"I got hurt working from home."

The test hasn't changed; the facts have

Labor Code § 3600(a) requires that the injury arise out of and occur in the course of employment. There is no provision excluding a home office, and no California authority holding that remote work is categorically outside coverage.

What matters is what you were doing. Answering work email at your desk is employment. Walking to the kitchen for coffee during the workday is generally covered under the personal comfort doctrine, which California recognizes. Moving a laundry basket is not.

The closer the activity is to the employer's benefit, the stronger the claim — and unlike a factory floor, at home that connection has to be established rather than assumed.

The claims that come up most

Repetitive strain. By a wide margin. Kitchen tables, couches, and dining chairs are not workstations, and two or three years of them produces neck, shoulder, wrist and low back claims. These are cumulative trauma claims, with their own date-of-injury rule under § 5412, and they are absolutely compensable. How cumulative trauma works. · Carpal tunnel.

Falls during the workday — tripping over a cord, stairs while carrying a laptop to a meeting.

Psychiatric injury. Isolation, always-on availability, and the collapse of any boundary between work and home. Compensable under § 3208.3, with a real threshold. What that requires.

What makes these cases work

Anything that establishes you were working at that moment. Calendar entries, message timestamps, VPN and login logs, call records, the document you had open. This is the substitute for a witness, and remote workers usually have far more of it than they realize.

Any employer acknowledgment of the arrangement. A remote work policy, a stipend for equipment, an approved home office, an ergonomic assessment. If your employer set up or paid for any part of your home workspace, say so — it goes directly to whether the home was a workplace.

Report it the same way you would report an on-site injury, in writing, the same day. The absence of a supervisor down the hall is exactly why the written report matters more here.

What defeats them

A gap before reporting. In a home injury with no witnesses, delay is the most common reason for denial.

A personal activity in the middle of it. If you were injured while doing something unrelated to work, that portion of the day is not employment — and the carrier will look for it.

No contemporaneous record. Which is why the logs above matter.