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Of the 579 injuries reported to federal regulators on the Gulf of Mexico Outer Continental Shelf between 2022 and 2024, 473 were suffered by contractor employees. That is about 82%. Among injuries serious enough to keep someone off the job or on restricted duty more than three days, the contractor share rises to roughly 92%.
The people getting hurt out there mostly do not work for the company whose name is on the lease.
That single fact drives most of what follows, because the law that covers your injury depends on who employs you, what you do, and where you were standing. Get that classification wrong and you can spend a year pursuing the wrong claim in the wrong forum while a deadline runs.
Brandt & Sherman represents injured offshore and maritime workers across Acadiana. This page explains how the three federal regimes divide up, because no one tells you at the hospital.
Offshore injury claims are not one body of law. The Jones Act and the LHWCA are mutually exclusive, and OCSLA extends the LHWCA out onto the shelf. Which one covers you changes everything.
The Jones Act (46 U.S.C. Section 30104) gives a seaman a negligence action against his employer, with a jury trial. Because it borrows the railway workers' statute, the causation standard is famously light and there is no contributory negligence bar. Seaman status also carries two general maritime remedies that the Jones Act did not create: maintenance and cure, and unseaworthiness.
Seaman status has two prongs, from Chandris, Inc. v. Latsis (1995). Your duties must contribute to the function of the vessel or the accomplishment of its mission, and you must have a connection to a vessel in navigation "that is substantial in terms of both its duration and its nature."
Most sources stop at the duration prong and quote the Supreme Court's rule of thumb that a worker spending less than about 30% of his time in service of a vessel does not qualify. That is a guideline for disqualifying rather than a threshold for qualifying, and in Louisiana it is the wrong half of the test to focus on.
Why the nature prong decides Louisiana cases. In Sanchez v. Smart Fabricators of Texas (2021), the Fifth Circuit sitting en banc held that a land-based welder was not a seaman even though he had worked 61 of his 67 days aboard two jack-up rigs. He cleared 30% easily. He lost anyway. The Fifth Circuit put him in the category of specialized transient workers hired for discrete short-term jobs, whose connection to a vessel ends when the job does. That held even for the rig where he was actually hurt, which sat on the Outer Continental Shelf and was under tow to a new drilling location while he was aboard. The court asked three additional questions:
If you are a welder, fitter, scaffold builder, or rigger sent offshore for a specific job and then sent home, Sanchez probably puts you outside the Jones Act. That is not the end of your claim. It moves it.
The Longshore and Harbor Workers' Compensation Act (33 U.S.C. Section 901 and following) is a no-fault compensation system. It requires two things: status, meaning you were engaged in maritime employment, and situs, meaning the injury happened on navigable waters or an adjoining pier, wharf, dry dock, terminal or similar area customarily used for loading, unloading, repairing, dismantling or building vessels.
The statute expressly excludes "a master or member of a crew of any vessel," which is what makes the Jones Act and the LHWCA mutually exclusive. You cannot be both. You can, in a narrow set of cases, be neither, which the next section covers.
In practice, that line is litigated constantly in this circuit.
The Outer Continental Shelf Lands Act (43 U.S.C. Section 1333) does two separate things, and they get confused constantly.
Section 1333(b) extends LHWCA benefits to workers injured as a result of operations conducted on the OCS for exploring, developing, removing, or transporting shelf resources. This extension does not require the LHWCA's own maritime-employment status test or its situs test. It substitutes its own trigger, which is why it reaches a fixed-platform hand the LHWCA would otherwise leave out.
You also do not have to be injured on the shelf. In Pacific Operators Offshore v. Valladolid (2012), the Supreme Court adopted a substantial nexus test: the worker must show a significant causal link between the injury and the employer's OCS operations. The worker in that case spent about 98% of his time on platforms but was killed in a forklift accident at an onshore processing plant, and his claim was still viable. The fabrication yard, the shore base, and the dock are all in play.
Section 1333(a)(2)(A) adopts adjacent state law as surrogate federal law on fixed structures on the shelf. For platforms off Louisiana, that means Louisiana law applies, but as federal law, in federal courts, and only where it is applicable and not inconsistent with federal law.
There is a category of Louisiana worker who falls through all three.
In Herb's Welding, Inc. v. Gray (1985), the Supreme Court held that a welder injured on a fixed production platform in Louisiana state waters was not engaged in maritime employment, and so was not covered by the LHWCA on its own terms. The holding turned on the nature of his work, not on the platform's location, so a worker on the same platform who was loading a vessel or repairing one could still qualify. Quoting its earlier decision in Rodrigue, the Court described fixed platforms as artificial islands with no more connection to admiralty "than do accidents on piers."
So a non-seaman doing non-maritime work on a fixed platform inside Louisiana's three-mile belt can fall outside the Jones Act, outside the LHWCA, and, unless the injury has a substantial nexus to his employer's operations on the shelf, outside OCSLA as well. He falls to Louisiana workers' compensation.
That matters here more than it would elsewhere, because Louisiana has eliminated the usual choice. La. R.S. 23:1035.2 bars state compensation for any employee covered by the LHWCA, "any of its extensions," or the Jones Act. There is no election and no concurrent jurisdiction.
The practical risk is a whipsaw. A worker files for Louisiana comp, the state carrier denies claiming LHWCA coverage, and the LHWCA carrier denies claiming he is a seaman. Misclassification can leave someone with nothing while the question gets sorted out. Your job duties, who employed you, and where you were standing all have to be answered together. None of them decides it alone.
The difference between these labels is money, and the gap is large.
Disability compensation under the LHWCA runs at 66 and two-thirds percent of average weekly wages, subject to a national maximum, and for total disability a national minimum, both reset by the Department of Labor every October 1.
For the period October 1, 2025 through September 30, 2026, the national average weekly wage is $1,041.35, the maximum weekly compensation is $2,082.70, and the minimum is $520.68, according to the Department of Labor's published rate table. That was a 4.18% increase, and it is the first year the figure has passed $1,000.
Do the arithmetic on the maximum: $2,082.70 a week caps out around $108,300 a year. An experienced Gulf hand can earn well past that. For the workers this page is written for, the LHWCA ceiling is a real and binding constraint, and there are no damages for pain and suffering in it at all.
Death benefits are structured the same way. A surviving spouse alone receives 50% of the decedent's average weekly wages during widowhood, with a two-year lump sum on remarriage, plus 16 and two-thirds percent for each child, capped globally at 66 and two-thirds percent and subject to the same weekly maximum.
Funeral expenses are capped at $3,000. That figure is written into the statute and has never been indexed, so it has fallen well behind actual funeral costs.
The LHWCA bars a negligence suit against your employer acting as your employer. It does not bar a suit against the vessel, and where your employer also owns the vessel, Section 905(b) can reach it in that capacity. There is one large exception, and it matters on this coast: if you were employed to do shipbuilding, ship repair or ship breaking and your employer owned, operated or chartered that vessel, Section 905(b) bars the claim against your employer in any capacity, including as the vessel's owner. Ask a lawyer which side of that line your job falls on. The bar also lifts entirely if your employer failed to secure compensation coverage as the statute requires.
Section 905(b) lets a covered worker bring a negligence action against a vessel as a third party, and Section 905(c) extends the same right to workers covered through OCSLA. Under Scindia Steam Navigation Co. v. De Los Santos (1981), the vessel owes three duties: to turn the vessel over in a condition allowing the contractor to work with reasonable safety and warn of hidden dangers, to exercise reasonable care over areas and equipment it keeps under active control, and to intervene where it knows of a danger the contractor is obviously wrong to keep relying on.
This is not a technicality. On the Gulf, the injured worker is usually a contractor employee, and the vessel is usually owned by someone other than his employer. A Section 905(b) action recovers full tort damages, including pain and suffering, which LHWCA compensation does not touch. It is frequently available in fact, not just in theory.
If you are a seaman, your employer owes maintenance and cure regardless of fault, from the onset of injury until you reach maximum medical improvement. Cure is the medical expense. Maintenance is the daily cost of food and lodging ashore.
The daily rate is where seamen get shortchanged. Under Hall v. Noble Drilling (5th Cir. 2001), a court compares your actual costs of food and lodging against the reasonable cost for a single seaman in your area and generally awards the lesser. One exception matters: if the court finds your actual spending was too low to feed and house you adequately, you get the reasonable figure instead. The seamen in Hall recovered $31.50 and $30.50 a day, including their full mortgage payments rather than a pro-rata share.
But Hall was careful to note that no union contract was at issue. Hall lets a court weigh union contract rates as evidence of what is reasonable in your area, and the court was careful to note that no union contract was at issue in that case. If a CBA sets a rate for you, expect your employer to argue it controls. Whether one governs can be the single largest variable in your daily rate.
One more thing worth knowing. Punitive damages are available where an employer's refusal to pay maintenance and cure is willful and wanton, under Atlantic Sounding Co. v. Townsend (2009).
Unseaworthiness is a separate claim from Jones Act negligence. The vessel owner warrants that the vessel and its appurtenances are reasonably fit for their intended purpose, and that warranty is strict. No notice, no negligence, and no opportunity to cure is required.
Seamen normally plead negligence and unseaworthiness together, because the proof burdens differ and the defendants may differ.
In The Dutra Group v. Batterton (2019), the Supreme Court held that "a plaintiff may not recover punitive damages on a claim of unseaworthiness." It expressly left Atlantic Sounding alone. So after Batterton, the punitive exposure sits on the maintenance and cure claim, not the unseaworthiness claim. If an employer has stonewalled your maintenance payments, that is now the claim that carries the teeth.
Federal data says most of the people getting hurt out here work for contractors, not for the operators who hold the leases.
The Bureau of Safety and Environmental Enforcement collects incident reports from every operator on the shelf, and publishes them as Offshore Incident Statistics. For the Gulf of Mexico OCS Region across calendar years 2022 through 2024:
| Gulf OCS Region, CY2022 to CY2024 | Count |
|---|---|
| Reported incidents | 2,741 |
| Total injuries | 579 |
| Contractor-employed | 473 (81.7%) |
| Operator-employed | 106 |
| Injuries with more than 3 days lost time or restricted work | 293 |
| Of those, contractor-employed | 268 (91.5%) |
| Occupational fatalities | 4 |
Gulf incident counts have risen every year since 2021, from 735 that year to 1,006 in 2024.
Lifting operations show up on more injury incidents than anything else. Counting injuries on Gulf incidents flagged by cause, cranes account for 58 and other lifting devices for 37. Together that is 95, more than human error at 55 and far more than equipment failure at 11 or slips and falls at 9. BSEE notes that an incident can carry more than one cause flag, so these overlap rather than partition.
Two reasons this matters for your claim. If four out of five injured people on the Gulf shelf work for a contractor, then in most cases the company that owns the platform, the vessel, or the crane is not your employer. That usually makes them ordinary third parties. Expect a fight about it: in the Fifth Circuit, a company that controlled your work can argue you were its "borrowed employee," which would extend the exclusive-remedy bar to it. That is a fact question and it is often the first defense a platform operator files. And when the injury involves a crane or a lifting device, the equipment, its maintenance records, and its operator frequently belong to a third party too.
Source: BSEE Offshore Incident Statistics, CY2022 through CY2024 calendar-year workbooks, Gulf of Mexico OCS Region only. BSEE renamed this region "Gulf of America" beginning with the CY2024 workbook. BSEE revises these counts retrospectively as investigations close.
The point of getting the classification right is that it determines who you can reach.
Where the injury happened on a fixed platform on the shelf off Louisiana, OCSLA adopts Louisiana law for those third-party claims, so Louisiana negligence rules apply as surrogate federal law.
Maritime deadlines do not match Louisiana's, and the LHWCA clock behaves in a way almost nobody expects.
| Claim | Deadline | Runs from |
|---|---|---|
| Jones Act negligence | 3 years | when the cause of action arose |
| General maritime law, including unseaworthiness | 3 years | when the cause of action arose |
| Death on the High Seas Act | 3 years | when the cause of action arose |
| LHWCA notice to employer and deputy commissioner | 30 days (one year for occupational disease that does not immediately disable) | date of injury, or awareness of the work connection |
| LHWCA claim filing | 1 year | injury, or the date of the last payment |
| LHWCA occupational disease claim | 2 years | awareness of the connection |
| Louisiana tort claims (injuries after July 1, 2024) | 2 years | the day injury or damage was sustained |
The LHWCA trap. If your employer or its carrier has been paying compensation voluntarily, without a formal award, the one-year clock to file your claim runs from the date of the last payment, not from the accident. Injured workers routinely take months of voluntary payments and assume the claim is protected. It runs from the day the checks stop.
There is a safety net if you guessed wrong about seaman status. If you sue under the Jones Act and the case is dismissed because you were actually an LHWCA employee whose employer had secured compensation coverage, the one-year LHWCA period restarts when that suit terminates.
Louisiana's deadline changed. For injuries arising after July 1, 2024, Louisiana's general tort prescription is two years, not one. La. Civ. Code art. 3493.1, enacted by Act 423 of 2024, replaced the old one-year articles and applies prospectively only. Earlier claims still run on one year, so both rules are live right now depending on your date of injury. A claim arising on July 1, 2024 itself sits on the line and should be treated as a one-year claim until a lawyer says otherwise.
Where the death happened matters, and not only how far out. The Death on the High Seas Act reaches deaths on the high seas beyond three nautical miles from shore, and limits recovery to pecuniary loss only. No loss of society, no grief.
It does not reach deaths on fixed platforms. Under Rodrigue v. Aetna Casualty (1969), a fixed platform on the shelf is an artificial island rather than the high seas, so OCSLA supplies Louisiana wrongful death law instead. That is broader than DOHSA, because Louisiana allows loss of society, and it runs on Louisiana's shorter prescriptive period rather than DOHSA's three years. Whether the structure floated changes both what a family recovers and how long they have to file.
Most offshore injuries come from the same handful of preventable failures.
Where poorly maintained walkways or ignored safety procedures are involved, the analysis looks much like a slip and fall or premises liability case, with the difference that the applicable law depends on where the deck was floating.
What you can recover depends on which regime covers you, which is why the classification question comes first.
Under the Jones Act and general maritime law, damages include past and future medical care, lost wages and lost earning capacity, pain and suffering, disfigurement, and loss of enjoyment of life, plus maintenance and cure while you recover.
Under the LHWCA and OCSLA, compensation is capped and no-fault, with no award for pain and suffering. A Section 905(b) action against the vessel is the route to full tort damages.
Offshore injuries are often catastrophic. Severe burn injuries and brain and spinal cord injuries are common in this work, and both carry lifetime care costs that dwarf any compensation schedule.
In fatal cases, families may pursue a wrongful death claim, with the available remedies depending on how far from shore the death occurred.
Employers and their insurers run the same playbook, and most of it aims at classification rather than at what happened.
Expect an argument that you are not a seaman, which moves you from a jury trial against your employer to a compensation schedule plus, in most Gulf cases, a Section 905(b) action against the vessel. Expect an argument that you were at fault. Under the Jones Act, comparative fault reduces your recovery but does not bar it, so this is a discount argument rather than a defense. Expect an argument that the injury is pre-existing, or that the delay in reporting means it did not happen at work.
And expect voluntary compensation payments that quietly start a clock nobody mentions.
The Jones Act covers seamen, and seaman status has two parts. Your work must contribute to the vessel's function or mission, and your connection to a vessel in navigation must be substantial in both duration and nature. The often-quoted rule of thumb is that spending less than about 30% of your time in service of a vessel disqualifies you, but clearing 30% is not enough on its own. In Sanchez v. Smart Fabricators (5th Cir. 2021), a welder who worked 61 of 67 days aboard jack-up rigs was still held not to be a seaman, because his work was shore-based in nature and limited to discrete repair jobs. If you are sent offshore for a specific task and then sent home, you may well fall under the LHWCA or OCSLA instead. Have a lawyer review your actual duties.
Then you are probably covered by the Longshore and Harbor Workers' Compensation Act, or by the LHWCA as extended to the Outer Continental Shelf by OCSLA. That is compensation rather than a lawsuit against your employer, at 66 and two-thirds percent of your average weekly wages, capped at $2,082.70 per week for the year running October 1, 2025 through September 30, 2026, with no damages for pain and suffering. The important part is that it does not end there. Section 905(b) lets you sue the vessel as a third party for full tort damages, and on the Gulf the vessel usually belongs to someone other than your employer.
It depends entirely on your classification. If you are a seaman, yes, the Jones Act gives you a negligence action against your employer with a jury trial. If you are covered by the LHWCA or OCSLA, the exclusive remedy provision generally bars a negligence suit against your employer as your employer, and compensation is your remedy against them. Two exceptions matter. If your employer also owns the vessel, Section 905(b) can reach it as vessel owner, though not if you were employed to do shipbuilding, ship repair or ship breaking on a vessel your employer owned or chartered, which the statute expressly carves out. And if your employer failed to secure compensation coverage, the bar lifts altogether. That bar protects your employer, and in the Fifth Circuit it can also protect a company that has become your "borrowed employer" by controlling your work. That is the first thing a platform operator will argue, and it is a fact question worth fighting. Where it does not apply, the platform operator, the vessel owner and the crane owner are ordinary third parties, and since roughly 82% of injuries on the Gulf shelf are suffered by contractor employees, those are usually different companies from your employer.
Under the Jones Act and general maritime law, comparative fault reduces your recovery in proportion to your share of fault but does not bar it. There is no threshold that cuts you off, unlike Louisiana's state-law rule. Under the LHWCA, compensation is no-fault, so your own negligence generally does not reduce it. Where a claim proceeds under Louisiana law as surrogate federal law on a fixed OCS platform, Louisiana's own comparative fault rules apply instead. Those changed on January 1, 2026: under La. Civ. Code art. 2323, as amended by Act 15 of 2025, a claimant found 51% or more at fault recovers nothing. That applies to causes of action arising on or after January 1, 2026. Injuries before that date remain under Louisiana's older rule, where your own fault reduced recovery but never barred it.
It depends on the regime. Jones Act, general maritime, and Death on the High Seas Act claims carry a three-year period under 46 U.S.C. Section 30106. LHWCA claims require written notice to your employer and to the district deputy commissioner within 30 days, and a claim filed within one year. The one-year LHWCA period is the trap: if your employer has been paying compensation voluntarily without a formal award, the year runs from the date of the last payment rather than from the accident. Louisiana tort claims for injuries arising after July 1, 2024 carry a two-year prescriptive period, changed from one year by Act 423 of 2024, which applies prospectively only.
Not necessarily, and this is where people lose claims. Voluntary compensation payments made without a formal award do not preserve your rights indefinitely. Under 33 U.S.C. Section 913(a), the one-year LHWCA filing period restarts from the date of the last payment, which means the clock begins running the day the checks stop rather than the day you were hurt. Workers commonly receive months of voluntary payments, assume everything is handled, and discover the deadline passed while they were waiting.
If you are a seaman, your employer owes maintenance and cure regardless of who was at fault, from the onset of the injury until you reach maximum medical improvement. Cure covers medical expenses. Maintenance covers your daily food and lodging ashore. Under Hall v. Noble Drilling (5th Cir. 2001), the court compares your actual costs against the reasonable cost for a single seaman in your area and generally awards the lesser, though a seaman whose actual spending was too low to house him adequately gets the reasonable figure instead. The seamen in that case recovered around $30 per day including full mortgage payments. If a collective bargaining agreement sets a maintenance rate, expect your employer to argue that rate controls. Punitive damages are available where an employer's refusal to pay is willful and wanton.
That depends heavily on where the death occurred and on what the worker was standing on. On the high seas beyond three nautical miles, the Death on the High Seas Act applies and limits recovery to pecuniary loss, meaning financial support and services, with no recovery for loss of society or grief. But DOHSA does not reach a death on a fixed platform: under Rodrigue v. Aetna Casualty (1969) a fixed platform is an artificial island, not the high seas, so OCSLA applies Louisiana wrongful death law instead, which is broader and runs on Louisiana's shorter prescriptive period. A death inside Louisiana's three-mile belt also falls outside DOHSA. LHWCA death benefits pay a surviving spouse 50% of average weekly wages with additional amounts per child, subject to a global cap, and funeral expenses are capped by statute at $3,000.
No. Many resolve in settlement, and LHWCA claims proceed through an administrative process rather than a trial. But the classification fight often has to be resolved before anything can settle, because whether you are a seaman determines the forum, the remedies, and the value of the case. That fight is worth having early, and it is why an offshore case should not be handled the same way as a car accident claim.
The first question in your case is not what happened. It is which law covers you.
That answer decides whether you get a jury or a compensation schedule, whether pain and suffering is on the table, and how long you have to file. It turns on your job duties, the structure you were on, and how far from shore you were.
Call Brandt & Sherman for a free consultation. We will walk you through which regime likely applies to your job and your accident, and what that means for your options, before you sign anything or give a statement. The consultation is free, and clients may be responsible for costs and expenses in addition to any fee.
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