Florida—Tolling the Statute of Limitations
On March 23, 2026, the Florida Court of Appeal, First District, in Estes v. Palm Beach County School District, considered whether an employer’s provision of workers compensation (WC) benefits to an injured employee suspends the running of the two-year statute of limitations for filing a petition for benefits under Florida statute 440.19—which states that an employer’s payment of benefits or the provision of medical care tolls the two-year statute of limitation period for one year following the last payment or treatment.
After paying WC benefits for 16 months to an injured employee who sustained a workplace injury in 2021, an employer issued a notice of denial alleging that the accident was not the major contributing cause of the need for treatment or benefits. In 2024, 17 months after receiving the last benefit payment, the employee filed a petition for benefits that a judge of compensation claims (JCC) denied as untimely. In its decision, the JCC relied on prior court decisions that interpreted the statute as granting a one-year grace period to file the claim calculated from the date the last payment of benefits was received.
On appeal, the First District Court of Appeal explained that under Florida statute 440.19, the two-year statute of limitation begins to run after the employee knows of or should have known of the workplace injury. However, the court added, if an employer provides benefits after the injury, the two-year limitation period is tolled (suspended or stopped temporarily) and restarts one year after the provision of the last benefit. Applying the statute, the court found that the employee received benefits for 16 months after the workplace injury and, as a result, the two-year statute of limitation period stopped and did not restart again until a year after the last benefit payment was made. Therefore, because the employee filed the petition for benefits approximately six months after the one-year tolling period expired and the two-year statute of limitation began running again, the court held that the petition was not time-barred.
This decision may be appealed. NCCI will monitor for any future developments.
Pennsylvania—Applicability of Notice of Injury Requirement
On March 26, 2026, the Supreme Court of Pennsylvania, in Erie Insurance Property & Casualty Co. v. Heater, considered whether an injured claimant who is the sole employee of his own general contracting business must notify his workers compensation (WC) insurer within 120 days of a work‑related injury.
In this case, the WC insurer denied a claim alleging, in part, that the sole proprietor did not provide the required notice pursuant to section 311 (77 P.S. § 631) of the Workers’ Compensation Act (the Act)—which provides that no compensation shall be allowed unless notice is provided to the employer within 120 days of the occurrence of the injury.
In its analysis, the court focused on the meaning of the term “employer,” which is defined in two separate statutory sections of the Act: section 103 (77 P.S. § 21), which defines “employer” when used thorough the Act, to include natural persons, partnerships, and corporations, but does not include insurers and section 401 (77 P.S. § 701), which defines “employer” to include an insurer, when used in this article—referring to Article IV of the Act, which deals with WC procedures.
The court reasoned that the phrase “when used in this article” in section 401 limits the applicability of the insurer-inclusive definition of employer to the statutes contained in Article IV. Thus, the court added, because the statutory section that the insurer relied on for required notice, section 311, is not within Article IV, the insurer‑inclusive definition did not apply, and the definition set forth in Section 103 is what governs. As a result, the court concluded that the sole proprietor was not required to notify the insurer of the work-related injury within 120 days in order to be eligible for compensation.
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