Your checks stopped. A judge found you were not attached to the labor market, and the carrier stopped paying lost wage benefits.
That finding can be undone. The process is called re-attachment, and the single most important thing to understand about it is that there is a deadline nobody tells you about — and it is not a date on a calendar.
What a detachment finding actually did
It suspended your indemnity benefits. It did not close your case, it did not find you committed fraud, and it did not end your medical coverage.
What it decided is that, on the record in front of the judge, you had not shown you were genuinely in the job market within your restrictions. Our page on labor market attachment explains why that requirement exists and who it applies to.
Re-attachment means building the record you did not have, and asking the Board to restore benefits going forward.
The deadline is your classification, not a date
Here is the trap.
Most permanent partial disability cases eventually reach classification — the point at which the Board fixes your permanent impairment and your loss of wage-earning capacity. Classification is ordinarily good news, because of a change made in 2017.
Since then, Workers’ Compensation Law § 15(3)(w) has said benefits are payable during the continuance of the disability “without the necessity for the claimant who is entitled to benefits at the time of classification to demonstrate ongoing attachment to the labor market.”
Read that sentence carefully, because two phrases in it decide cases.
- “entitled to benefits at the time of classification.” The exemption is written for people who were being paid when they got classified. If your benefits had already been suspended for detachment, you were not entitled to benefits at that moment, and the exemption does not reach you.
- “ongoing.” What the amendment excuses is having to keep proving attachment month after month after classification. It does not excuse showing attachment at classification.
So classification is the moment the door closes. If you were detached going into it, you have to be re-attached by then.
The courts have said exactly this
This is not a theory about how the statute might be read. It has been decided twice in recent years, both times against the worker.
In a December 2025 decision, a claimant who had earlier been found to have voluntarily removed himself from the labor market argued that classification entitled him to benefits without more. The Appellate Division disagreed: “Having previously been found to have voluntarily removed himself from the labor market, it was incumbent upon claimant to demonstrate reattachment to the labor market at the time of classification.” The court added that the 2017 amendment “does not overrule the requirement that a claimant must show attachment to the labor market at the time of classification.”
A 2024 decision reached the same place from a different angle: a claimant found unattached at classification does not get the benefit of the amendment, and later re-attaching does not retroactively fix it.
Both men eventually did what the law asked. Neither did it in time.
What re-attachment takes
The proof is the same proof that establishes attachment in the first place, and the Board recognizes five routes: an independent job search that is timely, diligent and persistent; active participation in job-location services such as the Department of Labor or a One-Stop Career Center; active participation in vocational rehabilitation through ACCES-VR; active participation in a job-retraining program; or full-time attendance at an accredited school pursuing work within your restrictions.
Our page on how to show attachment covers what each route requires and how the C-258 and C-258.1 forms are supposed to be filled out.
Two things are different when you are re-attaching rather than starting clean. The judge already has a finding that your last effort fell short, so the second record gets read more closely. And because benefits are restored going forward rather than retroactively, every week you wait is a week you do not get back.
Withdrawal is a separate question from effort
There is a related finding that gets confused with this one.
Where the Board finds you voluntarily withdrew from the labor market — retired, left the workforce, stopped working for reasons of your own — you are not entitled to benefits unless your disability caused or contributed to that withdrawal. Whether you withdrew voluntarily is a question of fact for the Board.
That matters because the two findings call for different answers. If the dispute is whether you tried hard enough, the answer is a documented search. If the dispute is why you left work, the answer is medical evidence tying your departure to the injury. In the 2024 case, the claimant offered medical evidence of total disability and the Board found it insufficient to show he left work even partly because of the injury — the proof has to connect to the leaving, not just to the condition.
If your benefits have stopped
- Find out whether classification is coming, and how soon. That is the date your re-attachment has to beat.
- Start the search now and write it down as you go. Reconstructed job logs read as reconstructed. Contemporaneous ones do not.
- Read the actual finding. Detachment and voluntary withdrawal are different holdings requiring different proof, and the decision says which one you got.
- Pick a route you can document. Enrolling with ACCES-VR or a career center creates an independent record that does not depend on employers replying to you.
- Keep treating. Your medical benefits are unaffected, and the medical record is what supports restrictions and, where relevant, causation.
- Do not assume classification fixes it. That assumption is precisely what the two decisions above rejected.
Talk to a Staten Island workers’ comp attorney
A detachment finding is one of the few things in a comp case that a worker can genuinely fix without a doctor changing an opinion. What it takes is starting promptly and documenting properly, and the value of doing it before classification is difficult to overstate.
Call (718) 701-2776. The consultation costs nothing, and you will speak with me.
Workers’ Compensation Law § 15(3)(w); Matter of Ryan v City of Albany Water Dept., Appellate Division, Third Department, December 11, 2025, Docket No. CV-25-0250; Matter of Digbasanis v Pelham Bay Donuts Inc., 224 AD3d 1047 (3d Dept 2024).
Nothing on this page is legal advice about your own claim. What re-attachment requires depends on the findings already made and the facts of the individual case.
