The short answer
The honest answer is that it depends which of four tracks your case is on, and most people are never told which one they are on until it matters.
New York workers’ compensation is not one benefit with one clock. It is several, and they run for very different lengths — a few weeks, a fixed number of weeks set by statute, or the rest of your life. Which track you land on is decided by findings in your file, and those findings are contested.
The four tracks, and how long each one runs
| What you are receiving | How long it lasts |
|---|---|
| Temporary benefits — while you are still healing | Until you reach maximum medical improvement. No fixed end date, but see the 130-week trap below. |
| Permanent partial disability (spine, brain, systemic) | A capped number of weeks — 225 to 525 — set by your loss of wage-earning capacity. |
| Permanent total disability | No cap. Paid for as long as the total disability continues. |
| Schedule loss of use (arm, leg, hand, eye, ear) | A fixed number of weeks for that body part, paid as a sum. Different logic entirely. |
Everything below is about how you end up on one track rather than another, and what quietly shortens the time you are paid.
While you are healing: temporary benefits
For as long as your condition is still improving, you are on temporary benefits — total if you cannot work at all, partial if you can work in some reduced way. These are wage replacement, roughly two-thirds of your average weekly wage, subject to the maximum in effect on your date of accident.
There is no fixed expiration on this stage. It runs until you reach maximum medical improvement — the point at which your doctor says you have recovered as far as you are going to. That is usually somewhere around a year, longer if there has been surgery.
The 130-week trap
Here is the part almost nobody knows, and it is the single most valuable thing on this page.
For accidents on or after April 9, 2017, if you are paid temporary disability benefits for longer than two and a half years — 130 weeks — the carrier receives a credit for that excess against your permanent partial disability cap.
Read that again, because it works against you and it is invisible while it is happening. Time spent waiting — for a surgery to be scheduled, for a denied treatment to be resolved, for a hearing date — is time on temporary benefits. Past 130 weeks, every one of those weeks comes out of the permanent award waiting for you at the end.
A claim that drags is not a neutral thing. It converts future benefits into present ones and leaves you with fewer weeks on the other side. It is one of the strongest practical reasons not to let a case sit, and a reason that treatment denials cost more than the treatment.
There is a safety valve. If the Board finds you have genuinely not reached maximum medical improvement at the two-and-a-half-year mark, temporary benefits can continue beyond it.
After you stop improving: the capped weeks
Once you reach maximum medical improvement, a permanent injury that is not on the schedule — a back, a neck, a brain injury, a lung or heart condition — goes to classification. The Board finds your loss of wage-earning capacity, and that percentage sets a fixed number of weeks. When they run out, the checks stop.
This is the table that decides it, for accidents on or after March 13, 2007:
| Loss of wage-earning capacity | Weeks of benefits | Roughly |
|---|---|---|
| Greater than 95% | 525 | about 10 years |
| Greater than 90% to 95% | 500 | about 9.5 years |
| Greater than 85% to 90% | 475 | about 9 years |
| Greater than 80% to 85% | 450 | about 8.5 years |
| Greater than 75% to 80% | 425 | about 8 years |
| Greater than 70% to 75% | 400 | about 7.5 years |
| Greater than 60% to 70% | 375 | about 7 years |
| Greater than 50% to 60% | 350 | about 6.5 years |
| Greater than 40% to 50% | 300 | about 5.75 years |
| Greater than 30% to 40% | 275 | about 5.25 years |
| Greater than 15% to 30% | 250 | about 4.75 years |
| 15% or less | 225 | about 4.25 years |
Look at what that table means in practice. The difference between a finding of 30 percent and a finding of 40 percent is 25 weeks of benefits. Between 50 and 60 percent, another 50 weeks. Your loss of wage-earning capacity is not a medical number — it takes in your medical impairment together with your age, education, skills and what work you can realistically still get. It is argued, and it is worth arguing.
How that percentage is arrived at, and what goes into it, is covered on our page about classification and loss of wage-earning capacity.
One thing to hold onto: these weeks are not calendar time if you return to work. If you go back and your earnings recover, benefits can be suspended and the remaining weeks preserved. The cap is a number of weeks paid, not a countdown running in the background.
When there is no cap at all
A finding of permanent total disability carries no cap. The statute provides for payment during the continuance of the total disability — which for a genuinely totally disabled worker can mean the rest of their life.
This is the difference between a case worth a few hundred thousand dollars and a case worth several times that, and it turns on a classification finding. It is not automatic, it is not common, and it is not something a carrier volunteers.
The extreme hardship provision
There is also a route that exists specifically for people whose capped weeks are about to run out and who cannot survive without the benefits.
If your loss of wage-earning capacity was found to be greater than 75 percent, you may apply to be reclassified to permanent total disability or total industrial disability on the ground of extreme hardship. The application has to be made within the year before your benefits are scheduled to exhaust.
That deadline is the whole thing. It is a one-year window, it opens years after the classification that set it, and nobody sends a reminder. A worker who reaches the end of 425 weeks without having filed has lost the opportunity, not because they did not qualify but because the window closed while they were waiting for the checks to stop.
If you are classified at more than 75 percent, the date your weeks run out is a date that belongs in your calendar, and the year before it is when something has to happen.
The application is made on Form C-35, and it has rules of its own — including one that catches people out: filed too early, it is returned unprocessed. See the C-35 and extreme hardship redetermination.
Arms, legs and eyes work differently
If your permanent injury is to an extremity or a sense — shoulder, arm, hand, hip, knee, foot, vision, hearing — you are not on the capped-weeks track at all. You are owed a schedule loss of use award, which is a fixed number of weeks assigned by statute to that body part, multiplied by your percentage of permanent loss.
The practical difference is large: a schedule award is usually paid out as a lump sum rather than stretched week by week, and it is owed whether or not you went back to work. People who have fully returned to their jobs routinely leave these unclaimed because they assume returning to work ended their case.
Your medical treatment is on its own clock
Everything above is about the checks — indemnity benefits, the wage-replacement side. Medical treatment is separate, and the two do not end together.
Causally related medical care for your work injury can continue after your weekly payments have run out. Running out of indemnity weeks does not close your case and does not end the carrier’s obligation to pay for treatment of the injury.
The exception is a settlement. A Section 32 agreement that closes out medical benefits ends that too, permanently. That is the question worth asking about any settlement you are offered: what exactly is being closed.
When it ends sooner than it should
Most of the time, when someone asks how long their benefits will last, what has actually happened is that the benefits already stopped and nobody explained why.
Payments can halt for reasons that have nothing to do with running out of weeks — a carrier’s independent medical examination finding you able to work, a dispute over whether you are attached to the labor market, a suspension after a missed appointment, a gap in medical reporting from your own doctor. Each of those is challengeable, and each has its own path back.
We cover that separately: why your workers’ compensation payments stopped, and what to do about it.
The short version
- While you are still healing, benefits run until maximum medical improvement — but past 130 weeks, that time starts eating your permanent award.
- A permanent non-schedule injury pays 225 to 525 weeks, set by your loss of wage-earning capacity.
- Permanent total disability has no cap.
- An arm, leg, hand, eye or ear injury pays a fixed schedule award, owed even if you went back to work.
- Classified above 75 percent? The year before your weeks run out is your window to apply for extreme hardship.
- Medical treatment continues after the checks stop — unless you settle it away.
If you are trying to work out where you stand
The question behind “how long will this last” is usually a more specific one: how many weeks am I actually owed, has anything already been taken off that number, and is the percentage in my file the right one?
Those are answerable from your file. Call (718) 701-2776. The consultation costs nothing, and you will speak with me. If we don’t recover money for you, we don’t get paid.
Nothing on this page is legal advice about your own claim. Which track you are on, and how many weeks that means, depends on your date of accident, your classification and the findings in your file.
