“My employer is self-insured.”

What self-insurance means

A large employer — a grocery chain, a hospital system, a city, a county, a school district, a transit agency — can be certified to pay its own workers’ compensation claims rather than buying a policy. The claims are usually handled by a third-party administrator on the employer’s behalf.

Every benefit and every deadline in the Labor Code applies identically. Temporary disabilityTD / TTD / TPD Temporary Disability, Total or Partial. Wage replacement while recovering. Two-thirds of average weekly earnings; 2026 maximum $1,764.11/week., permanent disabilityPD Permanent Disability. Compensation for lasting impairment. A different and much lower weekly rate — 2026 maximum $290/week., medical treatment, utilization reviewUR Utilization Review. The process that approves, modifies, or denies each treatment request. A modification is a denial of what it left out., IMRIMR Independent Medical Review. The appeal from a UR denial. 30 days (10 if the dispute is only over drugs on the MTUS Drug List)., the job displacement voucher, penalties — all the same.

What actually changes

The money is your employer’s. Every dollar paid on your claim comes out of the same budget that pays your wages, and the person deciding is closer to your employer than an outside carrier would be.

The administrator may not be the employer. Notices arrive from a company you have never heard of. That is normal, and correspondence should go to the administrator identified on the notices — but reporting to your employer still matters for notice purposes.

And retaliation risk is more immediate. Where the entity paying your claim is also the entity that supervises you, the § 132a and FEHA questions are worth watching. Both routes.

The provision that helps you

Labor Code § 5814.5: where payment of compensation has been unreasonably delayed or refused subsequent to the issuance of an award, by an employer that has secured the payment of compensation, the Appeals Board shall award reasonable attorney’s fees incurred in enforcing the payment of compensation awarded.

Both limbs matter. It is an award-enforcement remedy, and it does not reach the illegally uninsured employer — who by definition never secured payment.

Those fees are paid by the employer — not out of your recovery.

That is on top of the ordinary § 5814 penalty of up to 25% or up to $10,000, whichever is less, and the automatic 10% for any late indemnity payment. How penalties work.

If your employer is a public agency

A retirement system disability process may run alongside the comp claim, on a different standard, decided by different people — and the reports written for one get read by the other.

Public safety classifications listed in § 4850 receive up to a year of full salary instead of temporary disability, and school employees have 60 days of industrial accident leaveIndustrial accident leave At least 60 days at full salary for school employees. coordinated to full salary.

How the public employee systems interact.School employees.