Work on digital platforms: the obligations in force since June 2025

01What changes for your company

Who is a worker. Under Arti­cle 291-C of the Fed­eral Labor Law (Ley Fed­eral del Tra­bajo), a dig­i­tal plat­form worker is anyone who pro­vides per­sonal, paid, and sub­or­di­nate ser­vices under the direc­tion and super­vi­sion of a person who offers ser­vices to third par­ties through a plat­form, and who earns net monthly income equal to at least one monthly min­i­mum wage for Mexico City, regard­less of the time worked. Anyone who does not reach that income in a given month is an inde­pen­dent worker, but retains the rights under the chap­ter for the time actu­ally worked, except for social secu­rity and hous­ing con­tri­bu­tions; even so, the plat­form is respon­si­ble for occu­pa­tional risk insur­ance in all cases. If the person has no activ­ity for thirty con­sec­u­tive cal­en­dar days, the rela­tion­ship ends with­out lia­bil­ity.

What the plat­form must do. Among other obli­ga­tions (Arti­cle 291-K):

1. Pay within no more than one week and issue weekly receipts show­ing tasks per­formed, time worked, and with­hold­ings.
2. Keep a record of hours worked and wait­ing times.
3. Enroll work­ers with the Mex­i­can Social Secu­rity Insti­tute (IMSS) and make con­tri­bu­tions to the hous­ing fund.
4. Ensure the secu­rity of work­ers’ infor­ma­tion and per­sonal data.
5. Estab­lish mech­a­nisms for han­dling com­plaints of vio­lence, harass­ment, bul­ly­ing, and dis­crim­i­na­tion.
6. Report the pay for each task, item­ized, and pro­vide the infor­ma­tion the author­i­ties request.

The con­tract and the algo­rithm. The work must be set out in a con­tract whose model must be reg­is­tered (Arti­cle 291-G), and the plat­form must issue and keep up to date an algo­rith­mic man­age­ment policy doc­u­ment with the rules for assign­ing tasks, and report any changes to it (Arti­cle 291-J). This is the first time Mex­i­can labor law requires an expla­na­tion of how an algo­rithm dis­trib­utes work.

Work­ers’ per­sonal data. The duty to pro­tect their infor­ma­tion is added to the per­sonal data law: the plat­form is the data con­troller for that data and, if it eval­u­ates work­ers’ per­for­mance through auto­mated deci­sions with­out human inter­ven­tion, they may object to that pro­cess­ing under Arti­cle 26, sec­tion II, of the Fed­eral Law on the Pro­tec­tion of Per­sonal Data Held by Pri­vate Par­ties (Ley Fed­eral de Pro­tec­ción de Datos Per­son­ales en Pos­esión de los Par­tic­u­lares).

Profit shar­ing. Plat­form work­ers par­tic­i­pate in employee profit shar­ing when their time actu­ally worked exceeds 288 hours per year (Arti­cle 127, sec­tion IX).

Social secu­rity. On June 24, 2025, the IMSS pub­lished in the Offi­cial Gazette of the Fed­er­a­tion (DOF) the gen­eral rules for the enroll­ment pilot pro­gram, under the second tran­si­tory arti­cle of the decree.