If you have been injured on the job your injury may have been so severe that you were not able to work at all. In that situation, you should have received temporary total disability benefits. On the other hand, there may be a time in the healing process when you are able to come back to work with limitations such as number of hours a day, lifting, etc. In those situations, if your employer can accommodate you, you need to go back to work. If you are not receiving the full amount of pay that you were receiving prior to your injury you could be entitled to temporary partial disability benefits.
For example, assume you broke your ankle. The initial break has started to heal and you are going in for physical therapy treatment. In a normal case an employee will improve their health from being unable to work at all to being able to work but with restrictions. These restrictions normally come from the employee’s doctor and include things like limiting the number of hours in a day an employee can work, the amount of weight an employee can handle, or the type of work that an employee can do.
If the employee does limited work for their employer, then the employee should be getting paid by the employer for the work that the employee does. What happens when those wages aren’t enough to live on? Fortunately, worker’s compensation allows an employee to get paid for wages they miss out on.
The easiest way to describe how much temporary partial disability an employee receives is to use an example. Let’s say our employee who broke his ankle received $1,000 a week in Total Temporary Disability payments and now he is ready to go back to work at half-time at his same wages. An employee’s temporary disability payments get offset by how much he is working. In this case, our employee would now be entitled to $500 a week in Temporary Partial Disability payments because he is working half-time. Had he only been able to work 25% of the time, he’d be entitled to 75% of his disability payments or $750.
Temporary partial disability payments help make sure that an injured employee can ease back into work safely and helps offset the wages an employee loses while they are only working part time. Once the work restrictions are gone and an employee reaches a healing plateau (where the employee won’t improve in their health) and is working full time the temporary partial disability will stop.
If you have been injured on the job or any have worker’s compensation questions please contact me for a free, no cost, no obligation consultation. We take these cases on a contingency fee basis so there is never a fee for our services unless and until there is a recovery. In the Madison area call (608) 824-8540, in the Baraboo area (608) 356-3961, statewide call (866) 455-2993, email at mark@kh-law.net or check out our website at https://khtlawyers.com for more information. At Krueger Hernandez & Thompson SC, we listen, we care, we get results!
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