What Is a Duress Button? The Complete Guide for Employers
What is a duress button, how does it differ from a panic button, and which type is right for your staff? A clear employer's guide to duress alarms.
New York has written a duress alarm directly into law. For retail security leaders, the smart move is to look past the hardware requirement and ask what actually happens when a worker presses the button.
New York has drawn a line in the sand for retail employers. Under the Retail Worker Safety Act, businesses with 500 or more retail employees in the state must provide every worker with a silent response button starting January 1, 2027. It is one of the first laws in the country to write a duress alarm directly into statute, and it signals where retail safety regulation is heading nationwide.
For risk and security leaders, the temptation is to treat this as a procurement box to check before the deadline. That would be a mistake. The organizations that get real value from this are the ones that look past the hardware requirement and ask a harder question: when a worker is in trouble, what actually happens next?
What the Act requires?
The Retail Worker Safety Act, codified as Section 27-e of the New York Labor Law, already requires every employer with 10 or more retail employees in the state to adopt a retail workplace violence prevention policy and deliver annual training. Those obligations took effect in 2025, and the New York State Department of Labor has published model templates to help employers comply.
The headline duress requirement lands later and applies to larger employers. Starting January 1, 2027, retailers with 500 or more employees in New York must give each worker access to a silent response button that requests immediate help. The law was amended in early 2025 to clarify what that button does. Rather than dialing 911 or law enforcement, it alerts an internal responder: a security officer, manager, or supervisor. Employers can meet the requirement with a fixed button in the store, a wearable device, or an app on the worker’s phone. Training on how to use it is mandatory too.
That flexibility matters, because it turns a compliance obligation into a design decision.
Why this is bigger than New York?
The backdrop is hard to ignore. Retail workers absorb roughly a quarter of all workplace violence incidents, according to OSHA. Across the wider economy, around two million American workers experience workplace violence each year, and acts of violence remain one of the leading causes of fatal occupational injury. Close to half of all incidents are never formally reported, often because staff fear retaliation or simply have no straightforward way to raise the alarm.
A silent response button speaks directly to that last problem. It gives a frightened employee a discreet, low-friction way to call for help without escalating a confrontation. New York is first, but it will not be last. Employers who build a credible response capability now will be ready as similar rules surface in other states, rather than scrambling to retrofit one under a deadline.
A button is only as good as what happens after the press
Here is the part the statute cannot legislate. A silent alarm that lights up a screen no one is watching, or pings a manager who is off shift, is worse than no alarm at all, because it creates a false sense of security. The value is never in the button. It is in the response.
That is the lens security leaders should apply when they evaluate their options. A silent alert needs to reach the right person immediately, wherever they are, and it needs to carry context: who raised it, where they are, and what is happening. It should reach more than one responder, so a single unanswered phone does not become a single point of failure. It should escalate automatically if the first responder does not acknowledge it, and it should give whoever responds a live picture of the situation rather than a bare notification.
For retailers with multiple locations, this quickly becomes a question of coordination rather than devices. A wearable or app-based duress alarm that ties into a wider mass notification capability lets an organization locate the worker, alert the nearest responders, and coordinate the incident response from one place. The button becomes the first link in a chain, not the whole solution.
Preparing before 2027 change
There is no need to wait for the deadline to think clearly about this. Employers approaching the 500-employee threshold in New York can use the lead time to map how a duress alert would travel through their organization today, find where it would stall, and decide whether help would actually arrive. Three questions are worth asking now:
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When an alert is raised, does it reach a real person who is on duty and able to act?
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Does that person know where the worker is and what they are facing?
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Can the response be coordinated across locations when it matters?
If the answer to any of those is uncertain, the hardware is not the gap. The response capability is. New York has made the silent response button a legal requirement. The employers who benefit most will treat it as an opportunity to build something their workers can genuinely rely on.
Sources
Retail Worker Safety, New York State Department of Labor
New York Makes Key Changes to Retail Worker Safety Act, Fisher Phillips
New York Proposes Chapter Amendment to Retail Worker Safety Act, Littler
Workplace Violence Overview, OSHA
