Your deadlines

Missing a deadline is the one failure nothing downstream repairs — not a better doctor, not a better argument, not a better lawyer. And the two most consequential deadlines in California workers’ compensation are also the two most commonly miscounted.

The five years to reopen runs from the date of injury, not from your award. People settle in year four, get worse in year six, and find the door closed while they still believed they were inside the case. Labor Code § 5410.

In a cumulative traumaCT — Cumulative trauma Injury from repeated exposure over time. The largest injury category in California and the least claimed. or exposure case, your date of injury is not the day it started hurting. It is the date disability and knowledge of its industrial cause come together — often the day a doctor first connected the condition to your work, which can be years after the symptoms began. That one date moves every other deadline on your case, usually in your favour.

Cumulative trauma and § 5412 →

From your date of injury alone:

• The 30-day notice deadline — and the § 5403 rule that usually saves people who miss it
• Your employer’s obligation to give you a claim form within one working day of learning of the injury
• The 90-day presumption of compensability — 75 days for the public-safety occupational illnesses in §§ 3212–3212.85 and 3212.9–3213.2 (not the COVID-19 presumptions at §§ 3212.86–3212.88, which had their own 30- and 45-day windows and were repealed on January 1, 2024)
• The one-year statute of limitations to file
• The 12-month window for a serious-and-willful misconduct petition
• The one-year deadline for a § 132a discrimination claim
• The 104-week 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. cap and the 240-week exception for nine listed conditions
• The five-year reopening window
• The outside limit on a dependent’s death claim

Add the dates you have, and it also gives you: reconsideration at 20 days, an 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). request at 30 days from a utilization reviewUR Utilization Review. The process that approves, modifies, or denies each treatment request. A modification is a denial of what it left out. denial (10 if the dispute is only over drugs on the MTUSMTUS Medical Treatment Utilization Schedule. California’s treatment guidelines. Four of them — shoulder, elbow, hand/wrist/forearm and traumatic brain injury — were replaced January 2, 2026. Drug List), the IMR appeal window and its narrow grounds, the utilization review response deadlines that make a late denial invalid, voucher expiry under the later of two rules, and the separate $5,000 return-to-work supplement at one year from voucher issuance.

Every deadline in one table →

Where the one-year statute appears to have run, the tool says so — and then immediately lists the four reasons it may not have. Benefits furnished restart the clock. Section 5412 may move your date of injury. A failure to give you a claim form can toll it. Estoppel applies where someone misled you about your rights.

Do not conclude your case is finished from a line on a calculator, including ours. The people most likely to use a deadline tool are the people most likely to have been told by an adjusterClaims administrator / adjuster The person handling your claim for the insurer or self-insured employer. that they are out of time, and that assertion is wrong often enough to be worth one phone call.

I think I missed a deadline →

The law deems a petition for reconsiderationPetition for Reconsideration Appeal from a final order. 20 days. A non-final order takes a Petition for Removal instead. denied unless the Appeals Board acts within 60 days. Those 60 days run from the date a trial judge transmits the case to the Board — the trigger AB 171 introduced on July 2, 2024 (Stats. 2024, ch. 52). That version was written to expire on July 1, 2026 and hand the clock back to the date of filing. SB 171 (Stats. 2026, ch. 83), chaptered July 13, 2026, deleted the sunset and repealed the filing-trigger version, so transmittal is now permanent.

This site said the trigger had reverted to filing until August 23, and we have logged the correction. Verified against the chaptered text of SB 171 on August 23, 2026. Corrections →

What changed in California workers’ comp in 2026 →

Every deadline here carries the Labor Code section that creates it, and the arithmetic is done in a way that cannot drift by a day across time zones. A deadline calculator that is one day wrong is worse than none at all.

If you find an error, tell us and we will correct it in public. Corrections →

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