Returned to Light Duty? How Temporary Partial Disability Benefits Really Work

Video transcript:

Hello. My name is Mike Dryden. I’m the head of the Workers’ Compensation department at Willig Williams & Davidson.

Today I want to talk about partial disability benefits. Almost every week, I’ll hear from an injured worker in Pennsylvania who’s been released to return to work with restrictions by a doctor. After they get released, they get returned to what’s called “limited duty” or “light active duty”, it goes by “modified duty”, they have different titles for it, but at the end of the day, you return to work with a restriction, and most times, you’re limited to 40 hours or less of work.

When you return to work with a restriction following a work injury, if you’re paid less than you made in the year prior to your work injury (when we calculate your pre-injury average weekly wage, we look at the year before the injury), we include your overtime if you had a second job, we include that as concurrent earnings. If your earnings after you return to work in light duty are less than the average pre-injury average weekly wage, you’re entitled to two-thirds of that difference in a second check. It’s called temporary partial disability benefits. It’s found in Section 306 B of the Pennsylvania Workers Compensation Act.

To put some numbers to it, if an employee who makes $25 an hour, that employee for a 40 hour week, will earn $1,000 a week if that employee works a couple extra hours each day and works maybe a Saturday, and when we do their calculation of their pre injury average weekly wage, we find that their true average weekly wage is actually $1,600. When that employee gets released back to light-duty work, and they limit his hours to 40 hours, and they only make $1,000, he has a $600 wage loss.

What should happen is that the employer then should pay two-thirds of that $600 or $400 to the injured worker each week that he’s in light duty in this second check. So if it’s done right, the employee who is released to return to work in modified duty goes back to work and earns $1,000 a week, should also get a check for $400 from the workers’ compensation insurance company responsible for his injury on top of his light duty pay. If that’s not happening, please contact Willig Williams & Davidson so that we can look into it.

It’s your absolute statutory right to receive two-thirds of that missing overtime. Employers won’t tell you. Sadly, they’re not obligated to tell you. You have to figure that out for yourself. Hopefully, this message helps.