If you suffer a personal injury and are forced to miss time at work, you can pursue compensation for lost income. Minnesota provides benefits for lost wages, but did you know that there’s more that goes into your claim award than just your salary? Below, we explain some other compensation factors that you should review if you want to maximize your award claim.
Lost Compensation Factors
During your injury case, you may use the terms “lost income” and “lost compensation” interchangeably, but they are actually two different things. Lost income refers to regular income that you will no longer receive as a result of your injury. Compensation encompasses all forms of payment or things of monetary value you would be eligible to receive in the course of your employment. It might sound a little confusing, but we’re sure it will be clearer once we provide some examples.
Here’s a look at some types of lost compensation you can add to the equation when filing an injury claim.
Sick Days – Most employers allow employees to accrue sick days. If you had to burn through all your sick days as a result of your injury, you can be compensated for their use. Usually you can claim a day’s worth of wages for every sick day you took due to your injury.
Vacation Days – In a similar manner, if you were forced or elected to use vacation days as a direct result of your inability to work due to your injury, you would be entitled to one day’s compensation for your lost vacation days.
Holidays or Bonus Days – Some offices offer paid holidays or other unique perks, like a free paid day off on your birthday or when the team hits certain quarterly performance goals. You could also claim compensation for each of these missed days.
Bonuses – Lost wage compensation is sometimes calculated by looking at your bi-weekly or monthly income, but what if you get paid quarterly or year-end bonuses? Those too can be considered in your compensation claim, and you should bring these bonuses to the attention of your injury lawyer.
Work Perks – If you routinely received perks through your job, like free sports tickets, free golf outings or similar unique job perks, you can add these lost items into your compensation claim award.
Precisely calculating these amounts and adding them into your claim can be difficult and time consuming, so your best bet to ensure everything is done quickly and correctly is to hire an injury compensation firm. We’ve helped maximize payouts for clients in the past, and we’d be happy to do the same for you. Contact our office today for more information.
