Connecticut Court Affirms One-Year Workers' Comp Filing Deadline

Connecticut Court Affirms One-Year Workers' Comp Filing Deadline in Occupational Disease Appeal

Connecticut's Appellate Court affirmed on August 25, 2026 that the Workers' Compensation Commission had no jurisdiction over a certified nursing assistant's claims, because she filed her notices outside the one-year period in Conn. Gen. Stat. section 31-294c (a) and did not prove an occupational disease.

Information last verified on September 7, 2026.

Status: Decided. The Connecticut Appellate Court officially released Callahan v. iCare Health Management, LLC, AC 48286, on August 25, 2026. The court affirmed the decision of the Compensation Review Board, which had itself affirmed an administrative law judge's dismissal of the plaintiff's claims for lack of subject matter jurisdiction. The advance release notice attached to the opinion states that opinions are subject to modification and technical correction before official publication, and that the officially released date is the operative date for the beginning of all time periods for filing postopinion motions and petitions for certification. The advance release text carries no Connecticut Appellate Reports volume and page citation.

Jurisdiction scope: This article covers Connecticut workers' compensation notice and filing periods under Conn. Gen. Stat. sections 31-294c and 31-275 (15). It does not address Connecticut's civil personal injury deadlines, which run on a separate track under Connecticut's general civil limitation statutes, and it does not describe the rules of any other state. For a comparison of state systems, see how state workers' compensation systems differ.

What Happened

Tachica Callahan worked for iCare Health Management, LLC as a certified nursing assistant from December 31, 2015 through October 24, 2017. On June 19, 2017 she injured her lumbar spine and left hip in a work-related lifting incident. She filed a claim for that injury dated October 31, 2017, and the parties settled it on November 19, 2019 by a full and final stipulation agreement. In 2020 Callahan commenced the present action, filing eight separate form 30C notices between January 28, 2020 and November 17, 2022 that alleged injuries to her left hip, left side, left labral tear, neck, cervical spine, back, right side, base of skull, pelvis and hips, with claimed injury dates running from October 2, 2017 through February 28, 2020. The defendants, iCare and its workers' compensation insurer Memic Indemnity Company, filed form 43 disclaimers contesting liability on each claim.

The administrative law judge for the Second District held a formal hearing on May 1, 2023 limited to two questions: whether the alleged injuries were an occupational disease under section 31-275 (15), which would carry the three-year period in section 31-294c (a), and if so whether the notices were timely. Callahan testified that the job was manual labor involving heavy lifting of patients who could weigh up to 200 pounds, that she moved human bodies with her hands for 66 percent of a shift, and that she now had an occupational disease of left hip osteoarthritis she framed as a sequela of the 2017 injury. She submitted voluminous medical records, including an August 7, 2021 letter from Romero Santiago and Carrie Redlich of Yale Occupational and Environmental Medicine describing her left hip labral tear, associated osteoarthritis and back pain as work-related. The defendants submitted a December 7, 2020 report from Vincent Williams of UConn Health opining that the injuries were degenerative and unrelated to her work.

The administrative law judge dismissed the claims on November 30, 2023. The dismissal turned on an evidentiary gap rather than on whether the injuries hurt or were connected to work:

"[t]he [plaintiff] submitted numerous medical reports attesting to her ongoing left hip osteoarthritis symptoms and the need for [a] left hip replacement, none of which specifically addresses how her left hip osteoarthritis, and any other injuries, are distinctively associated with or peculiar to her occupation as a [certified nursing assistant] with [iCare]." Callahan v. iCare Health Management, LLC, AC 48286, advance release slip opinion, p. 6 (quoting the administrative law judge's finding).

The judge found each alleged injury more closely resembled a repetitive trauma injury and dismissed for lack of subject matter jurisdiction because the notices missed the one-year period. The Compensation Review Board affirmed by memorandum of decision on November 22, 2024, reasoning that Redlich's reports associated the injury with the employment but contained no opinion that work as a certified nursing assistant made Callahan more susceptible to those injuries. The board also agreed with the defendants on their cross appeal and ordered several of the administrative law judge's merits findings stricken, an order Callahan did not appear to challenge on appeal. The Appellate Court affirmed the board, closing with the line "The decision of the Compensation Review Board is affirmed." (advance release slip opinion, p. 17). It declined to review one briefed claim about the denial of a motion to submit additional medical evidence, treating it as abandoned for lack of substantive discussion.

What the Law Actually Says

Connecticut's Workers' Compensation Act treats notice as a jurisdictional prerequisite, not a defense. Quoting Fieldhouse v. Regency Coachworks, Inc., 213 Conn. App. 662, 668-70, 279 A.3d 195, cert. denied, 345 Conn. 906, 282 A.3d 981 (2022), the Appellate Court restated the four possible prerequisites to the commission's subject matter jurisdiction over a claim: a timely written notice of claim under section 31-294c (a); a timely hearing, written request for a hearing, or assignment for a hearing under section 31-294c (c); the timely submission of a voluntary agreement under the same subsection; or the employer's furnishing of appropriate medical care for the work-related injury. Section 31-294c (c), which supplies those three alternatives to written notice, conditions each of them on the applicable one-year or three-year period. Because notice implicates subject matter jurisdiction, the court reviewed that question under a plenary standard.

The notice statute itself sets two clocks in a single sentence. Section 31-294c (a) provides in relevant part that "[n]o proceedings for compensation under the provisions of this chapter shall be maintained unless a written notice of claim for compensation is given within one year from the date of the accident or within three years from the first manifestation of a symptom of the occupational disease, as the case may be, which caused the personal injury . . . ." The Connecticut Supreme Court held in Discuillo v. Stone & Webster, 242 Conn. 570, 574-75, 698 A.2d 873 (1997) that "[t]he workers' compensation scheme explicitly provides for three categories of compensable injury: (1) accidental injury; (2) repetitive trauma injury; and (3) occupational disease," and that section 31-294c is silent on the filing period for repetitive trauma. The gap is filled by treating every cognizable claim, for jurisdictional purposes, as stemming from either an accident or an occupational disease. Id., 577-78. Repetitive trauma claims that fall into the accidental injury category therefore take the one-year clock, under Crochiere v. Board of Education, 227 Conn. 333, 354-55, 630 A.2d 1027 (1993); which category a repetitive trauma claim falls into depends on the specific facts of the particular claim. Discuillo, 242 Conn. 577-78.

The two filing clocks side by side

Section 31-275 (15) defines the term that decides which column applies: "'Occupational disease' includes any disease peculiar to the occupation in which the employee was engaged and due to causes in excess of the ordinary hazards of employment as such, and includes any disease due to or attributable to exposure to or contact with any radioactive material by an employee in the course of his employment."

The operative phrase is "peculiar to the occupation." Quoting Estate of Doe v. Dept. of Correction, 268 Conn. 753, 757-58, 848 A.2d 378 (2004), the court explained that the disease "need not be unique to the occupation of the employee or to the work place; it need merely be so distinctively associated with the employee's occupation that there is a direct causal connection between the duties of the employment and the disease contracted. . . . Thus, an occupational disease does not include a disease which results from the peculiar conditions surrounding the employment of the claimant in a kind of work which would not from its nature be more likely to cause it than would other kinds of employment carried on under the same conditions."

Discuillo supplied the closest comparison. A painter who climbed ladders and worked on scaffolding carrying five gallon buckets and heavy pneumatic grinding equipment suffered a heart attack. The Supreme Court held those workplace circumstances "cannot be said to be 'peculiar to' his occupation as a painter." The physical stresses he described are present in many jobs involving manual labor, and neither those stresses nor the mental stress of close supervision was "distinctively associated with" his particular occupation. Discuillo, 242 Conn. 579-80. Discuillo contrasted Hansen v. Gordon, 221 Conn. 29, 37, 602 A.2d 560 (1992), where hepatitis was an occupational disease because a dental hygienist was at particular risk through contact with blood and other secretions.

Applying that line, the Appellate Court held that Callahan "likewise has not demonstrated that the physical stresses she described were distinctively associated with her occupation as a certified nursing assistant, rather than with all other manual labor jobs" (advance release slip opinion, pp. 13-14). Records describing her injuries as work-related did not indicate that the job made her more susceptible to them. The court cited Dorsey v. United Technologies Corp./Norden Systems, Inc., 47 Conn. App. 810, 813, 707 A.2d 744 (1998), where a powerhouse operator's repetitive trauma case more closely resembled an accidental injury than an occupational disease. It also held that the fact her injuries were work-related "did not conclusively establish that she had an occupational disease pursuant to" section 31-294c (advance release slip opinion, p. 16).

On the statutory text, we read chapter 568 on the Connecticut General Assembly website on September 7, 2026. The base compilation is the General Statutes revised to January 1, 2025, carrying public act credits for section 31-294c through P.A. 22-89 and for section 31-275 through P.A. 23-80. The 2026 Supplement to chapter 568, revised to January 1, 2026, contains no entry for either section, so neither was amended in the 2025 sessions. Official compilations can lag an amendment, so what is described here is the version published as of that reading, and it matches word for word the text the court quoted in footnotes 2 and 3 of the opinion.

Analysis: Why This Matters

The following is analysis from the Recording Law Editorial Team.

Callahan is a short opinion about a distinction that decides cases before anyone reaches the medicine. Connecticut's three statutory categories of compensable injury collapse into two jurisdictional buckets, and the bucket a claim falls into fixes whether the clock ran for one year or three. That is why the administrative law judge held a formal hearing limited to classification and, if the claims cleared that hurdle, timeliness.

What the opinion illustrates most clearly is the evidentiary shape of the occupational disease test. Under Estate of Doe, a disease need not be unique to a job, but it does have to be distinctively associated with it. The comparison the fact finder makes is relative, not absolute: the question is not whether the work was hard or whether it hurt the claimant, but whether this occupation was more likely to produce the condition than other kinds of employment carried on under the same conditions. Here the record contained physicians describing the conditions as work-related, and both the board and the Appellate Court treated that as answering a different question than the one section 31-275 (15) asks.

There is a tension worth naming. The court repeated the settled canon that the act is remedial and should be construed generously, and in the same breath applied the rule that the commission is a tribunal of limited jurisdiction that cannot confer jurisdiction on itself. Generous construction operates inside the statutory grant of authority, not around it, which is how a claim can be compensable in type and still sit outside the commission's reach.

The standard of review did much of the work. Classification was a factual determination, and Connecticut law makes the administrative law judge the sole arbiter of the weight of evidence and the credibility of witnesses. The Appellate Court said expressly that it declined to disturb that weighing, and that it is immaterial that the same facts might permit different inferences. That allocation means the classification contest is effectively resolved at the formal hearing, on the record built there. It is also notable that the plaintiff was self-represented, and that the court observed much of her brief argued the merits rather than the jurisdictional ground the dismissal actually rested on.

How This Affects You

This section describes general Connecticut rules. It does not tell any reader what deadline applies to a particular situation.

The statute provides a one-year period for written notice measured from the date of the accident and a three-year period measured from the first manifestation of a symptom of an occupational disease. Section 31-294c (a) also contains a proviso for death claims: where death results within two years of the accident or of the first manifestation of a symptom, a dependent or the deceased employee's legal representative may file within that two-year period or within one year of the date of death, whichever is later. Connecticut courts have held that repetitive trauma claims that fall into the accidental injury category sit in the one-year category, and that the date of injury for repetitive trauma is generally the last day of exposure to the work-related incidents, which is usually the last date of employment. Which category a given condition falls into is a determination for the administrative law judge on the evidence presented, and written notice is only one of the four routes to jurisdiction listed above.

Where a claimant argues for the three-year period, the factors the commission considers include whether the record contains evidence that the occupation itself made the worker more susceptible to the condition, as distinct from evidence that the condition is connected to work generally. In Callahan, both the board and the Appellate Court pointed to the absence of a medical opinion addressing that comparison. Readers who want the surrounding framework can review our overview of Connecticut's workers' compensation system.

Two adjacent points often get conflated. Workers' compensation notice periods are separate from the deadlines governing ordinary civil lawsuits, covered in our guide to civil filing deadlines in the state. Questions about the end of an employment relationship are governed by employment law rather than the compensation act, and Connecticut's default rules are summarized on our page about ending employment in Connecticut. Anyone weighing these should consult a Connecticut lawyer about the facts of their own case.

This is general legal information, not legal advice. It addresses Connecticut workers' compensation law only, and reflects primary sources verified on September 7, 2026. Statutes and case law change, and the advance release version of an opinion is subject to modification before official publication. Consult a lawyer licensed in Connecticut about your specific situation.

Related articles

• Connecticut workers' compensation laws
• Workers' compensation rules across the states
• Connecticut civil filing deadlines
• At-will employment in Connecticut

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Last updated: 2026-09-07. Details verified as of 2026-09-07.