What is your workers' comp claim actually worth?

How this estimator works

The Anvil ledger applies your inputs to your jurisdiction's statutory PPD formula. The dominant approach in the United States — used in roughly 38 of 51 jurisdictions — is the scheduled-loss model: the legislature publishes a table that assigns each major body part a fixed number of weeks of indemnity, and your settlement equals that week count multiplied by your weekly compensation rate, multiplied by the impairment percentage assigned at Maximum Medical Improvement.

For example, in New York, total loss of an arm is scheduled at 312 weeks. A claimant with a 25% impairment rating and an Average Weekly Wage of $1,500 would compute: 312 weeks × $1,000 (the cap-applied comp rate) × 25% = $78,000. The same fact pattern in Georgia, where an arm is scheduled at 225 weeks and the maximum comp rate is much lower, yields a substantially smaller statutory value — a structural mismatch that drives much of the geographic disparity in injury law.

A second group of states — including California, Texas, Florida, Tennessee, Kentucky, Nevada, Alaska, and others — abandoned scheduled weeks in favor of whole-person impairment models. These jurisdictions ask the rating physician to use the AMA Guides to the Evaluation of Permanent Impairment (typically the 5th or 6th Edition) to produce a single whole-body impairment percentage, then multiply by a statutory week count, a tiered dollar value, or a percentage of state-average wage. Texas, for instance, pays exactly three weeks of Impairment Income Benefits at 70% of AWW for every 1% rating — a clean linear formula with no body-part schedule at all.

A small handful of jurisdictions — Washington, North Dakota, Minnesota — use entirely different mechanisms: category ratings, tiered lump-sum tables tied to whole-body impairment ranges, or "permanent partial industrial impairment" formulas that escalate at higher disability levels. Anvil flags these cases explicitly and uses a state-specific fallback.

Why this matters: the geography of injury

The same broken arm is worth radically different amounts depending solely on the state line. Workers' compensation is one of the few areas of American law where the dollar value of a human injury is set explicitly by the legislature, in a printed table, and the inputs are fully knowable in advance. Yet most injured workers never see that table. They receive a carrier offer, accept it under financial duress, and never learn that the statutory value of the same injury under the same facts was two, three, or ten times higher.

The opacity is intentional. A single keyword in Google's ad auction — "workers compensation lawyer" — costs plaintiff firms an average of $60 to $120 per click, according to multiple 2026 marketing-industry analyses. Insurance carriers and self-insured employers spend even more aggressively on defense-side keywords. The result is a search environment dense with directories and form-fill funnels but very few clean public-service tools that simply show you the schedule.

Anvil exists to close that gap. The state PPD schedules embedded in this tool are pulled from publicly available statutes — New York Workers' Compensation Law §15, Florida Stat. Ch. 440, Cal. Lab. Code §§4658–4662, Pa. 77 P.S. §513, and the equivalent provisions across the remaining 47 jurisdictions. Where a state has moved to AMA-based whole-person ratings, we use the statutory week count and impairment formula directly from that state's labor code.

The 50-state landscape: scheduled vs. impairment-income vs. category

Knowing which model your state uses is the first move in any settlement calculation. We classify each jurisdiction into one of four families:

• Scheduled-loss states (≈38 jurisdictions): The statute lists each body part with a week count. Anvil's wizard lets you select the part directly and plug in the impairment percentage.
• AMA whole-person states (CA, KY, ME, MT, NV, TN, VT, WV, WY, AK, and others): A treating physician produces a whole-person percentage using a specific edition of the AMA Guides. Anvil uses that figure × statutory weeks × comp rate.
• Impairment Income Benefit states (TX, FL): Flat formulas. Texas pays 3 weeks × 1% × 70% AWW; Florida pays a tiered week count per rating point at 75% of TTD rate.
• Category-rating states (WA, ND, MN): The state assigns the worker to a rating tier, each tier carrying a statutory dollar amount.

Regardless of the family, four levers move the number more than anything else: the statutory schedule for the affected body part, the comp-rate cap in effect on the date of injury, the impairment rating assigned by the rating physician, and whether the claim was filed within the statute of limitations (typically one to three years). Get any of those wrong and the statutory value collapses.

Common mistakes that cost claimants money

1. Accepting the IME's rating without a second opinion. Carrier-chosen Independent Medical Examiners produce ratings that are, on average, lower than those of treating physicians. Most states allow the claimant a competing rating; some require it before mediation.
2. Settling before reaching MMI. Maximum Medical Improvement is the legal predicate for a PPD rating. Settling earlier exchanges an unknown rating for a guess — almost always to the carrier's advantage.
3. Confusing wage replacement (TTD) with PPD. Temporary Total Disability benefits paid during recovery do not reduce the scheduled PPD value in most states. Carriers sometimes argue they should.
4. Ignoring the comp-rate cap on the date of injury. The comp rate is fixed by your injury date, not by today's date. Older injuries are sometimes calculated at higher historical caps than current ones — and sometimes at lower ones.
5. Overlooking concurrent employment. Most states allow Average Weekly Wage to be computed across all jobs you held at the time of injury, not just the one where the injury happened.
6. Letting the statute of limitations run. In most jurisdictions you have between 30 and 90 days to notify the employer and between 1 and 3 years to file. A late filing is often a total bar.

Frequently asked questions