Florida's appeals court has rewritten how workers' comp carriers must calculate claim deadlines, overturning 26 years of settled precedent.
In an en banc decision handed down on March 23, 2026, the First District Court of Appeal ruled that the word "toll" in section 440.19(2) of the Florida Statutes means to suspend or stop temporarily the two-year statute of limitations clock – not to extend it by creating a separate one-year filing window, as the same court had held since 1999.
The dispute arose from a workplace injury. Nancy Estes, a teacher employed by the Palm Beach County School District, tripped and fell on the job on September 30, 2021. The employer and its carrier, Davies Claims North America, accepted the injury as compensable and paid medical and indemnity benefits for approximately sixteen months, from October 2021 through January 26, 2023. Shortly after benefits stopped, the carrier filed a Notice of Denial on February 8, 2023, asserting that the accident was no longer the major contributing cause of Estes's need for further treatment.
Estes did not file a petition for benefits until June 2024, roughly seventeen months after receiving her last payment. She sought a one-time change in orthopedists and other benefits related to her original injuries. The carrier argued the claim was time-barred. Under the interpretation that had governed Florida since 1999, the math was straightforward: the accident occurred in September 2021, the last benefit was furnished in January 2023, and the one-year tolling window expired in January 2024. Estes's June 2024 filing came five months after that deadline. The Judge of Compensation Claims agreed and dismissed the entire petition with prejudice.
The statute at the center of the case has two relevant parts. Section 440.19(1) sets the baseline: a petition for benefits is barred unless filed within two years of the date the employee knew or should have known the injury arose from work. Section 440.19(2) provides that payment of any indemnity benefit or the furnishing of remedial treatment shall toll the limitations period set forth above for one year from the date of such payment. The provision also specifies that this tolling period does not apply to the issues of compensability, maximum medical improvement, or permanent impairment.
For more than two decades, the court had treated the tolling provision as functionally creating a one-year extension from the date of the last benefit payment. Under that approach, the two-year clock was never paused. It ran continuously from the date of the accident, and the one-year tolling period simply gave claimants an additional window that could run past the two-year mark if benefits were provided late enough. The en banc majority concluded that this interpretation was incorrect.
Chief Judge Osterhaus, writing for the majority, looked to the established legal meaning of the word. Legal dictionaries define "toll," when used in the context of a statutory limitations period, as meaning to suspend or stop temporarily the running of that period. The court also cited the US Supreme Court's 2018 decision in Artis v. D.C., which described tolling as a suspension of a limitation period that, once lifted, allows the clock to resume from where it left off.
The court found further support within the statute itself. Section 440.19(5) addresses tolling for minors and mentally incompetent persons, providing that the limitations period is tolled while such a person has no guardian. Under that subsection, the two-year clock is plainly suspended – it stops and resumes only after the condition ends. The majority reasoned that the same word cannot carry a different meaning in subsection (2).
The legislative history reinforced this reading. Before 1994, the statute operated on a rolling extension model. Each new payment or treatment gave the claimant a fresh two-year window from the date of that payment. The Legislature overhauled the statute during a special session in late 1993, with the changes taking effect in 1994. The revision was prompted by what the Legislature described as significant financial difficulties in the workers' compensation system. The new statute replaced the prior extension language with the word "toll" and shortened the resulting period from two years to one year. The majority held that the shift in language reflected a deliberate shift in approach.
The court also drew on the Florida Supreme Court's 2000 decision in Hankey v. Yarian, where the high court stated that the plain meaning of "toll" in a statute-of-limitations context had been routinely and consistently interpreted as suspending the running of the limitations clock until the identified condition is settled. The Hankey court also drew a clear distinction between an extension of a limitations period and a tolling of a limitations period, treating them as separate concepts with different legal effects.
Applied to the facts of this case, the result was that the two-year limitations clock was suspended almost immediately after the accident because benefits began within two days. The clock remained paused while benefits continued and for one year after the last benefit was furnished in January 2023. When the clock resumed running in approximately January 2024, Estes still had most of her original two-year period remaining. Her June 2024 petition was timely, with the limitations deadline not arriving until approximately January 2026. The court set aside the final order and remanded the case for further proceedings.
The court also rejected the carrier's alternative argument that the entire case should be treated as a compensability issue, which would take it outside the tolling provision altogether. The majority noted that compensability of Estes's original injuries was accepted long ago, the carrier had paid benefits for sixteen months, and the pretrial stipulation confirmed the injuries were accepted as related to the accident. The court drew a distinction between compensability – whether an injury is covered under the workers' compensation law – and disputes over entitlement to specific benefits flowing from an already-accepted injury.
Two judges dissented, each authoring a separate opinion.
Judge Bilbrey argued that the court's prior decisions had consistently used the word "toll" to mean "extend" and that the Legislature was presumed to have been aware of that usage when it enacted the 1994 amendments. The dissent raised practical concerns about the new framework. Because the statute provides that each payment of any indemnity benefit or furnishing of remedial treatment triggers a new one-year suspension, Judge Bilbrey warned that the limitations period could be extended for many years in most cases. In Estes's case, the record showed the carrier had provided payments for treatment well over 150 times. If each of those payments triggered its own one-year suspension, the statute of limitations would be effectively neutralized. The dissent also argued that reliance interests weighed against overturning the prior interpretation, noting that the Legislature had not amended the statute in over 25 years despite having the opportunity to do so.
Judge M.K. Thomas focused on procedural grounds, arguing that Estes should be bound by her stipulation below that the petition raised an issue of compensability – which would have disqualified her from the tolling provision entirely. Judge Thomas also challenged the majority's narrow reading of compensability and warned that the new tolling framework would be difficult to administer in practice. The dissent suggested that legislative action may be needed to restore a workable statute of limitations for workers' compensation cases.
For carriers and claims administrators, the operational impact is immediate. The prior rule, established in the court's 1999 Best decision, was simple: a petition is timely if filed within two years of the accident or within one year of the last benefit payment, whichever is later. The new framework requires tracking two clocks that run in opposition. The two-year limitations clock starts at the date of the accident. Each time a benefit is paid or treatment furnished, that clock stops and a one-year tolling clock begins. If another benefit is paid before the tolling clock expires, it resets to one year. When the tolling clock runs out without being reset, the two-year clock resumes from where it stopped. In a claim with frequent payments – which describes the vast majority of workers' compensation cases – the filing window could extend well beyond the original two-year period.
Adjusters face an additional challenge. Under section 440.19(4), the statute of limitations defense must be asserted in the first responsive pleading to a petition for benefits, and under section 440.192(8), that response is due within fourteen days. Performing the dual-clock calculation accurately under those time constraints adds a layer of complexity to routine claims handling.
