act theory that produces uncomfortable numbers, and the strict-liability regime of Reuter becomes softer than it looks. If it falls, pay-frequency litigation resumes against some of the state’s largest nonprofit employers, and outside sections of future budgets will draw much closer constitutional scrutiny. Watch for the SJC’s treatment of Article 30 in particular; a ruling that pending-case immunity invades the judicial function would matter far beyond payroll. Employees sorting out a departure from a covered institution, including anyone weighing benefits after a resignation, may also want our companion piece on unemployment eligibility after being fired or quitting, since none of this litigation affects those separate rights.
Frequently Asked Questions
Can my employer pay me monthly in Massachusetts?
For most workers, no. G.L. c. 149, § 148 requires weekly or biweekly payment. Salaried employees may be paid biweekly or semi-monthly, and monthly only if the employee personally elects it. Agricultural workers are a separate statutory exception. Section 113 of the FY2026 budget shields certain nonprofit colleges and health systems from suits over past and near-term monthly schedules, but it does not rewrite the underlying rule for employers generally.
Does Section 113 protect for-profit companies?
No. By its terms it covers only nonprofit institutions of higher education and nonprofit organizations comprising a health care delivery system, and only for claims commenced between July 1, 2024 and September 30, 2028 alleging that monthly or academic-term payment violated Section 148. The employer must also have paid wages in full within six days of the end of that disclosed pay period.
If the SJC strikes down Section 113, do the lawsuits automatically win?
No. The cases would return to the trial courts, where the plaintiffs would still need class certification, proof of the violations, and a ruling on the contested damages question: whether treble damages apply to the full amount of each late paycheck or only to the time value of the delay. A decision upholding the statute, by contrast, would end the covered claims outright.