Florida court rewrites workers' comp deadline rules, overturns 26 years of precedent

March 25, 2026

Critics warn the new system could effectively eliminate claim filing deadlines

Florida's appeals court has rewritten how workers' comp carriers must calculate claim deadlines, overturning 26 years of settled precedent.

In an en banc decision handed down on March 23, 2026, the First District Court of Appeal ruled that the word "toll" in section 440.19(2) of the Florida Statutes means to suspend or stop temporarily the two-year statute of limitations clock – not to extend it by creating a separate one-year filing window, as the same court had held since 1999.

The dispute arose from a workplace injury. Nancy Estes, a teacher employed by the Palm Beach County School District, tripped and fell on the job on September 30, 2021. The employer and its carrier, Davies Claims North America, accepted the injury as compensable and paid medical and indemnity benefits for approximately sixteen months, from October 2021 through January 26, 2023. Shortly after benefits stopped, the carrier filed a Notice of Denial on February 8, 2023, asserting that the accident was no longer the major contributing cause of Estes's need for further treatment.

Estes did not file a petition for benefits until June 2024, roughly seventeen months after receiving her last payment. She sought a one-time change in orthopedists and other benefits related to her original injuries. The carrier argued the claim was time-barred. Under the interpretation that had governed Florida since 1999, the math was straightforward: the accident occurred in September 2021, the last benefit was furnished in January 2023, and the one-year tolling window expired in January 2024. Estes's June 2024 filing came five months after that deadline. The Judge of Compensation Claims agreed and dismissed the entire petition with prejudice.

The statute at the center of the case has two relevant parts. Section 440.19(1) sets the baseline: a petition for benefits is barred unless filed within two years of the date the employee knew or should have known the injury arose from work. Section 440.19(2) provides that payment of any indemnity benefit or the furnishing of remedial treatment shall toll the limitations period set forth above for one year from the date of such payment. The provision also specifies that this tolling period does not apply to the issues of compensability, maximum medical improvement, or permanent impairment.

For more than two decades, the court had treated the tolling provision as functionally creating a one-year extension from the date of the last benefit payment. Under that approach, the two-year clock was never paused. It ran continuously from the date of the accident, and the one-year tolling period simply gave claimants an additional window that could run past the two-year mark if benefits were provided late enough. The en banc majority concluded that this interpretation was incorrect.

Chief Judge Osterhaus, writing for the majority, looked to the established legal meaning of the word. Legal dictionaries define "toll," when used in the context of a statutory limitations period, as meaning to suspend or stop temporarily the running of that period. The court also cited the US Supreme Court's 2018 decision in Artis v. D.C., which described tolling as a suspension of a limitation period that, once lifted, allows the clock to resume from where it left off.

The court found further support within the statute itself. Section 440.19(5) addresses tolling for minors and mentally incompetent persons, providing that the limitations period is tolled while such a person has no guardian. Under that subsection, the two-year clock is plainly suspended – it stops and resumes only after the condition ends. The majority reasoned that the same word cannot carry a different meaning in subsection (2).