Evaluating a Light-Duty Job Offer
Before you answer a light-duty offer, measure it against your restrictions, your treatment schedule, and the job as it will actually be worked. A checklist for injured Texas workers, including offers designed to fail.
The offer is a document. Evaluate it like one.
A light-duty offer changes your claim whether you accept it or refuse it. Accepting puts you back on a payroll under new conditions. Refusing a valid offer can shrink your income benefits. So the offer deserves the same treatment you would give any document with money attached: read it slowly, compare it against the records, and answer in writing.
The legal requirements for a valid offer, called a bona fide offer of employment, have their own page: When Your Employer Offers Light Duty: The Bona Fide Offer (BFOE). This page assumes the offer is in your hands and asks the practical question: is this a job you can actually do, or a document built to produce a refusal?
The checklist
Put the offer next to your current DWC073, the work status report listing your doctor's restrictions, and work through five comparisons.
1. Duties against restrictions. Every task the offer describes must fit inside the restrictions. Vague duty descriptions ("light warehouse tasks," "assisting as needed") are the most common defect, because a vague description cannot be checked. Ask, in writing, for the specific tasks, weights, and time on your feet. 2. Schedule against treatment. You are still a patient. If the offered shift conflicts with physical therapy or doctor's appointments, raise it in writing before accepting. Missing treatment hurts both your recovery and your claim. 3. Wage against your old wage. Light duty often pays less. That does not make the offer invalid, but it changes your benefit math: partial benefits can cover part of the difference. Returning to Work at Reduced Wages and How Returning to Work Affects Your Benefits explain what happens to your checks. 4. Location and hours against your life. The offer must state where and when you will work, and the location must be one you can reasonably reach. A night shift across town, offered to a day worker who no longer drives because of medication, is a real mismatch worth stating in writing. 5. The paper against the current restrictions. Confirm the offer responds to your doctor's most recent DWC073, not an older one. Restrictions change; an offer built on last month's report has not engaged with this month's limits.
If the offer passes all five, accepting is usually the sound move, for your recovery and your income. If it fails one, say which one, in writing, and ask your doctor to review the offer's job description against the restrictions when the mismatch is medical. A doctor's written opinion that the described duties exceed the restrictions is the strongest answer you can attach.
What if the light-duty job is a sham?
A sham light-duty job is one that exists to change your benefits rather than to use your work: a job description written to look compliant on paper while the actual assignment is different, or work designed to be so pointless or humiliating that you quit. The response to both is the same: do not walk out, and start documenting the gap between the written job and the real one.
The pattern has recognizable forms. The offer says seated inspection work; the floor supervisor assigns lifting by the second day. The job is counting bolts in a room by yourself, on a schedule that happens to conflict with your therapy. The offer arrives days before a benefit review conference, is valid to the letter, and the "job" evaporates a few weeks after your checks are reduced.
What to do:
1. Accept a facially valid offer rather than refusing on suspicion. A refusal based on what you suspect the job will really be is hard to defend. Documented reality is easy to defend, and it is collected from inside the job. 2. Keep a daily record from day one: what you were assigned, what you actually did, weights, hours on your feet. Notes made the same day beat memory a year later. 3. When the real work departs from the written offer, object in writing the same day, the same way you would for any restriction violation: name the task, name the restriction, ask to be assigned within the offer's own description. Returning to Work With Medical Restrictions gives the full sequence. 4. Do not quit in frustration. Quitting converts the employer's bad faith into what the carrier will call your voluntary decision, and the carrier will argue your lost wages now flow from the quit, not the injury. Quitting Your Job While You're on Workers' Comp and How Your Actions Can Affect a Disability Determination cover what resigning does to a claim. If the assignment is genuinely aggravating your injury, the exit runs through your doctor's pen, not through the parking lot. 5. Send your records to the adjuster and, if you have one, your lawyer once the pattern is clear. A job that never matched its written description stops protecting the carrier's benefit reduction.
After you answer
Whatever you decide, answer in writing and keep the copy. If you accept, the job either works or it does not; if your body cannot do it, or the duties grow past the restrictions, disability can begin again and benefits can resume (When Disability Begins, Changes, and Ends explains how). If you decline for stated medical reasons, expect the carrier to test the refusal, and keep every document that supports it. Either way, the offer, the DWC073, and your written answer are the three papers the whole question will be judged on.
Attorney notes regarding return to work & restrictions
Returning to work after an injury is an important part of many workers’ compensation claims. But decisions about when you return, what work you accept, and whether you can safely perform it can also affect your income benefits. This is an area where a decision made at work today can become part of a workers’ compensation dispute tomorrow.
Be careful when:
- You are asked to work outside your restrictions: Your employer’s expectations and your doctor’s restrictions may not always match.
- You receive a light-duty job offer: Do not ignore it. Whether the offer is valid and whether you can perform the job can affect your benefits.
- You try returning to work but cannot continue: Make sure the reason you stopped working is properly documented.
- You are fired, laid off, or asked to resign: Losing your job does not automatically answer whether you are entitled to workers’ compensation income benefits.
- Your wages decrease after the injury: Returning to work does not always mean your right to income benefits has ended.
At Abbott, Clay & Bedoy, we help injured workers evaluate return-to-work issues, medical restrictions, light-duty offers, and disputes over disability and income benefits.
Do not make an important employment decision without considering what it could do to your workers’ compensation claim. We can help you understand your options before a workplace problem becomes a benefits problem.
Get legal helpContact Us
