If you get injured on the job, you may wonder when you’re supposed to report that injury. Perhaps it’s serious enough that you need medical care, but it wasn’t a catastrophic incident where the workplace ground to a halt. Do you need to go to your boss immediately and tell them what occurred?
It’s generally best to report the injury as soon as you can. This is what many businesses will ask you to do, and it also helps support your case. For instance, if you go home and report it the next day, this opens the door for suspicion that you actually got injured at home. If you report it the same day, then it’s more clear that it happened at work.
Is there a statute of limitations?
From a legal standpoint, you do need to make your report and file for workers’ compensation within the next two years. You have 24 months after the day that you “knew or should have known” about the injury.
This may sound like a strange stipulation. Of course, you know that you got injured on the job. But there are cases in which people don’t really realize that they got hurt, or they don’t realize how bad it is. Perhaps you thought you were fine on the day of the accident, but you woke up with serious symptoms the next day because you suffered a traumatic brain injury. There is always a point at which the injury becomes clear to you, the worker, and that’s when your statute of limitations begins.
If you have suffered a serious injury, it could cause you to lose wages and see high medical bills at the same time, so you need to know about your legal options.