“Do I have to tell a new employer?”

What the law limits

California’s Fair Employment and Housing Act restricts pre-offer medical and disability inquiries. A prospective employer generally may not ask about your medical history or your disability status before making a conditional offer of employment.

After a conditional offer, medical inquiries and examinations are permitted in narrower circumstances — generally where they are job-related, consistent with business necessity, and applied uniformly to everyone in the same job category.

And an employer that withdraws an offer because of a disability, without engaging in the interactive process and considering reasonable accommodation, may be violating FEHA — which, unlike § 132a, has no $10,000 cap and provides emotional distress damages, punitive damages, and attorney’s fees. More.

Where honesty matters

If you are asked a direct question on a post-offer medical questionnaire, answer it truthfully.

A false statement on a medical history form can create real problems later — including in a future workers’ compensation claim, where credibility decides every disputed medical question. It is not worth it.

And note this cuts in your favor more often than people expect. A documented pre-existing condition is not a defense to a new industrial injury. ApportionmentApportionment Dividing permanent disability between industrial and non-industrial causes. It is to disability, not to findings on an image. is to disability, not to history — and a prior disability may open a SIBTFSIBTF Subsequent Injuries Benefits Trust Fund. Pays where a pre-existing disability plus an industrial injury produce a substantially greater disability. Rewritten by SB 171 in July 2026. claim, which is money in addition to what the employer owes. More.

Two practical points

Your current claim does not follow you to a new job. It stays with the employer and carrier where the injury occurred. Starting a new job does not end it.

But a new injury at the new job is a new claim, with its own date of injuryDate of injury For a cumulative or occupational disease claim, the law sets it as when you first suffered disability and knew or should have known it was work-related — not when the wear began. Almost every deadline runs off this. — and if the same body part is involved, expect an apportionment fight between the two. That is normal, it is resolvable, and it is a reason to have both claims looked at together rather than separately.

And if the new work aggravates the old injury, that may be a new cumulative traumaCT — Cumulative trauma Injury from repeated exposure over time. The largest injury category in California and the least claimed. claim in its own right. How.

We are workers’ compensation attorneys. Questions about what a specific employer may lawfully ask, and about disclosure in a hiring process, are employment law questions. Where a job offer has been withdrawn or an accommodation refused, that is worth a separate look.