There is a lump-sum payment New York's comp system owes many workers who are injured on the job that can be owed even after they return to work. It is called a schedule loss of use award. Most workers have never heard of it, and nobody at the job site is going to mention it.
Here's what surprises people. You do not have to be out of work to collect it. You do not have to sue your employer. You do not have to leave the trade. The award exists because the injury permanently cost you a percentage of that arm, hand, or leg. That is true whether or not you can still swing a hammer.
If your doctor has started using words like "permanent" or "maximum medical improvement," that decision puts money on the table.
What a Schedule Loss of Use Award Is
A schedule loss of use award, or SLU, is a cash award under Workers' Compensation Law § 15(3). It compensates permanent loss of function in an extremity or certain other body parts. The statute assigns each body part a fixed number of weeks of benefits. An arm is worth up to 312 weeks. A leg is worth up to 288 weeks. A hand is 244 weeks, a foot 205, an eye 160, a thumb 75, an index finger 46.
The award works as a percentage. Once your treating doctor finds maximum medical improvement, meaning the injury has healed as much as it will, the doctor assigns a percentage loss of use. A 30 percent loss of use of the arm is 30 percent of 312 weeks, or 93.6 weeks of benefits.
Each week pays two-thirds of your average weekly wage. That figure is capped at the state maximum benefit rate, which adjusts every July 1. For a high-wage construction worker, a shoulder that never fully recovered can mean a six-figure award. Weeks already paid while you were out of work are deducted, and the balance is owed to you.
You Can Be Back at Full Duty and Still Be Owed This Money
Toughness costs real money here. Plenty of workers push through, rejoin the crew, and assume the case ended when the checks stopped - but the law says otherwise. An SLU award pays for the permanent loss of function itself, not lost time. A carpenter at full duty with a shoulder that lost 25 percent of its range is still owed the award for that 25 percent.
Accepting an SLU award does not close your medical. Your right to future treatment for the injury stays open. Ending it would take a separate settlement, which is a different decision with its own math.
Collecting the award also does not endanger your job the way many workers fear. WCL § 120 prohibits an employer from firing or discriminating against you for pursuing a comp claim. Comp is no-fault insurance your labor already paid for, not a lawsuit against your boss.
The Percentage Fight Is Where the Money Is Won or Lost
Two numbers drive the award: your average weekly wage and your percentage loss of use. Both get contested.
Your treating doctor evaluates you under the Workers' Compensation Board's permanency guidelines and assigns a percentage. The carrier then typically sends you to its own examiner, who often finds a lower one. A 15-point gap on an arm is worth almost 47 weeks of benefits. At the maximum rate, that gap alone can exceed $50,000. Law judges resolve these disputes. Outcomes turn on range-of-motion measurements, surgical history, and how carefully the medical record was built from day one. That is one more reason the injury had to be reported and treated on the record, not just iced in the truck. The reporting steps that protect the claim are laid out in this guide to what to do after a job-site injury.
The wage number matters just as much. For union trades, average weekly wage should reflect actual earnings, including overtime, in the 52 weeks before the injury. A carrier working from an incomplete wage record lowballs every week of the award.
One distinction to know: backs, necks, and heads are not schedule injuries. Those permanent injuries run through classification and ongoing weekly benefits instead. Some workers have both, a scheduled shoulder and a non-scheduled back. Pursuing them together takes strategy that is not obvious.
The Union Math: What the Award Does Not Replace
A union member's paycheck was never the whole package. Pension credits, annuity contributions, and family medical all ride on hours worked. An SLU award is calculated from wages, and does not restore lost pension accrual. It does not buy back credits for a member a few years short of a full pension when the trade becomes physically impossible.
That gap is why the third-party question matters so much on construction injuries. Comp is the exclusive remedy against your employer under WCL § 11. But a case against a site owner or general contractor under Labor Law § 240(1) or § 241(6) sits outside the comp system entirely. That case can pursue the full lifetime loss: pension, annuity, pain and suffering, the whole picture. It does not touch the employer relationship the way many workers fear. Whether one exists depends on the facts of the site and the fall or failure that caused the injury. That is exactly what an experienced construction accident review looks at. More on how that works alongside comp is here.
Deadlines and Practical Steps
The clocks are unforgiving. Notice to the employer is due within 30 days of the injury under WCL § 18. The comp claim itself must generally be filed within two years under WCL § 28. A third-party construction case carries a three-year statute of limitations. Shorter notice windows apply if a public entity owns the site. An unreported injury loses its proof and its deadlines at the same time.
Write down the date, the task, and who was there. Get the injury into a medical record with an honest account of how it happened at work. Keep every wage stub from the year before the injury. None of that commits you to anything, and neither does a conversation with a lawyer. What it does do is stop a stubborn shoulder from quietly costing your family an award the law already priced.
Do not treat the carrier's first percentage as the final word. It is an opening position. The distance between positions is measured in tens of thousands of dollars.
How Schwartzapfel Holbrook Builds Schedule Loss of Use Cases
Schwartzapfel Holbrook evaluates every permanency case against the full math: the correct average weekly wage including overtime, the treating physician's independent findings under the Board's guidelines, the carrier examiner's report, and any credits the carrier claims for weeks already paid. Where the injury happened on a construction site, we evaluate the third-party case alongside the comp claim. The SLU award alone rarely accounts for a lost career, lost pension credits, or lost annuity contributions.
The firm is selective about the cases it takes across New York City and Long Island, including Nassau and Suffolk Counties. Every case we accept is prepared as though the percentage dispute will be tried before a law judge and the third-party case will go to a jury. Carriers value prepared cases differently. That difference shows up in the number.
