Does Workers Comp Cover Your Commute in Massachusetts?

Usually not. Massachusetts follows what is called the going and coming rule, which holds that the workers compensation act does not cover employees travelling to work in the morning or home at the end of the day. The rule dates to Chernick’s Case, decided by the Supreme Judicial Court in 1934, and it is still the starting point today. But it is a starting point, not a wall. There are recognised situations in which a trip that looks like a commute is covered, and there is a second and often more valuable route that most people miss entirely: if another driver caused the crash, you have an ordinary Massachusetts injury claim against that driver whether or not workers compensation applies. The two questions are separate, and the answer to one does not decide the other. To talk through a crash on the way to or from work, call Jim Glaser Law at (617) JIM-WINS. The line is answered 24 hours a day, and the first telephone consultation is free.

Where the Rule Comes From

M.G.L. c. 152, sec. 26 is the section that decides what workers compensation covers. It reaches an injury “arising out of and in the course of his employment,” and it also reaches an employee hurt while “actually engaged, with his employer’s authorization, in the business affairs or undertakings of his employer.”

Those two phrases carry the whole question. An ordinary commute is not usually either one. You are not engaged in your employer’s business while you drive to the office; you are getting yourself to the place where that business will later happen. The risk you face on that drive, other traffic, weather, road conditions, is a risk shared with every other person on the road at that hour, whether they are going to work, to a hospital, or to nowhere in particular. Massachusetts courts have treated that shared quality as the reason the commute sits outside the act.

Chernick’s Case put it directly in 1934: the compensation act “does not extend to cover employees going to and coming from their work.” Almost a century later that sentence still gets quoted in Department of Industrial Accidents decisions.

The label attached to the doctrine, the going and coming rule, is judge-made. You will not find it in c. 152. What you will find is sec. 26 and its two phrases, and a long line of decisions working out what falls inside them.

The Exceptions That Actually Come Up

The rule has exceptions, and they are not narrow curiosities. Between them they cover a large share of the people who get hurt on the road in connection with work.

You were driving as part of the job. This is the cleanest case and it is not really an exception at all, because a work trip is not a commute. Section 26 speaks to an employee operating a vehicle “in the performance of work in connection with the business affairs or undertakings of his employer.” A home health aide driving between two clients, a technician going from a job site to a supply house, a manager driving to a branch office at midday: those are work trips, and an injury on one of them is normally within the act.

You were on a special errand. If the employer sends you somewhere on a trip that is distinct from your regular commute, the employment relationship is not suspended for the duration of that trip. The Supreme Judicial Court described this exception in Haslam’s Case in 2008, and the phrase it used is the operative test: a special trip “distinct from his regular commute to and from work.” Picking up supplies on the way in because your supervisor asked you to is the ordinary shape of this. Stopping for your own coffee is not.

You are a traveling employee. Some jobs have no fixed workplace to commute to. A field service representative whose territory is the whole of southeastern Massachusetts does not have an office in the ordinary sense. Where an employee is genuinely a traveling employee, the going and coming rule has little application, because the concept it depends on, a fixed place of work with a trip on either side of it, does not describe the job.

You were still on the employer’s premises. The rule is about travel between home and work, so it does not start until you have left the employer’s property. An employer owned or maintained parking lot is generally treated as part of the premises for this purpose, and travel between two parts of the same premises, including crossing a public road between a lot and the building, has been treated as within the employment rather than outside it. A slip in the company lot on the way to your car is a very different case from a collision two miles down the road.

The employer provided the transportation. Where the employer supplies the ride, or supplies a facility for the use and convenience of employees, it takes on responsibility for injuries occurring in the use of that facility and in travel between it and the workplace. A shuttle from a satellite lot is the common example.

The trip served two purposes. A trip that would have been made for the employer anyway does not stop being a work trip because it also got you home. This is fact-heavy and it turns on whether the business purpose would have required the journey on its own.

You were paid for the travel time, or on call. Neither fact decides the question by itself, but both are evidence about what the parties treated the travel as being, and both come up in argued cases.

Answer Capsule

Massachusetts workers compensation generally does not cover an ordinary commute. Under the going and coming rule, stated in Chernick’s Case, 286 Mass. 168 (1934), and still applied today, the act “does not extend to cover employees going to and coming from their work,” because M.G.L. c. 152, sec. 26 reaches only injuries “arising out of and in the course of” employment. The recognised exceptions are real: driving as part of the job, a special errand distinct from the regular commute, being a traveling employee with no fixed workplace, being injured on the employer’s premises including an employer owned or maintained parking lot, employer provided transportation, and dual purpose trips. Work induced exhaustion by itself is not enough. In Haslam’s Case, 451 Mass. 101 (2008), the Supreme Judicial Court held that injuries from a crash on the drive home after roughly twenty-seven hours without sleep were not compensable where the employer had not required the extra hours and no special errand was shown. Separately, and this is what most people miss, if another driver caused the crash you have an ordinary Massachusetts injury claim against that driver regardless of workers compensation, subject to the three-year limit in M.G.L. c. 260, sec. 2A. If compensation is also paid, M.G.L. c. 152, sec. 15 governs the insurer’s share, requires board or court approval of any settlement, and gives the employee anything recovered above what the insurer paid. Where comp does apply, M.G.L. c. 152, sec. 34 pays sixty percent of the average weekly wage for up to 156 weeks, sec. 35 pays sixty percent of the wage difference during partial incapacity, sec. 34A pays two-thirds of the average weekly wage for permanent and total incapacity, and sec. 30 requires the insurer to furnish adequate and reasonable health care with no copayments or deductibles. Notice must be given as soon as practicable and a claim filed within four years under sec. 41. Call Jim Glaser Law at (617) JIM-WINS; the first telephone consultation is free.

What Haslam’s Case Settled, and What It Did Not

Haslam’s Case is worth understanding because it is the case people reach for when the commute injury has a work-related cause behind it.

The employee had worked something in the order of twenty-seven hours without sleep. Driving home, he was hurt in a one-car crash. An administrative judge found the injuries compensable, reasoning that exhaustion caused by the work had caused the accident, which made the accident a consequence of the employment rather than of the commute.

The Supreme Judicial Court disagreed. The injuries were not compensable, where the employer had not required the employee to work beyond his regular and far shorter shift, and where he had not shown that he was on a special errand for the employer distinct from his ordinary commute home.

Read carefully, the decision is narrower than it first appears. It does not hold that work induced fatigue can never matter. It holds that fatigue alone, in a case where the long hours were not required by the employer and no other exception applied, did not carry the claim past the going and coming rule. The facts a later claim would need are visible in the negative space of the holding: hours the employer required rather than permitted, and a trip that is something other than the daily drive home.

The practical lesson is that the exception you are arguing has to be identified precisely. “The job made me tired” is not an exception. “The employer required a twenty-seven hour shift” and “I was sent on an errand” are arguments about specific doctrines with specific elements.

The Claim Most People Miss

Here is the part that matters more than the doctrine, and it gets overlooked constantly because the two systems are administered so differently.

Workers compensation is a no-fault system. It pays whether or not anyone was careless, and in exchange, under M.G.L. c. 152, sec. 24, an employee is “held to have waived his right of action at common law” against the employer for a compensable injury, unless written notice preserving that right was given to the employer at the time of hire, which virtually nobody does.

That waiver runs to the employer. It does not run to the rest of the world. If a driver ran a light and hit you on your way home, that driver is not your employer and sec. 24 has nothing to say about them.

So the question “does workers comp cover my commute” and the question “can I recover for this crash” are different questions with different answers. A commute crash caused by another driver is an ordinary Massachusetts motor vehicle injury claim. Personal injury protection benefits under the crash victim’s own policy apply in the usual way, described in Massachusetts PIP coverage. Recovery for pain and suffering from the at-fault driver runs through the serious injury threshold. Fault is apportioned under M.G.L. c. 231, sec. 85, which bars recovery only when your own share of the negligence is greater than the defendants’ combined share, and which presumes you were in the exercise of due care until someone proves otherwise. That framework is set out in comparative negligence in Massachusetts and in how fault is determined.

The deadline for that claim is three years. M.G.L. c. 260, sec. 2A provides that tort actions “shall be commenced only within three years next after the cause of action accrues.” More detail is in the Massachusetts statute of limitations.

When Both Systems Apply at Once

Sometimes the trip is covered by compensation and another driver is also at fault. A delivery driver rear-ended while on a route is the standard picture. M.G.L. c. 152, sec. 15 governs what happens then, and its opening line is the point: where the injury “was caused under circumstances creating a legal liability in some person other than the insured to pay damages,” the employee is “entitled, without election, to the compensation and other benefits provided under this chapter.”

Without election. You do not have to choose. You take the compensation benefits, and the claim against the at-fault driver stays alive.

What sec. 15 then does is sort out the money so the same loss is not paid twice. The compensation insurer has an interest in the third-party recovery to the extent of what it paid. Anything recovered beyond that goes to the employee. The insurer cannot bring the third-party action itself until compensation has been paid and seven months have passed since the injury. And a settlement of the third-party case requires approval by the board, the reviewing board, or the court, after a hearing at which both sides are heard, with the court examining whether the allocation among family members with potential claims is fair.

That approval requirement is not a formality, and it is the single most common reason a commute case goes sideways when it is handled without counsel. A third-party settlement signed without addressing the compensation insurer’s interest is a problem you have created for yourself, and it is much harder to fix afterwards than to handle correctly at the time.

What Compensation Pays, If the Trip Is Covered

If an exception applies and the injury is compensable, these are the benefits the statute provides.

Medical treatment is covered under M.G.L. c. 152, sec. 30. The insurer “shall furnish to an injured employee adequate and reasonable health care services, and medicines if needed,” and the section is explicit that “in no instance shall employees be required to make copayments or pay deductibles.” The obligation lasts “so long as such services are necessary.” There is no fixed cut-off date written into the section.

Wage replacement depends on how disabling the injury is:

Benefit	Section	Rate	Duration
Temporary total incapacity	sec. 34	60 percent of the average weekly wage before the injury	not more than 156 weeks
Partial incapacity	sec. 35	60 percent of the difference between the pre-injury wage and what you can earn now	260 weeks, extendable to 520 on the statutory findings
Permanent and total incapacity	sec. 34A	two-thirds of the average weekly wage before the injury	while the incapacity lasts

All three are subject to the statutory maximum and minimum weekly compensation rates. Section 35 carries its own ceiling: partial benefits cannot exceed “seventy-five percent of what such employee would receive if he or she were eligible for total incapacity benefits under section thirty-four.” Where sec. 35 is extended past 260 weeks, sec. 34 and sec. 35 combined cannot exceed 520 weeks. How those periods interact over the life of a claim is covered in how long workers comp lasts in Massachusetts.

Notice compensation does not pay for pain and suffering. That is the trade the system makes, and it is why the third-party claim against an at-fault driver is frequently worth more than the compensation claim sitting beside it. The same two-track structure governs injuries on a job site rather than on the commute, which is set out in who pays for a construction site injury in Massachusetts.

The Deadlines Are Different, and Both Are Real

This is where commute cases get lost, because the two systems run on separate clocks and missing either one costs you that side of the case.

On the compensation side, M.G.L. c. 152, sec. 41 requires notice to the insurer or the insured “as soon as practicable after the happening thereof.” The claim itself must be filed within four years “from the date the employee first became aware of the causal relationship between his disability and his employment,” and within four years after death in a death case. If a third-party action is discontinued, a compensation claim gets a 60-day window following the discontinuance. Payment of compensation, or the filing of a claim, tolls the limitation period for benefits due for that injury.

On the tort side, the three-year period in c. 260, sec. 2A applies, and it is not tolled by anything happening at the Department of Industrial Accidents. A compensation claim that has been pending for two and a half years while everyone argues about the going and coming rule has done nothing at all to preserve the claim against the driver who hit you.

Both clocks start at the crash. Treat them as independent, because they are.

What to Do After a Crash on the Way To or From Work

The steps that protect both claims at once are not complicated, and the first two matter most.

1. Report it to your employer in writing, even if you assume it is not covered. Written notice as soon as practicable is what sec. 41 asks for. Reporting costs nothing and preserves a claim you may later discover is compensable under one of the exceptions. Deciding for yourself that the rule bars you, and saying nothing, is how a covered special errand quietly becomes an unreported one.
2. Treat it as an ordinary crash as well. Get the police report, exchange information, photograph the scene and the vehicles, and get medical attention promptly. The steps are the same ones set out in reporting a car accident in Massachusetts.
3. Write down what the trip was actually for, while you remember it. Who asked you to go, what you were carrying, whether you had already left the property, where you were going next. Those details decide which exception is available, and memory for them degrades fast.
4. Be careful about recorded statements. Both the compensation insurer and the other driver’s insurer may ask for one, and the questions about the purpose of your trip are not idle. The considerations are set out in recorded statements to insurance companies.
5. Do not settle the third-party case without dealing with the compensation lien. Section 15 requires approval, and an unapproved settlement is a mess.

Local practice detail on workers compensation claims is on the city pages, including Brockton workers compensation, Worcester workers compensation and Lowell workers compensation.

Frequently Asked Questions

Q: Is my drive to work covered by workers comp in Massachusetts?

A: Usually not. The going and coming rule, stated in Chernick’s Case, 286 Mass. 168 (1934), holds that the compensation act “does not extend to cover employees going to and coming from their work.” The rule exists because the risks of an ordinary commute are the risks the general public faces on the road, not risks created by the job. But the rule has real exceptions, and being hurt on the way to work does not by itself end the inquiry.

Q: What is the special errand exception?

A: It applies when the employer sends you on a trip that is distinct from your regular commute. The Supreme Judicial Court described it in Haslam’s Case, 451 Mass. 101 (2008), as a special trip distinct from the ordinary drive to and from work, during which the employment relationship is not suspended. Being asked to collect something on your way in is the ordinary shape of it. Errands you chose for your own convenience are not.

Q: I was hurt in my employer’s parking lot. Is that a commute injury?

A: Generally not, because the going and coming rule concerns travel between home and work, and an employer owned or maintained lot is usually treated as part of the employment premises. Travel between two parts of the same premises, including across a public road separating a lot from the building, has likewise been treated as within the employment. The facts of ownership, control and maintenance of the lot matter, so this is worth checking rather than assuming.

Q: I crashed driving home after an exhausting shift. Does that count?

A: Not on exhaustion alone. That was the question in Haslam’s Case, where the employee crashed after roughly twenty-seven hours without sleep, and the Supreme Judicial Court held the injuries were not compensable because the employer had not required the extra hours and no special errand was shown. What the decision leaves open is a case with different facts, particularly hours the employer required rather than permitted. Fatigue is a fact in the case, not an exception by itself.

Q: If workers comp does not cover my commute, do I have any claim at all?

A: Very possibly, and this is the part people miss. If another driver caused the crash, that driver is not your employer, and the exclusivity waiver in M.G.L. c. 152, sec. 24 does not protect them. You have an ordinary Massachusetts motor vehicle injury claim, with personal injury protection benefits, the serious injury threshold for pain and suffering, and fault apportioned under M.G.L. c. 231, sec. 85. The deadline is three years under M.G.L. c. 260, sec. 2A.

Q: Can I collect workers comp and sue the other driver at the same time?

A: Yes, where the injury is compensable and someone other than your employer caused it. M.G.L. c. 152, sec. 15 says the employee is entitled “without election” to compensation benefits in that situation. The section then sorts out the money: the compensation insurer has an interest in the third-party recovery to the extent of what it paid, anything above that goes to the employee, and any settlement requires approval by the board, the reviewing board or the court after a hearing.

Q: How long do I have to file?

A: Two separate deadlines. For compensation, M.G.L. c. 152, sec. 41 requires notice as soon as practicable and a claim within four years of becoming aware of the causal relationship between the disability and the employment. For a claim against an at-fault driver, three years under M.G.L. c. 260, sec. 2A. Filing at the Department of Industrial Accidents does nothing to preserve the tort claim, so the three-year clock runs regardless of what is pending on the compensation side.

Q: What does workers comp pay if my trip does turn out to be covered?

A: Medical treatment under M.G.L. c. 152, sec. 30, with no copayments or deductibles, for as long as the services are necessary. Wage replacement at sixty percent of the pre-injury average weekly wage under sec. 34 for up to 156 weeks of temporary total incapacity, sixty percent of the wage difference under sec. 35 during partial incapacity, and two-thirds of the average weekly wage under sec. 34A for permanent and total incapacity, all within the statutory maximum and minimum rates. Compensation does not pay for pain and suffering.

Q: Is Jimmy Knows AI giving me legal advice?

A: No. This is general information about Massachusetts law, not legal advice, and reading it does not create an attorney-client relationship. Whether any particular trip falls inside or outside the going and coming rule depends on facts that only an examination of your own situation can establish. For advice about a specific situation, call Jim Glaser Law at (617) JIM-WINS.

Talking to a Lawyer

Commute cases are worth a conversation precisely because the obvious answer is often the wrong one. The going and coming rule sounds like a closed door, and people stop at it. Two things are usually behind that door: an exception that fits the actual trip, and a claim against whoever caused the crash that never depended on workers compensation in the first place.

Sorting that out means looking at what the trip was for, who asked for it, where the employer’s property ended, and who else was on the road. It is not a question that answers itself from the fact that the crash happened at eight in the morning.

Jim Glaser Law handles both workers compensation claims and motor vehicle injury claims across Massachusetts, which matters here because the two have to be handled together. Fees on the injury claim are contingent, meaning no fee unless there is a recovery, and the client may be responsible for costs and expenses; the fee rules that apply on the compensation side are set out in workers comp attorney fees in Massachusetts.

The number is (617) JIM-WINS. The line is answered 24 hours a day. The first telephone consultation is offered without charge.