What is a Workers’ Compensation Injury?

Jul 17, 2025 | WC & Other Laws

What is a Workers’ Compensation Injury? – For an injury to be compensable, it needs to have one of two characteristics.

What characteristics are needed for it to be a Workers’ Compensation Injury?

1. The injury requires medical care

Sometimes people get injured on the job, and they call us before going to the doctor. In those cases, they don’t have an injury that we can do something about yet, because the injury has to require medical care. You need to report the injury and get medical care.

2. The injury is causing a disability

If your ability to do your regular job has been impaired and you’re no longer able to do 100% of it, that’s considered a disability.

Types of injury

There are 2 types of injuries in Workers’ Compensation

1. Accident, which is an injury that can be traced to a particular time, place, or cause, for example, you were lifting a box and you felt a pop in your back and felt immediate pain.

2. Occupational disease, which is when you were exposed at something over time or you did something over time which eventually caused problems. A classic example is if you’ve been doing heavy lifting your whole life, over 10 or 20 years of doing that job you will have a lot of degenerative joint disease and a lot of pain in your back.

Another example it’s what’s called cumulative trauma disorder. For example, if you’re doing a lot of typing, a lot of repetitious work, heavy vibration work, etc., and over time you start to develop problems with the nerves in your hands and arms, like carpal tunnel, etc.

Both types of injuries are covered under Workers’ Compensation.