Before you can sue for discrimination you have to file a charge — and the deadline is already running

Nothing about the process announces itself. No form tells you the clock started the day you were let go, and the agency will not chase you.

The charge is a precondition, not a formality

Title VII, the Americans with Disabilities Act, the Age Discrimination in Employment Act, the Genetic Information Nondiscrimination Act and the Pregnant Workers Fairness Act all require a charge before a private suit. The EEOC states the rule flatly: all of the laws it enforces except the Equal Pay Act require a charge of discrimination first. The Equal Pay Act is the one route straight to court — two years from the discriminatory pay practice, three if the violation was wilful, with no agency step at all.

Skipping the charge does not strip a court of jurisdiction. In Fort Bend County v. Davis (2019) the Supreme Court held unanimously that Title VII’s charge-filing requirement is "a mandatory claim-processing rule subject to forfeiture if tardily asserted" — an employer that waits years to raise it has lost the point. That is a lifeline, not a plan. Defence counsel raise it in the first motion.

Assume 180 days until you have checked that it is 300

42 U.S.C. § 2000e-5(e)(1) sets the base period at 180 days after the alleged unlawful employment practice occurred. It stretches to 300 days only where the conduct is also covered by a state or local law and an agency enforces it — what the EEOC calls a Fair Employment Practices Agency. Age claims are narrower still: for the ADEA the extension needs a state law with an enforcing agency, and a city ordinance alone will not buy it.

The mechanism behind the extra 120 days is deferral. Under § 2000e-5(c) the state agency gets 60 days of exclusive processing before an EEOC charge can be filed, so Congress lengthened the window to keep the federal claim alive across that pause. In practice almost nobody files twice: 29 CFR 1601.13 lets a FEPA waive its exclusive period through a worksharing agreement, and a charge presented to either body is dual-filed with the other. One submission, two claims preserved.

What resets the clock is narrower than people hope. In National Railroad Passenger Corp. v. Morgan (2002) the Supreme Court separated discrete acts from hostile environments. A termination, a failure to promote, a denial of transfer: each is its own violation on its own date, and earlier ones stay time-barred even where a later one is timely, though they remain usable as background evidence. A hostile work environment is one practice made of many acts, so a single contributing act inside the window lets a court consider the whole period.

The online inquiry is not the charge

This is the trap that catches careful people. The EEOC Public Portal asks you to submit an inquiry describing the problem; the agency then schedules an intake interview by phone, video or in person at one of its 53 offices; only after that is a charge drafted and signed. Three steps, of which the first two are not a filing. Somebody who submits an inquiry on day 175 and is offered an interview in six weeks has not filed anything.

A charge is a signed statement asserting that an employer, union or labour organisation discriminated, and asking the agency to act. The EEOC’s own instruction on filing by post could not be blunter: if you do not sign it, we cannot investigate it. If a deadline is close, the safe move is a signed letter naming you, the employer, what happened, when, and on what ground — posted or delivered before the date, with the interview left to follow.

What the charge says is what you get to sue about

Exhaustion is not satisfied by having filed something. A federal complaint may raise only the claims made in the charge and those like or reasonably related to them — the test being whether the new claim could reasonably be expected to grow out of an investigation into what the charge alleged. Courts apply it every month, and the casualties are predictable: a retaliation claim added later, a hostile environment claim built on facts the charge never mentioned because the charge described one dismissal.

That is not an argument for padding the form with a decade of grievances. It means describing the pattern rather than the last incident in it, and naming every ground you believe was in play. If your dismissal followed a complaint you made, say so — an untimely discrimination claim and a timely retaliation claim often sit on the same facts, as what counts as wrongful termination sets out.

What the agency does, and what it is not going to do

Within 10 days of filing the EEOC notifies the employer. It may then invite both sides to mediation, which is voluntary and averages under three months against roughly ten for an investigation. If mediation does not happen or does not settle, the employer files a position statement.

One asymmetry in that exchange is worth knowing, because it is the rare procedural rule that favours the person who filed. The EEOC will release the employer’s position statement and its non-confidential attachments to you so that you can respond — and it will not release your response to the employer. Whatever you write goes to the investigator alone.

A dismissal is not a finding that nothing happened. The EEOC closes charges because the law does not apply, because the filing was late, or because on the evidence gathered it cannot conclude a violation occurred. The letter still carries your right to sue, and a court owes the agency’s view no deference.

The notice, and the ninety days it starts

The right-to-sue notice is permission, not a decision. From receipt you have 90 days to file in federal or state court. It is the shortest clock in the sequence and the least forgiving: no agreement between the parties extends it, and the agency cannot grant more time.

You can also ask for it early. Once 180 days have passed since the charge was filed the Commission must issue the notice promptly on written request. Before 180 days it will issue one only if a director-level official certifies in writing that processing is unlikely to be completed in time. Asking ends the investigation, so the trade is real — you give up a free evidence-gathering apparatus in exchange for control of the timetable. Age claims need no notice at all: an ADEA suit may be filed any time from 60 days after the charge.

When the 90 days start has become genuinely contested now that notices arrive through the portal. In Hayes v. New Jersey Department of Human Services (3d Cir. 2024) the court held that an EEOC email saying a notice was forthcoming did not start the clock, and neither did uploading the letter to the portal without any direct communication; it also reaffirmed the rebuttable presumption that a posted letter is received three days after it is sent. In García-Gesualdo v. Honeywell Aerospace of Puerto Rico (1st Cir. 2025) the First Circuit held that an email which does not attach the letter must indicate without ambiguity that the EEOC has finished and that 90 days are running — expressly declining to follow the Eighth Circuit. Do not treat any of this as slack. Count from the earliest date the agency touched you and file inside that.

What the first fortnight is actually for

Two of the four clocks are unforgiving in opposite ways. Missing the charge deadline destroys the claim outright, with nothing left to argue about. The 90 days catch people because they arrive when the case feels dormant, often more than a year later, and the notice that starts them reads like a rejection letter.

Which is why the useful work in the weeks after being fired is administrative rather than legal. Fix day zero. Establish whether your state agency reaches the ground you are alleging. Draft the charge to describe the pattern rather than the final incident, because that text is the boundary of any lawsuit that follows. Everything else — whether the conduct was unlawful, whether the employer can justify it, whether a jury would agree — can be argued later. The dates cannot. And if what you are chasing is unpaid money rather than a finding of discrimination, final paycheck rules run on a different and usually faster track.