Every week you drive to physical therapy. You drive to the orthopedist, to the MRI, to the pharmacy, and to an examination the insurance company set up forty minutes away. Over a year that is hundreds of dollars of gas and tolls out of your pocket, at a time when your pocket is thinner than usual.
New York reimburses that. Most injured workers never claim a dollar of it, because nobody tells them the form exists and because by the time they hear about it they cannot remember where they drove.
The form is a C-257
Its full name is the Claimant’s Record of Medical and Travel Expenses and Request for Reimbursement, and it covers two categories:
- Medications or supplies properly prescribed by your health care provider that you paid for yourself.
- Fares, automobile mileage or other necessary expenses going to and from your provider’s office or the hospital.
“Other necessary expenses” is doing real work in that sentence. Tolls, parking, bus and subway fare, a car service where your injury makes driving impossible — these are travel costs of getting treatment, and the Board’s own guidance to injured workers tells you to keep receipts and says you may be reimbursed for mileage, public transportation, or expenses incurred for treatment.
The mileage rate, and the 2026 split
The Board publishes a mileage rate for travel by automobile. It changes, and in 2026 it changed twice — which matters if you are reconstructing a year of driving, because the two halves of this year are paid at different rates.
| Period | Rate per mile |
|---|---|
| On or after July 1, 2026 | 76 cents |
| January 1 – June 30, 2026 | 72.5 cents |
| 2025 | 70 cents |
| 2024 | 67 cents |
| 2023 | 65.5 cents |
| 2022 | 58.5 cents |
| 2021 | 56 cents |
A claim that has been open a few years is therefore not one multiplication. It is a separate calculation for each rate period, which is exactly the sort of thing that gets shortchanged when nobody is paying attention.
Claim it even without the receipt
This is the instruction most people get backwards, and it is printed on the form itself. You are told to list each item of expense whether or not you obtained a receipt, while obtaining receipts wherever possible.
So a missing parking receipt is not a reason to leave the trip off. Mileage has no receipt in the first place — it is a record of where you drove and how far. What you need is a contemporaneous log: the date, the provider, the destination, and the round-trip miles. Keep a copy of everything you send.
It goes to two places
Send the completed form, with copies of the receipts and bills you do have, to the workers’ compensation insurance carrier — or to your employer if it is self-insured — and to the Workers’ Compensation Board.
Sending it only to the carrier is the common mistake. The Board copy is what puts the request in the case file, which is what lets a judge take it up if the carrier simply does nothing.
The carrier’s exam counts too
Travel to an independent medical examination is reimbursable when the carrier or the employer is the one who requested it. The Board’s own notice of rights to claimants says so directly: you have the right to be reimbursed for travel to and from the examination site where the exam was requested by the insurance carrier or employer.
That is worth knowing when the appointment is an hour away. The distance may be a problem you should raise on its own — the exam is supposed to be within a reasonable distance of where you live — but the drive itself is not free to you, and it should not be.
You should not be paying for prescriptions at all
The C-257 exists partly to get back money you should never have spent. On an established claim you are not responsible for a co-pay on medication for the work injury, and you should not be paying your provider or the hospital for treatment of it either.
If you did pay — because the pharmacy would not run it through, or the claim had not been established yet — that is what this form is for. For prescription claims specifically, the insurer must pay the claim, either to the pharmacy or as reimbursement to you, within 45 days of receiving it.
What the law does and does not say
Worth being straight about this. Workers’ Compensation Law § 13 requires your employer to provide medical treatment, hospital service and medicine for as long as your injury requires. It does not spell out travel costs.
The mileage rate comes from a Board resolution adopted on February 20, 1990, under which the Board publishes a rate for reimbursement to injured workers for travel by automobile each year. That is settled practice rather than a line in the statute, and it is one reason a carrier that ignores a C-257 is often met with a shrug rather than a penalty. Persistence, and a copy in the Board file, are what get these paid.
How to actually collect it
- Start the log the day you start treating. A note in your phone after each visit beats reconstructing a year from memory.
- Record round-trip miles, not one way.
- Log every destination — the doctor, therapy, the MRI, the pharmacy, the carrier’s examiner.
- Note the date of each trip, since the rate depends on when you drove.
- Keep receipts for tolls, parking and fares, and claim them anyway if you lose one.
- File periodically rather than once at the end. Smaller, current requests get paid more often than one large one years later.
- Keep copies of what you send, and note the date you sent it.
If you have moved away while your claim is open, the drives get longer and this matters more — see our page on moving out of state with an open claim.
Talk to a Staten Island workers’ comp attorney
Travel reimbursement will not change your life, but it is your money, and over a long claim it adds up to real money. It is also a fair indicator of how the carrier is treating you generally.
Call (718) 701-2776. The consultation costs nothing, and you will speak with me.
Nothing on this page is legal advice about your own claim. Board forms, rates and procedures change, so check the current rate before you calculate, and every case turns on its own facts.