In November 2025 the New York Court of Appeals denied workers’ compensation to four public-facing employees who developed psychological conditions from COVID-19 exposure at work. The vote was 4–3. If you read the coverage and concluded that New York will not compensate a stress claim, that conclusion may well be wrong for a claim filed today — because the Court was applying a rule the Legislature had already changed, and the Court said so.
This is worth understanding carefully, because the headline and the current law point in opposite directions.
The four cases
The Court heard four claims together — two New York City Transit Authority employees, a City of Yonkers employee, and a Manhattan and Bronx Surface Transit worker. Each kept working in a public-facing job through the height of the pandemic. Each developed a psychological condition. Each filed for workers’ compensation.
The Workers’ Compensation Board disallowed all four. The Appellate Division reversed. The Court of Appeals reversed again and reinstated the Board’s denials.
The rule that defeated them
To be compensable, an injury must be accidental. For a psychological injury caused by stress rather than by physical trauma, New York courts had long read that requirement to mean the claimant must show stress “greater than that which other similarly situated workers experienced in the normal work environment.”
Read that standard against a pandemic and the problem becomes obvious. The comparison group is other workers doing the same job. During COVID-19, every transit worker faced the same exposure. So the Court found that substantial evidence supported the Board: the stress these claimants experienced was comparable to that of similarly situated workers in the normal work environment at the time.
The consequence is that a catastrophe severe enough to injure an entire workforce is compensable for none of them, precisely because it hit everyone. The three dissenting judges would have measured the pandemic-era stress against what those same workers faced before the pandemic, which would have produced the opposite result.
What the Legislature had already done
Here is the part the headlines mostly skipped.
Effective June 4, 2025 — months before the Court ruled — Workers’ Compensation Law § 10(3)(c) took effect. It provides that the Board may not disallow a claim by a covered employee “upon a factual finding that the stress was not greater than that which usually occurs in the normal work environment” where the claim is for post-traumatic stress disorder, acute stress disorder, or major depressive disorder.
That is the exact ground the four claimants lost on, removed by statute for those diagnoses.
The Court was aware of this. It noted that the claimants did not argue that the newly amended language applied retroactively to Board decisions that predated its effective date. So the Court decided the cases under the older rule and left the new provision for another day.
What § 10(3)(c) requires
The provision is real relief, but it is not a blank check. It carries its own requirements.
- Three diagnoses only. PTSD, acute stress disorder, or major depressive disorder. A claim framed as generalized anxiety or unspecified stress does not fit the provision, and the older standard still governs it.
- Diagnostic evidence. Medical proof based on the criteria in the edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders in effect on the date of accident, or another version the Board adopts that is no more stringent.
- Extraordinary stress from a distinct event. The employee must show the disorder “arose out of extraordinary work-related stress attributable to a distinct work-related event or events directly related to the employment and occurring during the performance of the employee’s job duties.”
That last requirement does most of the work now. The statute stops the Board from denying a claim merely because the stress was ordinary for that job — but the claimant still has to tie the disorder to an identifiable event or series of events, not to the general atmosphere of the work.
What did not change
Two limits are worth stating plainly.
First responders have their own provision. Section 10(3)(b) covers police officers, firefighters, EMTs, paramedics, other certified emergency medical personnel, and emergency dispatchers, for mental injury from extraordinary stress in a work-related emergency.
Neither provision applies to psychological injury flowing from a physical injury. Section 10(3)(d) says so expressly. That is not bad news — a psychological condition that develops out of an established physical injury has long been compensable as a consequential condition, and it does not have to clear the extraordinary-stress hurdle at all. If you were hurt on the job and then developed depression or anxiety from the injury, the pain, or the loss of your work, that runs on the established claim rather than on § 10(3)(c).
Which rule applies to your claim
The short answer is that it depends on your diagnosis, on whether there is an underlying physical injury, and on timing.
Section 10(3)(c) took effect on June 4, 2025. How it applies to a claim with an earlier date of accident is a question worth raising specifically, and it is the sort of thing that should be argued rather than assumed. The Court of Appeals decision did not resolve it, because no one asked the Court to.
If you are considering a psychological injury claim
- Get an actual diagnosis from a treating provider. The statute is written around specific diagnoses and DSM criteria. “Stress” as a description of how you feel is not a claim; a diagnosed disorder is.
- Identify the events. Dates, incidents, what happened and what you saw or were subjected to. The distinct-event requirement is met with specifics, not with a general account of a difficult job.
- Say whether there is a physical injury in the picture. It changes which path you are on, and the consequential-injury path is usually the more straightforward one.
- Do not be talked out of it by the headline. The November decision has been widely reported as closing the door on stress claims. It was decided under a rule the Legislature had already narrowed.
- Move promptly. The ordinary notice and filing deadlines apply here as they do to any other claim.
If your condition traces to September 11th rather than to ordinary employment, that runs under a separate statutory scheme with its own covered conditions and deadlines — see our page on Fresh Kills and 9/11 responders.
Talk to a Staten Island workers’ comp attorney
Psychological injury claims are among the most heavily contested in the system, and the law governing them moved twice in fifteen months. A claim that would have failed in 2023 is not necessarily a claim that fails now.
Call (718) 701-2776. The consultation costs nothing, and you will speak with me.
Sources: Matter of McLaurin v New York City Tr. Auth., Matter of Matthews v New York City Tr. Auth., Matter of Anderson v City of Yonkers, and Matter of Djanuzakov v Manhattan & Bronx Surface Tr. Operating Auth., Court of Appeals, Nov. 24, 2025 (Nos. 88–91); Workers’ Compensation Law § 10(3)(b), (c), (d), as amended by L 2025, ch 79.
Nothing on this page is legal advice about your own claim. Whether a psychological condition is compensable depends on the diagnosis, the proof, and the facts of the individual case.
