Austin Workplace Injury Lawyer

The first question: does your employer carry workers' compensation?

Texas Labor Code § 406.002 says coverage is elective. Except for public employers and a handful of situations set by other law, a private employer in Texas simply decides whether to buy workers' compensation insurance. An employer that buys it is a subscriber. An employer that does not is a nonsubscriber, and Texas is the only state where that word means anything.

Every other state makes coverage mandatory for practically all employers. Texas kept the 1913 bargain optional, and it has stayed optional for over a century. The result is a fork that runs through the entire case.

If your employer is a subscriber, workers' compensation is your exclusive remedy against that employer under § 408.001(a). You get medical care and a slice of your wages through a no-fault system that does not care whose fault the injury was, and you almost certainly cannot sue your employer no matter how careless it was. The compensation is capped and it leaves out the categories that matter most to seriously hurt people.

If your employer is a nonsubscriber, you can sue it directly for ordinary negligence, and § 406.033(a) strips it of three defenses that would otherwise gut your case. That combination makes a Texas nonsubscriber claim one of the more favourable postures a plaintiff can occupy. It also has a catch, which is the alternative benefit plan and the arbitration agreement most nonsubscribers use, and we deal with that below rather than burying it.

There is one wrinkle in the other direction. Under § 406.034, an employee of a subscriber can keep their common-law right to sue by giving the employer written notice within five days of being hired. Almost nobody does this, and the employer cannot make you do it as a condition of employment. If you did it, tell your lawyer, because it changes your posture entirely.

One more path worth knowing: if the work was on a public project, § 406.096 requires a governmental entity that signs a building or construction contract to make the contractor certify in writing that it carries workers' compensation for every employee on that project, and requires subcontractors to hand up the same certificate. City of Austin, Travis County and Texas Department of Transportation work therefore tends to be covered even where the same contractor runs uncovered crews on private jobs.

How to find out, without asking your boss

You do not have to walk into the office and ask. Three ways to check, in the order we use them.

Look at the wall. Texas Labor Code § 406.005 requires every employer to tell each new employee at hire whether coverage exists, and to post a notice of coverage or non-coverage at conspicuous locations at the place of business. Break room, time clock, near the entrance. Failure to post is an administrative violation. Take a photo of that notice with your phone before anything changes.

Run the coverage search yourself. DWC points the public at the TXCOMP/NCCI coverage verification service at ewccv.com/cvs, which searches licensed-carrier policies by employer name and date. Certified self-insured employers appear on a separate DWC list, and self-insured government employers have their own search tool. The starting point for all of it is DWC's coverage verification page.

Email DWC and make them answer. If the online search comes back empty, that alone does not prove non-coverage — it may mean the policy is held under a different legal entity name than the one on your paycheque. Send the employer's name, physical address and your date of injury to coverage.verification@tdi.texas.gov. DWC says a representative responds within one business day. The Division's consumer line is 800-252-7031.

There is a fourth signal. An employer that elects not to carry coverage has to notify DWC in writing under § 406.004, on DWC Form-005. Failure to file is an administrative violation, and DWC publishes nonsubscriber data through the Texas Open Data Portal. An employer with no coverage on file and no Form-005 on file is a nonsubscriber that has also broken a reporting rule, and that fact tends to travel poorly in front of a jury.

We run all of this for free before we take a case, because the answer determines whether there is a case.

If your employer is covered: what comp pays and what it never pays

Workers' compensation in Texas is a benefit schedule. It pays two things and refuses a third.

Medical benefits. Under § 408.021 you are entitled to all health care reasonably required by the nature of the injury, as and when needed — care that cures or relieves the effects of the injury, promotes recovery, or helps you return to work. There is no dollar cap and the carrier cannot limit or terminate its medical liability by agreement or settlement. That is genuinely valuable, and it is the strongest part of the system.

Income benefits, in four types, all computed off your average weekly wage and all capped:

Those caps come from § 408.061, which ties them to the state average weekly wage. DWC set the state average weekly wage at $1,271.05 for the fiscal year running October 1, 2025 through September 30, 2026, with a $191 weekly minimum. The cap in effect on your date of injury governs for the entire life of the benefit, which is why the date matters more than people expect.

Now the part most readers came here for.

Texas workers' compensation pays nothing for pain and suffering. Nothing for mental anguish. Nothing for physical impairment or disfigurement as a damage category. Chapter 408 contains medical benefits, income benefits, death benefits and a burial benefit. Human loss is not on the list. A worker who loses the use of a hand gets three weeks of impairment income benefits per rating point and a permanent inability to do the work he trained for; the law puts no separate price on the hand.

That gap is the reason the third-party claim below usually matters more than the comp claim.

If the injury was fatal, § 408.181 pays death benefits at 75% of average weekly wage to legal beneficiaries, capped at $1,271 a week for FY 2026, and § 408.186 pays burial expenses up to $10,000.

Why workers' compensation is called the exclusive remedy

Section 408.001(a) says recovery of workers' compensation benefits is the exclusive remedy of a covered employee, or a legal beneficiary, against the employer or an agent or employee of the employer for a work-related injury or death.

Read that phrase again: or an agent or employee of the employer. It closes the obvious workaround. You cannot sidestep the bar by suing the supervisor who told you the machine was fine, or the co-worker who backed the forklift into you. Both are inside the shield.

The trade is deliberate. You give up the right to sue and to prove fault; you get benefits that arrive whether or not anyone was careless, including in cases where the accident was your own doing. For a worker whose employer was blameless, that is a good deal. For a worker whose employer ignored a hazard for two years, it is a hard one.

The intentional-tort exception exists and it is narrow. In Reed Tool Co. v. Copelin, 689 S.W.2d 404 (Tex. 1985), a machine operator was struck in the head by a chain tong from the lathe he was running and left with severe brain damage. His wife sued for loss of consortium, alleging the company knew the machine was unsafe and had modified it. The Texas Supreme Court held that intent means a desire to cause the consequences or a belief that they are substantially certain to follow, and that willful negligence — even gross negligence — is not the intentional injury required to escape the exclusive remedy. Practically, this exception reaches an employer who assaults a worker. It does not reach an employer who runs an unsafe shop.

A separate note that trips people up: under § 408.001(d), a DWC determination that a particular injury is not compensable does not reopen the door to a lawsuit. The employer keeps the shield even when the claim is denied.

The exception when a worker is killed

Subsection (b) of the same statute is the one real crack, and it exists only in death cases.

Section 408.001(b) preserves the right of the surviving spouse or heirs of the body of a deceased employee to recover exemplary damages where the death was caused by an intentional act or omission of the employer, or by the employer's gross negligence. Subsection (c) borrows the definition of gross negligence from Civil Practice and Remedies Code § 41.001 — an act or omission involving an extreme degree of risk, which the employer had actual, subjective awareness of and proceeded with conscious indifference to.

Two things follow, and both are counter-intuitive.

First, gross negligence is enough here even though Reed Tool says it is not enough for a living worker. The Legislature drew the line at death on purpose.

Second, this is a claim for exemplary damages only. It is not a route to the medical bills, the lost income or the family's ordinary losses, which stay inside the comp system. A gross-negligence death claim against a subscribing employer is a punishment claim, tried on what the employer knew and chose to ignore, and it lives or dies on documents: prior incident reports, safety complaints, maintenance records, the meeting where somebody raised the hazard and was told to keep the line moving.

That is the whole of what this page says about work-related death. The Austin wrongful death page covers who may bring a claim, how the survival action works, and how exemplary damages are capped.

Texas recorded 557 fatal occupational injuries in 2024, per the Division of Workers' Compensation's Census of Fatal Occupational Injuries. Most of those families never learn subsection (b) exists.

If your employer opted out: the defenses they lose

This is the strongest posture in Texas work injury law, and it is worth understanding precisely.

Against a nonsubscriber you file an ordinary negligence suit in state district court. Section 406.033(a) then removes three defenses from the employer's hands. In an action by an employee not covered by workers' compensation, it is not a defense that:

1. the employee was guilty of contributory negligence;
2. the employee assumed the risk of injury or death; or
3. the injury or death was caused by the negligence of a fellow employee.

Take those one at a time, because each one kills a specific argument you would otherwise face.

No comparative fault. In a normal Texas negligence case, Chapter 33 bars recovery entirely if the plaintiff is more than 50% responsible, and reduces the award by whatever percentage the jury assigns. Against a nonsubscriber, that reduction does not happen. A worker who was rushing, who skipped a step, who was 70% to blame, still recovers in full if the employer's negligence proximately caused the injury. That is Kroger Co. v. Keng, 23 S.W.3d 347 (Tex. 2000), where the Texas Supreme Court held that a nonsubscribing employer gets no jury question on its employee's comparative responsibility, because comparative responsibility requires a contributory-negligence finding and § 406.033(a) forbids that finding.

No assumption of the risk. The employer cannot argue you knew the job was dangerous and took it anyway.

No fellow-servant rule. The employer cannot point at the co-worker who actually caused it and walk away.

Section 406.033(c) leaves the employer only two defenses: that you acted with intent to injure yourself, or that you were intoxicated.

Now the honest half, because a page that stops here is selling you something.

You still have to prove the employer was negligent. That is § 406.033(d), in the statute's own words: the plaintiff must prove negligence of the employer or of an agent or servant acting within the general scope of employment. And in Kroger Co. v. Elwood, 197 S.W.3d 793 (Tex. 2006), the Texas Supreme Court reversed a judgment for an injured grocery clerk and held that an employer is not an insurer of its employees' safety and owes no duty to warn of hazards that are commonly known or already appreciated by the employee. Elwood put his hand in a car's doorjamb while steadying a cart, a customer shut the door, and the Court held Kroger had no duty to warn him not to do that.

So the nonsubscriber cases that work are the ones with a named failure by the employer: a guard removed from a machine, a request for equipment that was refused, a training that never happened, a hazard reported up the chain and left in place. The cases that fail are the ones where a jury will say anyone would have seen it coming. We will tell you which one yours looks like, including when the answer is that it is not worth opening.

The paperwork you signed on your first day

If your employer is a nonsubscriber, there is a good chance it runs what the industry calls an occupational injury benefit plan — a private, in-house or outsourced substitute for workers' compensation. TDI's 2022 employer survey found that 30% of Texas nonsubscribers had such a plan, and that 73% of employees who work for a nonsubscriber were covered by one. The gap between those two numbers is not an error: the plans concentrate at the larger nonsubscribers, so a minority of employers covers a majority of the workers.

Read TDI's own warning about these plans, because it is the whole point. They "are not regulated by the Texas Department of Insurance, Division of Workers' Compensation." No benefit floor. No rate schedule. No dispute process the state runs. The employer writes the plan and the employer, or its administrator, decides your claim.

What the survey found inside those plans, all figures from the 2022 edition and all shares of nonsubscribers with plans:

• 57% require the injury to be reported immediately or the same day. Another 32% require it within 24 hours or by the next day.
• 13% exclude injuries not reported on the same day or same shift outright.
• 21% exclude treatment or supplies from any provider the plan has not approved.
• 24% cap medical benefits by duration of treatment, by dollars spent, or both.
• Only about 47% pay wage replacement at all, and of those that do, 39% impose a waiting period before payments start.
• TDI's footnote on other exclusions specifically lists occupational disease and repetitive trauma among the conditions some plans carve out.

That is the document you were handed at orientation, and it is why the same-day reporting rule matters more here than anywhere else in Texas injury law. A worker who tweaks his back on Friday, hopes it settles over the weekend and reports on Monday can be outside a plan that pays only for same-shift reports.

Signing the plan does not sign away your lawsuit. Section 406.033(e) is explicit: a cause of action against a nonsubscriber may not be waived by an employee before the injury, and any pre-injury agreement to waive it is void and unenforceable. If the packet contained a liability release, that release is worth nothing on its own terms.

A post-injury waiver is a different animal and it is enforceable when § 406.033(f) and (g) are satisfied — you entered it voluntarily and knowingly, it came no earlier than the tenth business day after the initial report of injury, you had a medical evaluation from a nonemergency care doctor first, the true intent of the parties is stated in the writing, and the waiver language is conspicuous, in larger type or contrasting colors. If somebody put a release in front of you three days after the injury with a cheque attached, those boxes are not ticked. Do not sign anything until you have had it read.

Arbitration agreements and pre-injury waivers in Texas

Here is the distinction almost nothing else on the internet draws, and it is the most useful thing on this page.

A pre-injury liability waiver in a nonsubscriber packet is void under § 406.033(e). A pre-injury arbitration agreement in that same packet can be perfectly enforceable.

In In re Odyssey Healthcare, Inc., 310 S.W.3d 419 (Tex. 2010), the Texas Supreme Court held that § 406.033(e) does not void an arbitration agreement, reasoning that an agreement to arbitrate waives neither the cause of action nor the rights § 406.033(a) confers — it agrees on the forum where those claims get tried. The Court further held that the Federal Arbitration Act does not offend the Tenth Amendment by reaching into a state's workers' compensation scheme. So the anti-waiver statute you just read has a hole in it exactly the shape of an arbitration clause, and nonsubscribers have used it.

The consequence is concrete. Instead of a Travis County jury, your case is decided by a single arbitrator, often under rules the employer's plan selected, usually without a public record and with sharply limited appeal.

Whether the clause binds you is where the fight is, and it is a real fight. In re Halliburton Co., 80 S.W.3d 566 (Tex. 2002), is the case employers cite: an at-will employee who kept working after notice of an arbitration program was bound by it, and the program was not illusory because the mutual promises to arbitrate were themselves the consideration and the employer could not amend or terminate its way out. That last clause is the opening. Arbitration provisions that let the employer change or cancel the program at will, or that apply to the worker and not the company, get attacked on exactly the ground Halliburton identified. Notice, consideration, unconscionability, whether the person who signed could read the language it was written in, and whether the signature on file is actually yours are all live questions.

If you were handed a stack of forms on day one and you do not have copies, ask for your complete personnel file in writing and keep the request. In an arbitration fight, what the employer can and cannot produce is often the case.

The company clinic and the first report of injury

After the injury there are two documents in motion, and you should know what each one is.

The employer's first report of injury. If a subscriber's employee misses more than one day of work, § 409.005 requires the employer to report it to its insurance carrier by the eighth day, and to hand you a written copy of that report at the same time. The form is DWC Form-001. Ask for your copy. If the employer never filed one, that is a fact worth having.

Your own claim. The Form-001 is the employer's filing, and it does not open your claim with the state. You file DWC Form-041 with the Division. Deadlines are below.

Then there is the clinic. In a subscriber system with a certified health care network, the carrier's network can direct where you treat. In a nonsubscriber's benefit plan there is often no network at all, just a plan term saying benefits are payable only for care from an approved provider — which the 2022 survey found in 21% of plans.

Two practical points about that clinic visit, and neither of them is a conspiracy theory.

First, the intake form you fill out is a medical record and it will be read out loud in a deposition. If your shoulder and your lower back both hurt, write down both. Injuries that first appear in a chart six weeks later get argued about for the life of the case.

Second, a work-status report that returns you to full duty is a document with legal consequences. If you cannot do what it says you can do, say so at the time, in writing, to the clinic and to your supervisor. Silence reads as agreement.

You can also call the Office of Injured Employee Counsel, a separate state agency that advocates for injured workers in the comp system, at oiec.texas.gov. We tell people about OIEC even when we are not taking the case.

Third-party claims: the case that is usually worth the most

If your employer is a subscriber, exclusive remedy blocks a suit against the employer. It does not block anybody else, and this is where the real recovery normally lives.

Section 417.001(a) says an employee may seek damages from a third party who is liable for a compensable injury and may also pursue workers' compensation benefits. Both at once. You do not have to choose.

A third party is any person or company that is not your employer and not a co-worker. In Austin work injuries, the recurring ones:

• The driver who hit you while you were working. Texas recorded 242 transportation-related workplace deaths in 2024, 43% of all workplace fatalities in the state, and 156 of those were roadway incidents involving motorized land vehicles. If you were driving for work on Ben White or I-35 and somebody rear-ended you, that driver's liability insurance is a claim the comp system never touches.
• The manufacturer of the machine, the tool or the vehicle. A product claim runs on a separate body of law and is covered on the Austin product liability page.
• A different contractor's crew on the same site. Another company's employee is not your fellow servant.
• The trucking company whose driver or load caused it, covered on the Austin 18-wheeler page.
• The property owner or occupier, where the hazard belonged to the premises rather than to your job.

The difference in value is not marginal. A third-party claim is a full tort case. It reaches past medical bills and future medical care, past lost wages and diminished earning capacity, into the categories comp refuses outright — pain and suffering, mental anguish, physical impairment, disfigurement, loss of consortium. A worker with a compensable back injury and a $1,271-a-week ceiling can have a seven-figure claim against the driver who caused it, and the two proceed side by side.

If your injury happened on a construction site, the party map is more complicated than this page can carry, and general contractor liability for a subcontractor's employee runs through a Texas statute this page deliberately does not cover. That analysis is on the Austin construction accident page.

The lien on your recovery, and how it gets negotiated

Nobody explains this part until the money arrives, and by then the leverage is gone.

If the comp carrier has been paying your medical bills and your income benefits, § 417.001(b) subrogates it to your rights against the third party. Its interest is limited to the total benefits paid or assumed, reduced by whatever percentage of responsibility the fact-finder assigns to your employer under Civil Practice and Remedies Code § 33.003. Section 417.002 then says the net recovery reimburses the carrier first, and anything above the reimbursement is treated as an advance against your future benefits — meaning the carrier can stop paying until the advance is used up, then resume.

In plain terms: the comp carrier gets repaid out of your third-party settlement, and part of what is left may not be spendable, because it is standing in for benefits you have not received yet.

Two levers matter, and this is why we handle both claims together.

Section 417.003 makes the carrier pay for the work of collecting its own money. Where the carrier's interest is not actively represented by its own lawyer, it owes a fee to the claimant's attorney out of the carrier's recovery — by agreement, or by court award of a reasonable fee up to one-third of the carrier's recovery plus a proportionate share of expenses. Where the carrier's lawyer does actively participate, the court apportions the fee between counsel out of the subrogation recovery. That fee comes out of the carrier's share, and it is the single most reliable way to shrink the lien.

The § 33.003 reduction is a live issue, not a formality. Every percentage point of responsibility a fact-finder puts on your employer comes off the carrier's interest.

Beyond the comp lien there may be hospital liens, health-plan reimbursement rights, and Medicare or Medicaid interests, each on its own rules. What arrives in your hands is the gross recovery minus every one of them, which is why we work the lien side from the first month rather than the last week. More on the underlying categories at medical expenses and lost wages.

Getting fired for filing: what the law does and does not protect

People do not report injuries because they need the job. That fear is rational and Texas law answers it only partly.

Chapter 451 of the Labor Code says a person may not discharge or in any other manner discriminate against an employee because the employee has:

1. filed a workers' compensation claim in good faith;
2. hired a lawyer to represent the employee in a claim;
3. instituted or caused to be instituted in good faith a proceeding under the Act; or
4. testified, or is about to testify, in such a proceeding.

Item 2 is worth pausing on. Hiring us is itself protected conduct.

Section 451.002 gives you reasonable damages for the violation and entitles an employee discharged in violation of § 451.001 to reinstatement in the former position. It also puts the burden of proof on the employee, which is the hard part: you have to connect the firing to the protected act, and employers rarely say the quiet part in an email. What wins these cases is sequence and inconsistency — a clean review file that turns critical the week after the claim, a policy applied to you and to nobody else, a termination reason that changes between the exit meeting and the unemployment hearing.

Note the limits honestly. Chapter 451 protects the workers' compensation claim. It does not create general protection for reporting a hazard, and Texas remains an at-will state, so an employer can fire you for a bad reason or no reason as long as the reason is not a prohibited one. For first responders, § 451.0025 waives governmental immunity for a Chapter 451 suit.

Your immigration status does not affect any of this. Texas courts allow injured workers to recover for on-the-job injuries regardless of status, we do not ask about it, and we do not report it.

Repetitive strain, chemical exposure and injuries that build up over time

Not every work injury has a date. Some of them have a slope.

Texas Labor Code § 401.011(34) defines occupational disease as a disease arising out of and in the course of employment that damages the physical structure of the body, and the definition expressly includes a repetitive trauma injury. It excludes an ordinary disease of life the general public is exposed to outside work, unless that disease is incident to a compensable injury. So a rotator cuff destroyed over three years of overhead work is inside the definition. A cold you caught at the office is not.

The clock is what makes this section different from every other injury on this site. Section 408.007 sets the date of injury for an occupational disease as the date the employee knew or should have known that the disease may be related to the employment. Not the first symptom. Not the first day on the job. The day the connection became knowable.

That rule reaches the injuries workers most often assume they have to live with:

• Carpal tunnel, cubital tunnel and tendinopathy from assembly, packing, keyboarding or hand-tool work.
• Cumulative lumbar and cervical disc injury from repeated lifting, pulling and carrying.
• Rotator cuff and shoulder impingement from sustained overhead work.
• Noise-induced hearing loss.
• Respiratory disease from silica, welding fume, isocyanates or solvent exposure.
• Contact dermatitis and chemical sensitization from unprotected handling.

Nationally, BLS reported 492,140 days-away-from-work cases in private industry over 2023-2024 from overexertion, repetitive motion and bodily conditions, with a median of 14 days away — the longest median of the major event categories, and nearly double the 8-day median across all causes. Those are national figures; BLS publishes case characteristics biennially and does not break them out by state.

Two practical warnings. First, § 409.001 gives you 30 days to report to your employer, and for an occupational disease that period runs from when you knew or should have known the condition might be work-related — so the day the doctor first says "this looks like it's from your job" is the day to report, not the day you decide how bad it is. Second, TDI's survey found that some nonsubscriber benefit plans specifically exclude occupational disease and repetitive trauma. A worker with a covered traumatic injury and an excluded repetitive one can be paid for the first and refused for the second by the same plan.

Heat illness on an Austin worksite

Texas has no state heat standard for workers, and after 2023 Austin does not have a local one either.

Austin adopted a rest-break ordinance for construction workers in 2010, and Dallas followed in 2015. House Bill 2127, the Texas Regulatory Consistency Act, took effect September 1, 2023 and broadly preempts local ordinances regulating in fields covered by state codes, which was widely understood to sweep in both break rules. A Travis County district court declared HB 2127 unconstitutional in August 2023; the State appealed, which suspended that ruling, and on July 18, 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 constitutional question was never reached. The practical position today is that nobody is enforcing the Austin or Dallas break rule.

What remains is federal. OSHA has no heat-specific standard in force; it enforces heat hazards under the General Duty Clause, § 5(a)(1) of the Occupational Safety and Health Act, 29 U.S.C. § 654(a)(1), which requires an employer to furnish a workplace free from recognized hazards likely to cause death or serious physical harm. OSHA published a proposed heat injury and illness prevention rule in the Federal Register on August 30, 2024; it had not been finalized as of this writing.

In a civil case, none of that is the point. The employer's duty is the common-law one: reasonable care for the safety of its workers. Whether that was met on a 104-degree August afternoon in Austin gets proved with facts — the heat index that day, what water and shade were available, whether new workers were acclimatized, whether anyone was trained to recognise heat exhaustion, and what happened in the twenty minutes after somebody stopped sweating.

The Division of Workers' Compensation recorded 8 Texas workplace deaths from exposure to temperature extremes in 2024. That category combines heat and cold and CFOI does not split them, so we will not tell you all eight were heat. It sits inside the 62 deaths from exposure to harmful substances or environments.

For construction-specific heat exposure and the site-safety obligations that go with it, see the Austin construction accident page.

Three clocks are running on a Texas work injury

Most injury pages have one deadline to explain. This one has three, and they do not run together.

30 days — tell your employer. Section 409.001 requires notice to the employer within 30 days of the injury, or within 30 days of when you knew or should have known an occupational disease might be work-related. Notice can go to the employer or to a supervisor or manager. Section 409.002 says missing it relieves the employer and its carrier of liability unless the employer or carrier had actual knowledge, DWC finds good cause, or the claim is not contested.

One year — file your claim with DWC. Section 409.003 requires the claim for compensation to be filed with the Division within one year of the injury, or of the date you knew or should have known a disease was work-related. Section 409.004 provides the same narrow escapes.

Two years — file suit. Civil Practice and Remedies Code § 16.003(a) gives you two years to bring a negligence action, and that is the clock on a nonsubscriber suit and on every third-party claim. It is the shortest realistic deadline in the sense that missing it ends the case with no administrative safety valve at all.

Do not let the one-year comp deadline lull you about the two-year one, and do not let the two-year one lull you about the 30-day notice. A worker who does everything right on the lawsuit clock and misses the 30-day notice can lose comp benefits he was entitled to for a year.

What our fee looks like on a work injury case

We work on a contingency fee. No fee unless there is a recovery, and no bill in the meantime.

Case expenses are separate from the fee and we advance them. What they consist of on a work injury is specific, and it is worth seeing because it explains where the work goes.

Establishing subscriber status. Coverage searches, a written DWC coverage verification, and where the answer is nonsubscriber, records from DWC on whether a Form-005 was ever filed. This is cheap and it is the first thing we do.

Getting the plan documents. On a nonsubscriber case the fight often starts with the occupational injury benefit plan itself — the summary you were given, the master plan document you were not, the arbitration agreement, the signature pages, and your complete personnel file. That is written discovery and, when the employer stalls, motion practice.

Proving employer negligence. Kroger v. Elwood means the case turns on a specific failure. Depending on the facts that means a safety engineer or human factors expert, maintenance and inspection records, training files, prior incident reports, and depositions of the supervisor and the safety manager.

Proving the disease link on a cumulative-trauma case. An occupational medicine physician, sometimes an ergonomist, and enough employment history to show exposure over time.

Valuing the loss. On a serious injury, a vocational expert on what work you can still do and an economist on what the earnings difference is worth over a working life.

Working the lien. On a third-party case with comp benefits paid, negotiating the carrier's subrogation interest and pressing the § 417.003 attorney-fee allocation is work that shows up in your net rather than the headline number.

The consultation costs nothing. If we look at it and the honest answer is that the employer is a subscriber, the third party is judgment-proof and the negligence proof is not there, we will say that and you will not owe us anything for hearing it.

The numbers behind Texas work injuries

Every figure in this section comes from a named government dataset. We pulled each one on September 5, 2026, and each is reproducible from the source listed at the bottom of this section. Where a number is national rather than Texas, it says so.

How many Texas employers skip workers' compensation. The Texas Department of Insurance runs a biennial employer survey, Employer Participation in the Texas Workers' Compensation System. It is a survey estimate, drawn from a random sample of private-sector Texas employers pulled from Texas Workforce Commission data; the 2022 edition rests on 1,619 completed interviews administered by the Public Policy Research Institute at Texas A&M University.

The 2018 and 2022 columns come from the 2022 edition of the survey. The 2024 column comes from DWC's Snapshot: 2024 Biennial Report to the 89th Texas Legislature, published November 2024, which reports the 2024 survey year as the lowest nonsubscription rate since 2016. The 2022 edition put the nonsubscriber employee population at roughly 1.4 million people.

The long trend, share of Texas private-sector employers that are nonsubscribers, from the 2022 edition: 44% (1993), 39% (1996), 35% (2001), 38% (2004), 37% (2006), 33% (2008), 32% (2010), 33% (2012), 33% (2014), 22% (2016), 28% (2018), 25% (2022).

Nonsubscription is concentrated at the small end. From the 2022 survey, share of employers that are nonsubscribers by headcount: 1-4 employees 31%; 5-9 18%; 10-49 13%; 50-99 7%; 100-499 12%; 500 or more 20%. If you work for a shop with fewer than five people, roughly one in three of those employers carries nothing. The most common reason nonsubscribers gave was having too few employees (26%); 23% said the law does not require it; 17% said premiums were too high.

And it varies sharply by industry. Same survey, 2022, share of employers that are nonsubscribers: Other Services 38%; Health Care and Educational Services 37%; Agriculture, Forestry, Fishing and Hunting 29%; Arts, Entertainment, Accommodation and Food Services 27%; Manufacturing 22%; Finance, Real Estate and Professional Services 22%; Wholesale and Retail Trade and Transportation 19%; Mining, Utilities and Construction 16%. The survey groups mining, utilities and construction together, and that combined group sits at the low end of nonsubscription, which surprises people; restaurants, salons, repair shops and home health sit at the high end.

Texas work injuries, most recent published year. From the Division of Workers' Compensation's 2024 Rates of Texas workplace injuries and illnesses, a sample-based estimate run with BLS: Texas private employers reported 172,800 total recordable nonfatal cases in 2024, an incidence rate of 1.7 per 100 full-time-equivalent employees, against a national rate of 2.3. By sector, the Texas rate per 100 FTEs was 3.5 in transportation and warehousing, 2.5 in retail trade, 2.5 in health care and social assistance, 2.1 in accommodation and food services, 1.9 in manufacturing, and 1.3 in construction. The highest individual industry rates in Texas were air transportation at 8.3 and couriers and messengers at 7.9.

Texas workplace deaths. From DWC's 2024 Texas Census of Fatal Occupational Injuries, a census rather than a sample: 557 fatal occupational injuries in Texas in 2024, a rate of 3.9 per 100,000 FTE workers, against a national rate of 3.3 on 5,070 deaths. By event: transportation incidents 242 (43%), contact incidents 91 (16%), falls, slips and trips 77 (14%), violent acts 75 (14%), exposure to harmful substances or environments 62 (11%), explosions and fires 10 (2%). Hispanic or Latino workers accounted for 253 of the 557, 45% of the total.

How long people are out, nationally. BLS publishes case characteristics on a two-year cycle. For US private industry across 2023-2024: 1,834,600 days-away-from-work cases, median 8 days away. By event, overexertion, repetitive motion and bodily conditions produced 492,140 of those cases at a median of 14 days; falls, slips and trips produced 479,480 at a median of 13 days; exposure to harmful substances or environments produced 196,540 at a median of 5 days.

Who this page is for. The Austin-Round Rock-San Marcos metro had 1,421,700 nonfarm jobs in July 2026 on preliminary BLS estimates, including 99,100 in mining, logging and construction, 87,000 in manufacturing, 214,000 in trade, transportation and utilities, and 155,300 in leisure and hospitality. Travis County alone had 931,200 covered workers in March 2026 under the Quarterly Census of Employment and Wages.

What we could not tell you. There is no Austin-only or Travis-County-only work injury count, because neither the fatal census nor the injury survey publishes a Texas metro breakdown and DWC claim counts by county are not a published series. We could have divided a state number by a population share and printed it. We did not, because that would be a number we made up. There is also no county-level figure for how many Austin employers are nonsubscribers; the TDI survey is statewide and does not support one.

Sources

• Texas Department of Insurance, Division of Workers' Compensation — Employer Participation in the Texas Workers' Compensation System, 2022 Estimates, published April 2023. PDF · summary page
• Texas Department of Insurance, Division of Workers' Compensation — Snapshot: 2024 Biennial Report to the 89th Texas Legislature, November 2024. Report
• Texas Department of Insurance, Division of Workers' Compensation — 2024 Texas Census of Fatal Occupational Injuries. PDF
• Texas Department of Insurance, Division of Workers' Compensation — 2024 Rates of Texas workplace injuries and illnesses. PDF
• U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics — Employer-Reported Workplace Injuries and Illnesses, 2023-2024, USDL-26-0101, released January 22, 2026. Release · Table 2
• U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics — County Employment and Wages in Texas, First Quarter 2026, USDL-26-1478-DAL, released September 4, 2026. Release
• U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics — Austin-Round Rock-San Marcos, TX Economy at a Glance. Data
• Texas Department of Insurance, Division of Workers' Compensation — Maximum and minimum weekly income benefits. Page

What to do this week

Six things, in order, and the first one is the one nobody thinks of.

1. Ask whether the employer is a subscriber, in writing. Send a short message to HR or your supervisor asking for the name of the workers' compensation carrier and the policy number. If the answer is that there is no coverage, you have that in writing. If there is no answer, run the DWC coverage search or email coverage.verification@tdi.texas.gov with the employer's name, physical address and your date of injury.
2. Photograph the posted notice. Section 406.005 requires it on the wall. Photograph it before it changes, along with the safety board, the hazard, the equipment and the area where it happened.
3. Report the injury in writing, today. Text or email beats a hallway conversation because it has a timestamp. Name every body part that hurts, not the worst one.
4. Ask for two documents. Your copy of the employer's first report of injury under § 409.005, and your complete personnel file including everything you signed at hire. Make both requests in writing and keep a copy of the request itself.
5. Sign nothing that resolves anything. A pre-injury liability waiver is void under § 406.033(e). A post-injury waiver is enforceable only if it came at least ten business days after the initial report of injury, after a medical evaluation from a nonemergency care doctor, in conspicuous type. If a release or a settlement is in front of you, that is the moment to call a lawyer rather than after.
6. Say what you actually cannot do. If a work-status report clears you for duty you cannot perform, tell the clinic and your supervisor in writing the same day.

Who you would be working with

Israel Medina, legally Israel Ruiz Medina, is the founding partner of Medina & Medina and a bilingual trial attorney. Texas Bar No. 24130487. Juris Doctor, Baylor University School of Law. Admitted in Texas and Nevada. Member of the Texas Trial Lawyers Association, the Austin Bar Association, the Travis County Bar Association and the American Association for Justice.

Israel is a first-generation American. His family came to this country from Mexico, built a life through hard work, and raised him to believe that a person who keeps their word and outworks everyone in the room can build something real. Watching his family work hard for everything they had taught him how the deck can be stacked against honest people; the legal system is complicated and insurance companies count on that. He handles injury cases from start to finish, investigates the facts, and prepares every case as if it will go to trial.

Rikki Medina, legally Rikki Olivia Medina, is the firm's other founding partner. Texas Bar No. 24144569. Juris Doctor, Baylor University School of Law. Admitted in Texas and Nevada. Member of the Texas Trial Lawyers Association, the Austin Bar Association and the Travis County Bar Association. Her practice includes workplace injuries, premises liability and slip-and-fall claims.

Full biographies: Israel Medina · Rikki Medina

Questions injured workers ask us

What injured workers ask us before they decide whether to call anyone.

More general questions are collected on our FAQ page.

Related pages on this site

• Hurt on a construction site specifically
• A fall at work on someone else's premises
• A machine or tool that failed
• A worker killed on the job
• A crash while driving for work
• Lost wages

Talk to a lawyer about your work injury

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.