California Workers' Comp Pay 2026: TTD Rates, Wait and Time Limits

If you were hurt on the job in California and your doctor has taken you off work, the payment that replaces your paycheck is called temporary disability, or TD. The rules for it fit on one page, but the numbers change every January, and most of the questions people ask come down to four things: how much the check is, when it starts, what happens if you go back on light duty, and when it stops. This guide covers each one for injuries in 2026.

How much California workers' comp pays per week

California pays temporary total disability at two-thirds of your average weekly earnings. Average weekly earnings means your gross pay before taxes, including overtime and regular second jobs, averaged over a period that fairly reflects what you were earning before the injury.

That two-thirds is held inside a band the state resets each year. For injuries in 2026, the Division of Workers' Compensation (DWC) set:

Injury year	Weekly minimum	Weekly maximum
2026	$264.61	$1,764.11
2025	$252.03	$1,680.29

The DWC gets these figures by raising the prior year's earnings limits by the growth in the state average weekly wage, which was just under 5% for 2026. In practice it means:

• If you earned about $2,646 a week or more, you get the maximum, $1,764.11.
• If you earned about $397 a week or less, you get the minimum, $264.61.
• Everyone in between gets exactly two-thirds of their earnings.

A worker who averaged $1,050 a week gets $700 a week in TD. One who averaged $3,200 a week still gets $1,764.11, because the cap applies. The rate is locked to the table for your date of injury. If you were hurt in December 2025 and are still off work in 2026, your check is based on the 2025 table, not the new one.

The 3-day waiting period

The first three days you are off work are not paid, with two exceptions:

1. Your disability lasts more than 14 days, in which case the first three days are paid as well.
2. You are admitted to a hospital as an inpatient, which waives the wait.

So a worker earning $1,050 a week who is off for 10 days receives pay for 7 of them, about $700. If the same worker is off for 30 days, all 30 are paid, roughly $3,000.

When the first check should arrive

Once the insurer knows about your injury and that you can't work, it generally has 14 days to send the first temporary disability payment, and then pays every two weeks. California adds a 10% penalty to late TD payments, which is one reason insurers usually start paying while they investigate.

The deadlines on your side matter just as much. Tell your employer about the injury within 30 days. Your employer should then give you a claim form (DWC-1) within one working day. The general deadline to file a workers' comp claim is one year from the date of injury. While the insurer decides whether to accept the claim, which it must do within 90 days, it has to pay up to $10,000 of medical treatment.

Light duty and temporary partial disability

Many workers go back to modified or part-time work before they fully heal. If that work pays less than you were earning, California pays temporary partial disability: two-thirds of the weekly wage loss.

Take the worker who earned $1,050 a week. If light duty pays $600 a week, the loss is $450, and TPD is two-thirds of that, $300 a week. Added to the $600 paycheck, the worker takes home $900 a week. TPD can never exceed the TTD maximum.

What decides whether you get total or partial benefits is your treating doctor's work status report. If the doctor says you can do modified work and your employer offers it, you will usually move from TTD to TPD. If the employer can't accommodate the restrictions, TTD generally continues.

How long temporary disability lasts in California

For most injuries since 2008, temporary disability is limited to 104 compensable weeks within five years of the date of injury. A handful of serious conditions, such as severe burns, amputations, chronic lung disease and certain eye injuries, can extend that to 240 weeks.

TD also stops earlier if your doctor says you can return to your regular job or you reach permanent and stationary status, the point where your condition is not expected to improve further with treatment. At that point any lasting impairment is handled by permanent disability benefits, which use a separate rating schedule. This calculator does not cover them.

Common mistakes that shrink a California TD check

• Leaving out overtime or a second job. California counts earnings from all employment. If you held two jobs, both belong in your average weekly earnings.
• Using the wrong year's table. The table that applies is the one for your injury date. Workers hurt late in a year sometimes compare their check to the new January maximum.
• Counting days off the wrong way. The 14-day rule refers to the length of the disability, not to working days, and a hospital admission removes the wait entirely.

Worked examples for 2026 injuries

Average weekly earnings	Situation	Weekly benefit
$350	Off work	$264.61 (minimum)
$1,050	Off work	$700.00
$1,050	Light duty at $600	$300.00 TPD
$3,200	Off work	$1,764.11 (maximum)

You can run your own numbers with the California workers' comp calculator. It applies the earnings limits, the waiting period and the 104-week cap, and shows the Labor Code section behind each step.

If your California check is late or looks wrong

Start with the numbers. Divide your weekly check by your average weekly wage and compare the result with the formula above. If it is lower than it should be, the usual causes are an average weekly wage that left out overtime or part of the look-back period, the wrong year's rate table, or days counted under the waiting period that should have been paid back.

Then ask the insurer, in writing, for the wage statement and the calculation it used. Most errors are corrected at this stage once you send pay stubs that show the difference. If payments have stopped without a written explanation, or the insurer won't correct a clear mistake, contact the Division of Workers' Compensation's Information & Assistance Unit. State agencies run ombudsman or customer-assistance programs for injured workers, and a workers' compensation attorney can review the claim; in most states their fees are limited by law and come out of the benefits recovered rather than being billed up front.

Is California workers' comp taxable?

No. Workers' compensation benefits paid under a state workers' compensation act are excluded from federal income tax, and California does not tax them either. That is part of the reason the two-thirds rate often comes closer to your take-home pay than it first appears.

Where these figures come from

• California DWC, Newsline 2025-116: temporary total disability rates for 2026
• California Labor Code §§4453, 4652, 4653, 4654 and 4656
• Nolo, How and when to file a workers' comp claim in California

If your check doesn't match these numbers, ask the claims administrator to show how it calculated your average weekly earnings. Errors in that one figure explain most underpayments.