Virginia has several different types of compensation, or money, that you may receive after you have been injured at work and have filed a worker’s compensation claim. The names of several of them sound similar, and it can be difficult to understand what each one means. One type is Temporary Total Disability Benefits, for people who have been injured and cannot work while they are healing.
Temporary Total Disability (TTD) Benefits are paid if you are unable to work at all while you are healing from an injury. If you can work some while you are healing, you will receive
. You will receive 2/3 of the gross average weekly pay, up to a maximum amount. The law looks at how much money you earn on average before taxes and benefits, and then gives you 2/3 of that amount for a certain amount of days.
Calculating the days can be complicated. You must be unable to work for at least seven (7) days to receive the TTD benefits, but if you are disabled for at least three weeks (21 days), you will get the money for the first week. So if you are completely unable to work for four (4) days, you will not receive any TTD benefits because you did not hit the seven-day minimum to receive benefits. If you are unable to work for sixteen (16) days, you will receive benefits for days eight (8) through sixteen (16), because you hit the seven-day minimum but did not hit the twenty-one day period that lets you get the first week’s money. If you are unable to work for twenty-five (25) days, you will receive benefits for all 25 days because hit the seven-day minimum to start getting money but then you also reached the twenty-one day period that let’s you get the first week’s money.
If you have recovered enough to go to work but cannot do your regular job yet, your doctor may put you on light duty, or say that you cannot do certain types of work. If you broke a bone, for example, you may have recovered enough to work, but your doctor may say you cannot lift over a certain weight for another while longer. If your job does not have any work that meets the light duty requirements then you can keep getting temporary total disability benefits while you look for a different job that you can do while you finish healing. An example of your job not having any work you could do would be if you worked in a job where everyone regularly had to lift 50 pounds, but you were only allowed to lift 10 pounds right now while you were healing. If your job did not have anything you could do where you only had to lift 10 pounds, you would be expected to try to find another job you could work while you couldn’t lift 50 pounds.
TTD benefits can last only 500 weeks maximum, or about 9 and a half years.