Austin Construction Accident Lawyer

Your foreman just told you to go to the company clinic

Go, if you are hurt. Get looked at. Then read this before you sign anything they put in front of you.

The clinic the company sends you to is chosen by the company. The incident report the superintendent is typing up is written by the company. The adjuster who calls tomorrow works for a carrier the company pays. Every part of the machinery moving around you right now belongs to somebody whose interest is that this stay small and stay internal.

Here is the part almost nobody explains on day one. On an Austin job site there are usually six to ten separate businesses working under one fence: the owner who is paying for the building, the general contractor running the schedule, the subs doing concrete and framing and electrical and mechanical, the staffing agency that put half the crew on the site, the outfit that rented the lift, and the company that manufactured the thing that failed. You work for exactly one of them. The one you work for is frequently the one you have the least ability to sue. Everybody else is fair game if their negligence put you on the ground.

That gap is the whole subject of this page.

Everyone on the job site who might owe you something

Start by drawing the site as a chart of businesses rather than as a place. A twelve-storey office core going up off West 6th, a data-centre shell out on SH 130, a five-over-one on East Riverside, a road widening on US 183 — the geometry differs and the corporate map is the same shape every time.

The owner. The entity that holds title to the land or the building. On a private job this is a developer, a REIT, a manufacturer expanding a plant. On public work it is a city, a county, a school district, the State. The owner hires the general contractor and, on most jobs, keeps a project manager on site.

The general contractor, or the construction manager. Runs the schedule, runs the site, holds the safety plan, holds the subcontracts. On a large Austin job this is a national builder with a regional office here.

The subcontractors. Concrete, steel, framing, roofing, glazing, electrical, mechanical, plumbing, drywall, paint, flatwork. Each is a separate company with separate insurance. On a mid-rise there are commonly fifteen to thirty of them, and four or five working the same floor on the same afternoon.

Second-tier subs. The sub who hired another sub. This layer is where the paperwork usually goes thin and where the actual crew that caused the injury frequently sits.

The staffing agency or labour broker. Supplied the body. Signs the cheque. Is often the only entity with a written employment relationship to you.

The equipment lessor. Rented the scissor lift, the boom lift, the excavator, the crane, the shoring. Owns it, maintains it, is contractually responsible for a machine arriving in working order.

The crane or specialty operator's employer. Frequently a separate company from the GC and from the sub, with its own operator, its own rigger, its own insurance tower.

The manufacturer. Built the harness, the anchor, the ladder, the saw, the lift, the shoring jack, the ladder-jack bracket that came apart.

Engineers, architects and safety consultants. Rarer as defendants and not never. A shoring design, a scaffold engineering drawing, a third-party safety firm that signed off on a site inspection are all documents with a professional's name on them.

Nine boxes. Your claim asks a specific question of each one: did this entity owe me a duty, did it breach the duty, did the breach put me here. The answer is different for every box, and most of the work in a construction case is proving the answer for the two or three boxes where it is yes.

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The company you work for is usually not the company you sue

The first question in every construction case is whether your direct employer carries workers' compensation insurance. Texas is the one state that lets a private employer decline it. If your employer subscribes, workers' compensation is generally your exclusive remedy against that employer, and the claim you build goes against everybody else on the site. If your employer does not subscribe, that employer can be sued directly for ordinary negligence, and under Texas Labor Code § 406.033 it loses the defences of contributory negligence, assumption of the risk, and negligence of a fellow employee.

That question has its own page, because the answer changes the entire architecture of the case and drags in a body of employment law this page does not cover. What comp actually pays, how impairment ratings work, what happens if you are fired after reporting, and whether the injury-benefit plan you signed at orientation binds you to arbitration all live at our Austin workplace injury page. Read that one alongside this one.

What matters here is the consequence. Texas Labor Code Chapter 417 preserves your right to sue a negligent third party even while you are drawing comp benefits from your employer's carrier. The carrier gets a subrogation interest in what you recover, reduced by any percentage of responsibility the jury assigns to the employer, and there is a statutory fee owed to your lawyer for recovering the carrier's money when the carrier is not actively represented. Translated: the comp claim and the third-party claim run in parallel, they are not alternatives, and the third-party claim is where the real recovery usually is.

So the working question stops being can I sue my boss and becomes who else was on this site, and what did they do.

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When the property owner is on the hook, and when Chapter 95 protects them

Texas gives property owners a statutory shield against claims by contractors working on their property. It is Chapter 95 of the Civil Practice and Remedies Code, and it is the first thing an owner's defence lawyer raises.

Section 95.002 sets the scope. The chapter applies only to a claim against a property owner, contractor or subcontractor for injury to a contractor, subcontractor, or an employee of one, that arises from the condition or use of an improvement to real property where the contractor or subcontractor constructs, repairs, renovates, or modifies the improvement. Both halves have to be true. A claim outside that scope is an ordinary premises or negligence claim and Chapter 95 never enters it.

Section 95.003 then says the owner is not liable for that injury — including injury arising from the failure to provide a safe workplace — unless both of the following are established:

1. the owner exercised or retained some control over the manner in which the work was performed, other than the right to order the work to start or stop or to inspect progress or receive reports; and
2. the owner had actual knowledge of the danger or condition that caused the injury and failed to adequately warn.

Conjunctive. Not a balancing test. An owner who controlled the means and methods but genuinely did not know about the hazard walks. An owner who knew the third-floor guardrail had been pulled two days earlier but exercised no control over how the framing crew worked also walks. Proving one prong and losing the other is the most common way a construction claim against an owner dies, and it dies on summary judgment before a jury ever sees it.

The Texas Supreme Court settled the outer boundary in Abutahoun v. Dow Chemical Co., 463 S.W.3d 42 (Tex. 2015), holding that Chapter 95 applies to independent-contractor claims for damage caused by the property owner's own negligence when § 95.002(2) is satisfied. Before that decision, plaintiffs argued Chapter 95 covered only claims about a dangerous premises condition and left the owner's own negligent conduct outside it. That argument is gone.

What this means practically is that the owner case is built out of documents, not out of testimony about how things felt on site. It is built out of the owner-contractor agreement and its retained-rights clauses, the owner's project manager's daily reports and photographs, the owner's own safety requirements imposed on the trades, emails where the owner directed sequence or method, the site-visit logs showing what the owner's representative saw and when, and any prior complaint, punch item or near-miss that put the owner on actual notice of the specific hazard. We ask for all of that early, because it is the only path through § 95.003.

Chapter 95 also appears on our Austin premises liability page, where it is stated in two sentences as one of several owner defences. This is the page that litigates the control exception.

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Retained control: the question that decides the general contractor's liability

A general contractor is not automatically liable for what a sub's crew does. The default rule is the opposite: a company that hires an independent contractor is generally not responsible for the contractor's negligence. The exception is control, and it is the single most litigated issue in Texas construction law.

Redinger v. Living, Inc., 689 S.W.2d 415 (Tex. 1985) adopted Restatement (Second) of Torts § 414 into Texas law. One who entrusts work to an independent contractor but retains control of any part of the work is subject to liability for physical harm caused by a failure to exercise that retained control with reasonable care. In Redinger the general contractor retained the power to direct the order in which work was done and to forbid work being done in a dangerous manner. That was enough to create a duty.

Retained control gets proved two ways, and a real case uses both.

Contractual control. The subcontract, the general conditions, the site-specific safety plan, the prime contract flow-down provisions. Language reserving the right to direct sequence, to stop unsafe work, to require particular fall-protection methods, to run the site-wide safety programme, to control access and staging, or to mandate a specific means of performing a task is contractual retained control. A GC that drafted a fifty-page safety manual and required every sub to follow it has, on paper, asserted control over the manner of the work.

Actual control. What the superintendent actually did. Toolbox talks he ran. Directions he gave your foreman about how to set the scaffold. The decision that the crane pick would happen with the deck open. A refusal to shut down when the wind came up. The photographs on his phone. The daily reports in the GC's project-management system. Testimony from your co-workers about who told whom to do what.

Contract language and daily practice both matter, and they frequently point in opposite directions — a subcontract that disclaims all control, sitting next to a superintendent who ran the site minute to minute. That conflict is a jury question, and getting it in front of a jury requires the documents. Project-management platforms retain daily logs, RFIs, safety observations, photographs and toolbox-talk sign-ins, all timestamped. Those systems purge and roll over. Preservation letters go out to the GC and the owner in the first days of the case for exactly this reason.

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Staffing agencies, day labour and who your employer legally is

A large share of the Austin trades workforce is placed through staffing agencies and labour brokers. You interview at an office on North Lamar, you get sent to a site in Pflugerville, you take direction all day from a superintendent employed by somebody else, and the cheque comes from a third company. When you get hurt, three companies each explain that you are not their employee.

Texas law has an answer, and it is not the one most workers expect.

Wingfoot Enterprises v. Alvarado, 111 S.W.3d 134 (Tex. 2003) held that a worker hired by a temporary employment agency and assigned to a client is an employee of both the agency and the client for purposes of the Workers' Compensation Act. A worker can have more than one employer at the same moment. Port Elevator-Brownsville, L.L.C. v. Casados, 358 S.W.3d 238 (Tex. 2012) added that an employer may not split its workforce and choose to exclude certain workers — such as temporary workers — from coverage, absent a recognised exception.

That doctrine cuts both directions and you have to know which way it is cutting in your case.

• If the client company carries comp and you count as its employee, the exclusive-remedy bar may block a direct negligence suit against the client that a worker would otherwise have. Defence counsel raise this early, and the answer turns on the actual right of control over the details of the work, not on the label in the staffing contract.
• If the agency subscribes and the client does not, or if the client is a genuine third party rather than a co-employer on the facts, the negligence claim against the client survives.
• Either way, every other company on the site — the GC, the other subs, the equipment lessor, the manufacturer — remains a third party you can sue.

Day-labour arrangements make this harder and more important. A worker picked up at a corner, paid cash, with no I-9, no policy number and no written agreement, has no paper trail proving who directed him. The proof comes from elsewhere: the site sign-in sheet, badge or turnstile records, the daily manpower count in the GC's log, the superintendent's own photographs, texts on your phone, the names and numbers of the men who were on the crew with you. Get those names now. In two months half of them will be on a different job in a different city.

We take the staffing question apart before we file, because naming the wrong entity as a defendant and the right one as your employer is a mistake with no clean fix late in a case.

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The Focus Four: falls, struck-by, caught-in-between, electrocution

OSHA groups construction's deadliest hazards into four categories it calls the Focus Four, and it builds its 10- and 30-hour outreach training around them: falls, caught-in or -between, struck-by, and electrocution. Anyone who has taken an OSHA 10 in Texas has sat through those four modules. Their significance in a lawsuit is that OSHA has already written down, in advance and in public, what a reasonable contractor is supposed to do about each one.

Falls. The largest category, and the one Austin's mid-rise and residential boom produces most. Falls from leading edges, through unguarded floor and shaft openings, off roofs, off scaffold platforms, off ladders, off the top rail of a scissor lift. The Texas fatality data puts a floor under how ordinary these are: of the 77 Texas workers killed by falls, slips and trips in 2024, 61 died in a fall to a lower level, and 28 of those fell between 6 and 30 feet (Texas Department of Insurance, Division of Workers' Compensation, Texas Census of Fatal Occupational Injuries 2024). Thirty feet is a three-storey building. Six feet is the height of the man standing next to you.

Struck-by. Falling tools and material, a load swinging off a rig, a bundle of studs coming off a forklift, a pipe rolling off a stack, a nail gun, a saw kickback, a vehicle backing in the laydown yard. Texas recorded 91 fatal contact incidents in 2024, of which 51 were "struck by propelled, falling, or suspended object" and 36 specifically struck by a falling object (TDI DWC, 2024). Struck-by is also the category with the most non-fatal serious injury behind it, because a two-pound object at thirty feet does not always kill.

Caught-in or -between. Trench collapse, a body caught between a machine and a wall, an arm into an unguarded rotating part, a worker pinned by a load being set. Texas recorded 22 fatalities from being "struck, caught, or compressed by running powered equipment" and 6 from "collapse, engulfment" in 2024 (TDI DWC, 2024). The engulfment number is small and the injuries are catastrophic: cubic yards of soil weigh what a car weighs.

Electrocution. Contact with an overhead line while moving a ladder or a boom, an ungrounded tool, a temporary panel wired wrong, an arc flash while a panel was assumed dead. Texas recorded 24 fatalities from exposure to electricity in 2024, including 11 from indirect exposure (TDI DWC, 2024). Electrical injuries that do not kill produce burns, cardiac damage and nerve injury that present days later, which is why an electrical contact is worth an emergency-department visit even when you walk away from it.

Each of the four maps onto a specific standard, a specific set of physical evidence, and a specific set of defendants. A fall means Subpart M, the anchor points, the harness, the lanyard, and whoever removed the guardrail. Struck-by means the rigging, the load path, the exclusion zone, and whoever put a crew under a suspended load. Caught-in means the shoring, the competent person's daily inspection, the machine guard. Electrocution means the line clearance, the lockout, the temporary power design.

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What an OSHA citation proves, and what it does not

Workers are told constantly that "OSHA is investigating, so the case is handled." That is wrong in both directions, and the accurate version is more useful.

OSHA gives you nothing to sue with directly. The Occupational Safety and Health Act creates no private right of action. You cannot sue an employer or a contractor for violating an OSHA standard. OSHA cites, OSHA fines, and the fine is paid to the government.

An OSHA violation is not negligence per se in Texas. In Supreme Beef Packers, Inc. v. Maddox, 67 S.W.3d 453 (Tex. App.—Texarkana 2002, pet. denied), a jury was instructed that violating an OSHA regulation was negligence in itself. The court of appeals held that the OSHA regulations at issue could not be the basis of a negligence per se claim and that the instruction misstated the law. A lawyer who promises you that the citation decides liability has not read the case.

What the standard and the citation actually do is more valuable than either myth. They are evidence:

• The standard itself is published, industry-wide, written by the regulator and known to every contractor in the country. It is admissible as evidence of the standard of care — what a reasonable contractor in that trade does about that hazard. An expert stands in front of a jury with the text of 1926.451 and explains what the scaffold was supposed to have.
• The citation is evidence of notice and, depending on classification, of what the employer knew. A repeat or wilful classification carries a finding about the employer's knowledge. A serious citation issued to the GC on a hazard the GC says it never controlled is a direct contradiction of the GC's control defence.
• The investigation file is the fastest source of clean early evidence. The compliance officer photographs the scene, takes measurements, interviews witnesses within days, and records the employer's own explanation before anyone has lawyered up. Those interviews happen before memories move. The file is obtainable.

And an investigation usually exists, even when you were told otherwise. Under 29 CFR 1904.39 an employer must report a work-related fatality to OSHA within 8 hours, and an in-patient hospitalisation, amputation, or loss of an eye within 24 hours. That obligation does not depend on whether the employer thinks it was at fault, and it does not depend on your immigration status, your job title or whether you were on the clock. If you were hospitalised as an in-patient or lost a finger, a report was legally required. Whether the employer made it is itself a fact worth establishing.

Two caveats we say out loud. Federal OSHA is thin on the ground — approximately 1,850 inspectors between federal OSHA and its state partners for 130 million workers, roughly one compliance officer for every 70,000 workers (OSHA, Commonly Used Statistics). Plenty of serious injuries produce no inspection at all. And the absence of a citation proves nothing about your case; it frequently means nobody came.

That the construction standards get cited constantly is a matter of record. In fiscal year 2025, five of OSHA's ten most frequently cited standards nationwide were Part 1926 construction standards: fall protection at number one, ladders at three, scaffolding at six, fall-protection training at seven, and eye and face protection at nine (OSHA, Top 10 Most Frequently Cited Standards for Fiscal Year 2025, October 1, 2024 through September 30, 2025).

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Scaffolds, ladders, trenches and cranes: the specific rules

The general duty to be careful loses to a specific written rule every time, because a specific rule tells the jury exactly what should have happened.

Fall protection — 29 CFR 1926 Subpart M. The core requirement in 1926.501(b)(1): an employee on a walking or working surface with an unprotected side or edge 6 feet or more above a lower level must be protected by a guardrail system, a safety net system, or a personal fall arrest system. Six feet. Not a storey, not "high up." The questions that follow are concrete: was an anchor point available and rated, was a harness issued and did it fit, was there a written rescue plan, who removed the guardrail and when, was the floor opening covered and marked, and was the cover secured against displacement.

Scaffolds — Subpart L, 1926.451. Capacity, full planking, guardrails, safe access that is not the cross-bracing, a competent person supervising erection and dismantling, and inspection before each shift. Most scaffold cases turn on access, planking gaps, or a platform that was moved by another trade overnight and put back wrong.

Excavations — Subpart P. Under 1926.652(a)(1), an excavation 5 feet or deeper requires a protective system — sloping, benching, shoring or a trench box — unless it is made entirely in stable rock. Under 5 feet, a competent person can determine that no system is needed if examination shows no potential for cave-in. Central Texas trenching runs through limestone, clay and fill in the same block, so "it was rock" is a claim that gets tested against the soil classification the competent person was required to make. The daily inspection record, the spoil-pile setback, the ladder within 25 feet of lateral travel, and the identity of the competent person are the file.

Cranes and derricks — Subpart CC, 1926.1400 and following. Operator certification, ground conditions and the assembly/disassembly director, power-line clearance, the lift plan, the rigging inspection, the signal person, and the prohibition on working under a suspended load. Crane cases produce more documents than any other kind: load charts, wind readings, inspection logs, telematics, the crane company's own daily reports.

Electrical — Subpart K. Grounding, ground-fault protection on temporary power, assured equipment grounding programmes, clearance from energised lines, and lockout of circuits before work.

The physical evidence that proves these cases decays fast. Scaffolds come down. Trenches get backfilled the same afternoon. Lifts go back to the rental yard and get repaired. The harness and lanyard get thrown away. Which is why the preservation letters in the next section go out in days, not months.

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Rented equipment, defective equipment, and the manufacturer

Very little of the equipment on an Austin site is owned by the company using it. Lifts, excavators, generators, compactors, shoring, temporary fencing and often the crane are rented, and that creates two more defendants.

The lessor. A rental company that puts a machine into service owes a duty to deliver it in a condition safe for its intended use, to perform the maintenance and inspections its own programme and the manufacturer's manual call for, and not to supply a machine it knows or should know is defective. Rental companies keep excellent records because their business depends on them: service history by unit number, pre-delivery inspection sheets, damage reports from prior renters, telematics on newer fleet, and the delivery ticket signed on your site. Those records are subpoenaed by unit serial number, so the number stencilled on the machine is worth photographing before it leaves.

The manufacturer. If the anchor point failed, the lanyard tore at the stitching, the ladder rail buckled, the guard was designed so it had to be removed to do the job, or the lift tipped within its rated envelope, the claim runs against the company that designed and built it. That is a products case, with its own elements, its own experts and its own statutory framework, and it lives on our Austin product liability page. This page names the manufacturer as a defendant and stops there.

The practical instruction is the same in every equipment case and it is the most important sentence on this page: do not let the equipment be repaired, returned, scrapped or "checked out." The harness, the lanyard, the anchor, the ladder, the bracket, the saw, the failed component — those objects are the case. Once a rental company services a lift, the condition it was in when it dropped you no longer exists anywhere except in photographs. We send preservation letters to the lessor, the GC and the manufacturer naming the unit and demanding it be held, and where necessary we move for an order.

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Responsible third parties and how the defence spreads the blame

This is the manoeuvre that decides how much a construction verdict is actually worth, and almost nobody warns clients about it.

Texas apportions fault under Chapter 33 of the Civil Practice and Remedies Code. Under § 33.003 the jury assigns a percentage of responsibility to each claimant, each defendant, each settling person, and each responsible third party who has been designated under § 33.004. Under § 33.001 you recover nothing if your own share exceeds 50 percent. Your recovery from any liable defendant is otherwise reduced by your percentage.

Section 33.004 lets a defendant file a motion for leave to designate someone who is not a party as a responsible third party. The motion must be filed on or before the 60th day before the trial date unless the court finds good cause for a later filing. If another party objects within 15 days, the court still grants leave unless the objecting party shows the defendant failed to plead sufficient facts about the designated person's responsibility, and failed again after being granted leave to replead. Under § 33.004(i), designating someone does not by itself impose liability on that person and cannot be used against them in another proceeding.

Put plainly: a defendant can put an empty chair on the jury's verdict form.

On a construction site the empty chairs are everywhere. Your own employer, who is immune from suit but not from being blamed. The framing sub that dissolved into a new LLC eighteen months ago. The bankrupt scaffold company. The equipment lessor in another state. The individual foreman who has left the country. Each designation is a slice of fault that can come off your recovery without anyone writing a cheque.

Three things follow, and they change what a lawyer does in the first month rather than in the last one.

1. Sue the right parties, early. A designated responsible third party who is also a defendant is a party you can collect from. A designated non-party is not. Identifying the real actors before limitations runs is the single highest-value thing that happens in a construction case.
2. Litigate the designation. A defendant still has to plead sufficient facts about the designated person's responsibility. Loose designations get objected to.
3. Build the comparative-fault defence of your own conduct from day one. The defence will argue you did not clip off, you moved the ladder, you entered the trench. The answers are usually structural — the anchor was not there, the schedule made it impossible, the competent person never inspected, nobody trained you in a language you read. Those answers come from documents and co-worker testimony, which means finding them before the crew scatters.

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Heat on an Austin job site

Texas summers on an unshaded slab are a genuine occupational hazard, and the legal position is thinner than most workers assume.

There is no federal heat standard. OSHA has no specific rule setting a temperature threshold, a required rest interval, or a mandatory water supply for outdoor construction. It reaches heat through the General Duty Clause, section 5(a)(1) of the OSH Act, which requires an employer to furnish a workplace free from recognised hazards likely to cause death or serious physical harm. General-duty cases are harder for OSHA to make than standards cases because the agency has to prove the hazard was recognised and that a feasible means of abatement existed.

There is no Texas state heat standard either. Texas has no occupational safety agency of its own for private employers; federal OSHA has jurisdiction here.

Austin had a local rule and it is not being enforced. In 2010 Austin adopted Ordinance No. 20100729-047, requiring employees performing construction activities at a construction site to receive a rest break of at least ten minutes for every four hours worked. In 2023 the Legislature passed House Bill 2127, the Texas Regulatory Consistency Act, which broadly preempts local ordinances that regulate in fields covered by state codes, and it was widely understood to sweep in the Austin and Dallas construction rest-break ordinances. A Travis County district court declared HB 2127 unconstitutional in August 2023; the State appealed, which suspended that ruling, and in 2025 the Third Court of Appeals reversed on standing grounds, holding that the cities could not mount a broad facial challenge without a specific ordinance dispute. The practical position for an Austin construction worker today is that the ten-minute rest break is not a rule anyone is enforcing.

So what is left when a worker collapses on a roof in August?

The claim is an ordinary negligence claim and it is built the ordinary way. A general contractor that runs the site safety programme, sets the schedule and controls the sequence of work has assumed a role in which heat is a foreseeable hazard, and evidence of what it did — shade, water, an acclimatisation plan for new crew members, scheduled breaks, a heat-illness response procedure, a supervisor trained to recognise symptoms — is measured against what reasonable contractors do. Industry guidance, the employer's own written safety programme, and the manufacturer's and trade association's recommendations all supply the standard the jury measures against. Where a worker died, exposure to temperature extremes is a category the state tracks: Texas recorded 8 fatalities from exposure to temperature extremes across all industries in 2024 (TDI DWC, 2024).

One honest caveat. Heat injury is systematically under-recorded in Texas construction. A worker sent home with a headache generates no record anywhere, and a nonsubscriber employer files no DWC injury report at all. When we take a heat case, the medical record from the day of the event, the weather data for that hour at the nearest station, and the testimony of the men who carried you to the truck usually matter more than any official document.

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Your immigration status does not decide whether you have a claim

We put this in writing because the fear is doing more damage in Austin than the law is.

An injured worker in Texas can bring a personal injury claim regardless of immigration status. The courthouse door is not conditioned on a visa, a work permit, or a Social Security number. This is true for a negligence claim against a general contractor, an owner, a sub, an equipment lessor or a manufacturer, and it is true whether or not the employer carries workers' compensation.

Evidence of immigration status is generally inadmissible. In TXI Transportation Co. v. Hughes, 306 S.W.3d 230 (Tex. 2010), the Texas Supreme Court held that a driver's status as an illegal immigrant, and his use of a false Social Security number to obtain a commercial licence, were not relevant to the negligent hiring and entrustment claims against his employer, were inadmissible to impeach him, and that admitting the evidence was harmful error. The reasoning is ordinary evidence law under Texas Rules of Evidence 402 and 403: status that has nothing to do with how the injury happened is irrelevant, and the risk of unfair prejudice from putting it before a jury is enormous.

We state that carefully rather than as a slogan, because the rule is about relevance and not about a blanket prohibition. Where a specific damages issue genuinely turns on it — for example, a claim for future lost earnings modelled on a particular wage market — a defendant may attempt to raise it, and courts handle that dispute case by case. Our practice is to move in advance to exclude the subject entirely and to prepare the damages proof so that it does not open a door.

Three more things worth saying plainly.

• An injury claim does not grant immigration status. It is not a path to a visa, a work permit, or relief from removal. Anyone who tells you otherwise is not being straight with you. The injury claim is a money claim for the harm you suffered, and that is all it is.
• We do not report clients, and status is not something we ask about in order to decide whether to take a case. We ask what happened, who was on the site, and what your body is like now.
• You do not have to come to our office in Austin. Consultations happen by phone and by video, and we come to you when travel is the obstacle. The consultation is in English or Spanish, with a bilingual attorney rather than an interpreter relaying it second-hand.

The data explains why this section exists at all. In 2024, Hispanic or Latino employees accounted for 253 of the 557 workplace fatalities in Texas — 45 percent of the state total (TDI DWC, Texas Census of Fatal Occupational Injuries 2024, Demographics and Table 4). The share of the workforce that speaks Spanish at home is a share that is dying at work, and a legitimate claim abandoned out of fear is a family that pays for somebody else's negligence for the rest of their lives.

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What a trade is worth when the body is the tool

Every category of damages available in a Texas injury case is available here, and the ones common to all injury claims are explained at our compensation guides. This page goes deep on the one that matters most to a tradesman and that gets undervalued most often: loss of earning capacity.

Lost wages and lost earning capacity are different things. Lost wages are the paycheques you did not receive between the injury and today; they are close to arithmetic. Loss of earning capacity is the reduction in your ability to earn money in the future, and Texas measures the capacity rather than the salary. A journeyman electrician who is 34, who can no longer kneel, climb or work overhead, and who has an eighth-grade education and no English literacy, has lost something quite different from an office worker with the same spinal fusion. The office worker goes back to a desk. The electrician's entire market disappears.

Building that number honestly requires a specific stack of proof, and it is why construction cases carry higher expenses than most:

• What the trade actually paid. Not a national average. Your certified payroll, your W-2s or 1099s, your union or agency records, the prevailing rate for the classification on the jobs you were working, and the overtime pattern the trade runs. For context on the local market, the Bureau of Labor Statistics puts the average weekly wage in private construction across the Austin-Round Rock-San Marcos metro at $1,625 in the second quarter of 2025 (BLS Quarterly Census of Employment and Wages, area C1242, industry 1012). Your own figures are the ones that get used; that number is only the backdrop.
• A functional capacity evaluation. A measured statement of what you can lift, carry, reach, climb and sustain over an eight-hour day, produced by testing rather than by opinion.
• A vocational rehabilitation expert. Someone who takes the FCE, your education, your language, your certifications and your work history, and identifies what jobs remain open to you in this labour market and what they pay. This is where a trade worker's case is won or lost, because the honest answer is frequently "very little, and much less than before."
• A forensic economist. Converts the annual gap into a lifetime figure, adjusted for work-life expectancy, wage growth and present value.
• Fringe and trajectory. A 28-year-old apprentice was on a path to journeyman and to foreman. A career that was going somewhere is a capacity that was going to grow, and that growth is compensable when it is proved rather than assumed.

Where the injury is catastrophic, the injury-specific proof lives elsewhere and we link rather than repeat: spinal cord injury and traumatic brain injury are the two most common catastrophic outcomes of a fall from height, and each has its own page. Where a worker died, the statutory beneficiaries and their claims are governed by Civil Practice and Remedies Code §§ 71.001–71.012 and covered at our Austin wrongful death page. Household and personal-care losses, disfigurement and the rest are at /compensation/loss-of-earning-capacity and /compensation/disability-and-disfigurement.

Nobody can put a number on your case honestly in the first week. Anyone who does is selling.

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The measured risk on a Texas job site

Every figure below comes from a named government dataset. We pulled each one on 5 September 2026, and every number is reproducible from the source listed at the end of this section. Where a number is statewide we say statewide; where it is national we say national. There is no Austin-only construction fatality series published by anyone, so we do not print one.

Stat cards

Texas construction fatalities by industry group

Texas Department of Insurance, Division of Workers' Compensation, Texas Census of Fatal Occupational Injuries, Table 1. Private industry.

How Texas workers were killed in 2024

TDI DWC, Texas Census of Fatal Occupational Injuries 2024, Table 3. All industries, all ownerships, 557 total. Categories are TDI's own (BLS OIICS 3.02).

National backdrop

• 1,034 fatal occupational injuries in the U.S. construction industry (NAICS 23) in 2024, out of 5,070 across all industries. Specialty trade contractors accounted for 606 of them. (BLS, CFOI Table A-1, 2024.)
• 1,032 fatalities among construction and extraction occupations nationally in 2024, with fatal falls, slips and trips among those workers down 7.5 percent to 370. (BLS, CFOI news release, 2024.)
• Construction's non-fatal recordable case rate was 2.2 per 100 full-time equivalent workers in 2024, with a days-away-from-work rate of 0.9 — slightly below private industry overall on total cases (2.3) and slightly above it on cases serious enough to keep someone off work (0.8). (BLS, Survey of Occupational Injuries and Illnesses, Table 1, 2024.)

Two limits on this data, stated up front

The Texas figures count fatalities, not injuries, because Texas publishes an annual fatality census and does not publish a comparable state-level construction injury series. The fatality data is therefore the sharpest instrument available and it says nothing about the far larger population of workers who survive a fall and never work in the trade again.

The industry numbers count the construction industry by NAICS code. A worker injured on a construction site while employed by a staffing agency is classified to the staffing agency's industry, not to construction, which means the construction counts understate the number of people hurt building things.

Sources

• Texas Department of Insurance, Division of Workers' Compensation — Texas Census of Fatal Occupational Injuries 2024: tdi.texas.gov/wc/safety/sis/documents/2024fatalrpt.pdf
• U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics — Census of Fatal Occupational Injuries, 2024 news release: bls.gov/news.release/cfoi.nr0.htm
• U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics — CFOI Table A-1, 2024: bls.gov/iif/fatal-injuries-tables
• U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics — Survey of Occupational Injuries and Illnesses, Table 1, 2024: bls.gov/iif/nonfatal-injuries-and-illnesses-tables
• U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics — Quarterly Census of Employment and Wages: bls.gov/cew
• U.S. Census Bureau — Building Permits Survey, metropolitan area annual data: census.gov/construction/bps
• Occupational Safety and Health Administration — Top 10 Most Frequently Cited Standards, FY2025: osha.gov/top10citedstandards
• Occupational Safety and Health Administration — Commonly Used Statistics: osha.gov/data/commonstats

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The first two weeks decide what evidence still exists

A construction site is a machine for destroying evidence. It is supposed to be — the whole point is that today's condition gets covered by tomorrow's work. Here is what actually needs to happen, in order.

1. Get treated somewhere that keeps a record you can obtain. Go to the company clinic if that is what gets you seen today. Then get evaluated somewhere independent. Describe every part of your body that hurts, including the ones that seem minor, because the note written in the first 72 hours is the document the defence will read out in two years.

2. Photograph the site before it changes. The scaffold, the opening, the trench, the lift, the anchor point, the machine. Wide shots and close shots. Photograph the serial or unit number on any piece of equipment involved. If you cannot do it, get a co-worker to.

3. Keep the physical objects. The harness. The lanyard. The broken bracket. The ladder. The hard hat. Do not let anyone take them "for the investigation" without writing down who took them and when.

4. Write down every company name on the site. Off the gate signs, the trailers, the trucks, the port-a-cans, the bin. Every logo is a potential defendant.

5. Get the names and phone numbers of the men who saw it. Personal numbers, not the company's. Construction crews turn over faster than any other evidence source in the case.

6. Ask one question and write down the answer: does my employer carry workers' compensation insurance? Subscriber or nonsubscriber changes everything downstream. Detail at our Austin workplace injury page.

7. Find out whether an OSHA report was made. If you were admitted to a hospital as an in-patient, or lost a finger, a hand or an eye, 29 CFR 1904.39 required your employer to notify OSHA within 24 hours — 8 hours if a co-worker died. An official file may already exist.

8. Do not give a recorded statement to any adjuster before you have talked to a lawyer. Not your employer's carrier, not the GC's, not the rental company's. Adjusters call early precisely because early is when you know least about your own injury.

9. Let preservation letters go out. Within days, not months. To the GC and the owner for daily reports, safety files, photographs, project-management logs and site video. To the lessor for the unit's service and inspection history. To whoever holds the failed component. Site cameras overwrite on a cycle measured in days on many jobs.

Two years, and why the clock is worse here

Under Texas Civil Practice & Remedies Code § 16.003(a) you generally have two years from the date of injury to file suit, and two years from the date of death in a death case. The construction-specific problem is that the correct defendant is often not identifiable until discovery has opened up the subcontract chain, so a case that starts at eighteen months has no time left to find the entity that actually caused the injury before limitations closes on it.

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Who pays the engineer before the case settles

We work on contingency. No fee up front, no hourly billing, and no fee at all unless we recover money for you. That much is common to every plaintiff's firm. What differs by case type is the expenses, and construction cases are among the most expensive personal injury cases there are.

A construction case does not get proved by a police report and a medical record. It gets proved by:

• A site inspection, done fast, often with an engineer, before the condition disappears.
• A structural, scaffold or crane engineer to explain what the anchor, the platform, the shoring or the rigging was supposed to do and what it did.
• A safety expert to lay the OSHA standard next to what actually happened and explain what a reasonable contractor does about that hazard.
• Records acquisition across six or eight companies — subcontracts, certified payroll, daily reports, safety files, inspection logs, equipment service history, the OSHA investigation file. Every one arrives on a different schedule from a different custodian.
• Metadata and telematics work where the equipment or the project-management platform holds data that has to be extracted properly.
• Depositions of superintendents, foremen, competent persons and corporate representatives, each with a court reporter and frequently a videographer.
• A vocational expert and a forensic economist to prove what a trade you can no longer work was worth over a working life.

We advance all of it. You are not asked to fund an engineer's site visit, and you are not asked to pay a records custodian. Expenses are repaid out of the recovery at the end, and they are set out in the fee agreement in writing before you sign it, in the language you read. If there is no recovery, you do not owe us the expenses.

There is a second reason we say this out loud. A firm that will not advance an engineering inspection settles construction cases for what the adjuster offers, because it has no proof to threaten anyone with. The expense structure is the case strategy.

We will also tell you when a case is not worth opening. If your employer is a subscriber, the only entity involved was your own employer, no third party had any role in the injury, and comp is covering the treatment, then the honest answer is that a lawsuit adds nothing and we will say so on the phone.

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The attorneys handling your case

Israel Medina — Israel Ruiz Medina, Founding Partner. Texas Bar No. 24130487. Juris Doctor, Baylor University School of Law. Admitted in Texas and Nevada. Member, Texas Trial Lawyers Association; Travis County Bar Association; Austin Bar Association; American Association for Justice. English and Spanish. Full biography.

Rikki Medina — Rikki Olivia Medina, Founding Partner. Texas Bar No. 24144569. Juris Doctor, Baylor University School of Law. Admitted in Texas and Nevada. Member, Texas Trial Lawyers Association; Austin Bar Association; Travis County Bar Association. English and Spanish. Full biography.

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Questions from workers hurt on a job site

Sixteen questions we get from people hurt on Austin job sites. Every one of them is written for this page.

Related pages on this site

• Hurt at work and not sure whether your employer carries comp
• Falls on someone else's property
• Spinal cord injuries and lifetime care
• Head injuries after a job site fall or struck-by
• A defective machine or tool caused the injury
• A worker was killed on the site
• Lost wages and earning capacity

Talk to us about the job site

This page is general information about Texas law. It is not legal advice, and reading it does not create an attorney-client relationship. Every case turns on its own facts. Past results do not guarantee future results.