Jones Act vs. Longshore Act vs. State Workers’ Comp: Which Law Covers Your Injury?

A gulf coast maritime attorney’s guide to the three legal frameworks that govern injuries on or near the water — and why the framework you fall under can mean the difference between scheduled benefits and a multi-million-dollar tort recovery.

By Daniel E Sheppard, Attorney  Morrow & Sheppard LLP

If the threshold question for your case is whether you are a seaman under the Jones Act — the test that triggers most of these analyses — read our companion piece, Am I a Jones Act Seaman? How Courts Decide Whether You Qualify, for the full multi-factor analysis the Supreme Court applies. The treatment below assumes that question and addresses the broader landscape.

The Three Tracks at a Glance

A worker injured in the maritime or near-maritime context generally falls onto one of three legal classification tracks. The plain-language version:

1. Jones Act governs injuries to seamen — workers with a substantial connection to a vessel in navigation. It is a tort framework: the employer is liable for negligence, and the seaman also has independent rights to maintenance and cure and to an unseaworthiness claim against the vessel owner under general maritime law.
2. LHWCA governs longshoremen, harbor workers, shipbuilders, ship repairers, and certain other maritime employees who are not seamen. It is a federal no-fault workers’ compensation system with scheduled benefits, plus a separate negligence remedy against vessel owners under Section 905(b).
3. State workers’ compensation governs most land-based workers who fall outside the federal maritime regimes. It is a no-fault system with scheduled or formula-based benefits that varies state by state. In Texas, employers may opt out of the workers’ compensation system entirely as non-subscribers, which changes the analysis substantially.

The boundaries between these three tracks are not always crisp, and a single injury can sometimes implicate two of them. The Supreme Court resolved much of that overlap in Sun Ship, Inc. v. Pennsylvania, 447 U.S. 715 (1980), to which we return below.

Track One: The Jones Act (For Seamen)

The Jones Act, codified at 46 U.S.C. § 30104, gives an injured seaman a personal-injury cause of action against the employer for negligence. The Act incorporates the substantive standards of the Federal Employers’ Liability Act (FELA), which means the seaman bears a relatively low causation burden: an employer is liable if its negligence played any part, even the slightest, in producing the injury. Rogers v. Missouri Pacific Railroad Co., 352 U.S. 500, 506 (1957). Comparative fault reduces — but does not bar — recovery, regardless of the worker’s percentage of fault.

A Jones Act plaintiff can recover the full range of tort damages: past and future medical expenses, past and future lost wages and earning capacity, pain and suffering, mental anguish, physical impairment, and disfigurement. Cases at law are tried to a jury, in either federal or state court.

In addition to the Jones Act negligence claim, an injured seaman has two independent rights under general maritime law:

• Maintenance and cure — daily living expenses (maintenance) and medical care (cure) owed by the employer from the date of injury until the seaman reaches maximum medical improvement, regardless of fault. This duty is nearly absolute, and willful or arbitrary denial can support punitive damages and attorney’s fees. Atlantic Sounding Co. v. Townsend, 557 U.S. 404 (2009).
• Unseaworthiness — a strict-liability claim against the vessel owner when an unseaworthy condition of the vessel (an unfit appurtenance, an unsafe method of work, an inadequate crew) is a proximate cause of the injury. Mitchell v. Trawler Racer, Inc., 362 U.S. 539 (1960). Because the standard is strict liability, the vessel owner’s exercise of reasonable care is not a defense. The standard does not require that the vessel be perfect — only that the vessel and its appurtenances be reasonably fit for their intended use. The Supreme Court has, however, narrowed the unseaworthiness remedy in one important respect: in The Dutra Group v. Batterton, 588 U.S. 358 (2019), the Court held that punitive damages are not available in unseaworthiness actions. The unseaworthiness remedy therefore remains compensatory; punitive recoveries in maritime cases must be pursued through the maintenance-and-cure framework or other available channels.

The Jones Act statute of limitations is three years from the date the cause of action accrues. 46 U.S.C. § 30106.A representative result: in Griffin v. REC Marine Logistics, LLC, No. 3:20-cv-00092-BAJ-EWD (M.D. La. 2023), aff’d (5th Cir.), Morrow & Sheppard secured a unanimous Jones Act verdict of $3.2 million on behalf of an injured deckhand — including $1.5 million in punitive damages for the defendants’ willful refusal to provide maintenance and cure. With interest, costs, and attorney’s fees, the total recovery exceeded $4 million. In a separate matter, the firm resolved an $8 million Jones Act settlement days before trial on behalf of an injured tugboat seaman, after roughly ten depositions exposed the employer’s effort to reverse its own incident investigation.

Track Two: The Longshore and Harbor Workers’ Compensation Act

The LHWCA, 33 U.S.C. § 901 et seq., is the federal counterpart for maritime workers who are not seamen. It originated in 1927 to fill a gap left by the Supreme Court’s earlier holdings that state workers’ compensation could not constitutionally extend to workers injured on navigable waters.

To qualify for LHWCA coverage, an injured worker must satisfy two tests:

The Status Test

The worker must be engaged in maritime employment, which the Act defines (in relevant part) to include any longshoreman or other person engaged in longshoring operations, and any harbor worker including a ship repairman, shipbuilder, and shipbreaker. 33 U.S.C. § 902(3). The Supreme Court has read this language broadly to cover essentially the full spectrum of waterfront cargo handling. Northeast Marine Terminal Co. v. Caputo, 432 U.S. 249 (1977).

The Situs Test

The injury must occur on actual navigable waters or on adjoining piers, wharves, dry docks, terminals, building ways, marine railways, or other adjoining areas customarily used by an employer in loading, unloading, repairing, dismantling, or building a vessel. 33 U.S.C. § 903(a).

Where the worker is injured on actual navigable waters, the Supreme Court has held the geographic situs test is independently satisfied — even without an additional maritime-employment showing. Director, OWCP v. Perini North River Associates, 459 U.S. 297 (1983). On land, both status and situs are required.

What the LHWCA Provides — and What It Does Not

The LHWCA is a no-fault system. The worker need not prove the employer’s negligence. In exchange, the worker is limited to scheduled benefits, generally consisting of:

• Wage replacement: approximately two-thirds of the worker’s average weekly wage, subject to a maximum tied to the national average weekly wage (NAWW). For fiscal year 2026, the maximum LHWCA compensation rate is $2,082.70 per week — 200% of the $1,041.35 NAWW. The cap is updated annually by the U.S. Department of Labor and changes each October.
• Permanent partial disability: scheduled awards calibrated by injury type — loss of an arm, hand, leg, eye, hearing, and so on.
• Medical benefits: paid in full for treatment reasonable and necessary as a result of the injury, with the worker generally entitled to choose the treating physician.
• Death benefits: a percentage of the deceased worker’s average weekly wage paid to the surviving spouse and dependent children, subject to caps.

Critically, the LHWCA does not allow recovery of pain and suffering, mental anguish, or other non-economic damages. Notice and limitations rules are tight: a worker must generally give notice of injury to the employer within 30 days, and must file a formal claim within one year of injury (two years for occupational diseases, measured from awareness of the connection to work). 33 U.S.C. §§ 912, 913.

The §905(b) Negligence Claim Against the Vessel

The most important offset to the LHWCA’s no-fault, capped structure is Section 905(b): a longshore worker injured by the negligence of a vessel — as distinct from the longshore employer — may bring a third-party tort claim against the vessel owner. The Supreme Court defined the vessel owner’s three duties in Scindia Steam Navigation Co. v. De Los Santos, 451 U.S. 156 (1981):

1. A turnover duty — to deliver the vessel and its equipment in a reasonably safe condition for the work the longshore crew is to perform.
2. An active control duty — to exercise reasonable care over portions of the vessel and equipment under the vessel owner’s active control during cargo or repair operations.
3. A duty to intervene — to act when the vessel owner becomes aware of an obviously unsafe condition that the stevedore is unreasonably failing to address.

A successful §905(b) claim allows recovery of the full range of tort damages, including pain and suffering — converting what would otherwise be a capped LHWCA award into a meaningful tort recovery against the vessel. In our experience, a §905(b) angle should always be evaluated alongside the LHWCA claim itself, because the tort recovery is often where most of the case’s value sits.

MORROW & SHEPPARD CASE EXAMPLE : 
§905(b) Claim — Turnover Duty / Duty to Intervene
 
Facts:
A longshoreman (Rivera) is part of a stevedoring crew hired to unload a bulk cargo vessel at the Port of Houston. Before the stevedore's team boards, the vessel's crew had been using a mid-ship crane to shift deck cargo.  One of the crane's wire rope pendant lines has a visible "birdcage" — a section where the wire strands have splayed outward from overloading — spanning roughly 18 inches.  The ship's chief officer noted the defect in the vessel's maintenance log two days earlier but did not take the crane out of service or flag it for the stevedore's foreman at turnover.
 
The stevedore's foreman does a walk-through before operations begin but doesn't inspect the crane closely because the vessel's crew says nothing about it.  The stevedore’s team begins using the crane to discharge cargo.  Mid-lift, the pendant parts at the birdcage, the load drops, and Rivera is struck and seriously injured.
 
Elements of a §905(b) Claim to Consider: 
Turnover Duty Breach (Primary Theory): The vessel owner had an obligation to deliver the crane in a reasonably safe condition — or at minimum to warn the stevedore of defects that were known to the vessel and not reasonably observable by a competent stevedore on a reasonable inspection.  Here, the defect was: Known to the vessel (logged by the chief officer),  Not disclosed at turnover. Not readily apparent because the pendant was partially coiled and the birdcage wasn't at eye level during a normal walk-through. This is a textbook turnover duty case.  The vessel handed over dangerous equipment without warning.
 
Duty to Intervene (Secondary / Belt-and-Suspenders Theory): Even if you assume the stevedore should have caught the defect on inspection, vessel crew members were present on deck during operations.  If any of them saw the stevedore’s team using the damaged pendant, the vessel had an independent duty to intervene and stop the work.  Testimony from deckhands or the mate on watch about what they observed during cargo operations becomes critical here.
 
Damages Available Under the LHWCA: Under the LHWCA alone, Rivera gets medical benefits and two-thirds of his Average Weekly Wage, capped by the statutory maximum.  Against a bad injury — say, a crush injury requiring multiple surgeries, with permanent work restrictions — that cap leaves most of his damages uncompensated.
 
The §905(b) claim against the vessel owner puts on the table the following damages:
- Full past and future lost earnings (not capped)
- Pain and suffering
- Loss of enjoyment of life
- Future medical care
 
The vessel owner's insurer (typically a Protection & Indemnity Club) typically defend and resolve these claims as maritime tort litigation — not as workers' comp matters.
 
Key Practical Notes:
- The stevedore/employer is immune from the tort claim under §905(a), but its knowledge of the defect can become relevant to whether the vessel's duty to intervene was triggered — a common battleground.
- Vessel owners routinely argue the stevedore had primary responsibility once it took control of the work area; pushing back on that with the Scindia framework is the core of the plaintiff's case.
- Preservation of the crane, the maintenance log, the vessel's SMS (Safety Management System) records, and statements from vessel crew should happen immediately.

Track Three: State Workers’ Compensation (and the Texas Non-Subscriber Wrinkle)

For workers whose injuries fall outside both the Jones Act and the LHWCA — the largest category in any economy — recovery typically runs through the relevant state workers’ compensation system. State systems vary, but the structure is broadly familiar: no-fault liability, scheduled benefits, medical coverage, and a generally exclusive remedy that bars tort suits against the employer.

Texas has an additional wrinkle that matters in nearly every Gulf Coast workplace-injury case: Texas does not require employers to carry workers’ compensation insurance. An employer that opts out is a non-subscriber. Under Texas Labor Code § 406.033, a non-subscriber employer that is sued for an on-the-job injury cannot assert the common-law defenses of contributory negligence, assumption of risk, or fellow-servant negligence. The injured worker, however, must still prove the employer was negligent — there is no automatic recovery.

Many large Texas employers — refineries, energy services firms, trucking operators, and contractors — are non-subscribers. For an injured worker, that means a lawsuit rather than a comp claim, and a lawsuit in which the employer’s standard defenses are stripped away. The strategic and dollar implications are significant.

Texas oilfield burn cases also frequently leave the workers’ compensation system entirely — either because the operator is a non-subscriber or because the strongest claims are third-party negligence claims against contractors, equipment suppliers, or well-services companies. A representative result: in Vergara v. HighPeak Energy Operating LLC, No. 141-345795-23 (141st Dist. Ct., Tarrant County 2024), Morrow & Sheppard secured a $10.5 million settlement on behalf of two plaintiffs who suffered severe burns and other serious injuries while cleaning a tank at a remote Texas oilfield site when an explosion occurred. The case proceeded in state-court tort, not under workers’ compensation. Defendants denied responsibility and attempted to attribute fault to the plaintiffs; the firm assembled oilfield safety and explosion experts, conducted more than two dozen depositions, and defeated multiple defense motions to dismiss before resolving the case in under 24 months.

State workers’ compensation also matters in maritime cases because of concurrent jurisdiction with the LHWCA, which we address next.

Where the Tracks Overlap: Concurrent Jurisdiction

For decades, the line between LHWCA and state workers’ compensation was treated as exclusive — a worker was on one side or the other, but not both. The Supreme Court replaced that rule in Sun Ship, Inc. v. Pennsylvania, 447 U.S. 715 (1980), holding that the LHWCA and state workers’ compensation systems can apply concurrently. A worker who qualifies for both may pursue both, with the second-paying system credited for amounts already received. After Sun Ship, concurrent state-LHWCA pursuit is the rule, not the exception, in many borderline cases.

The line between Jones Act and LHWCA is sharper because the two are mutually exclusive: a worker is either a seaman (Jones Act) or a maritime employee covered by the LHWCA, not both. The classification turns on the Chandris test discussed in our companion article on seaman status. In our experience, this is the boundary where employers and insurers most often try to push an injured worker into the lower-paying framework.

For a working overview of the broader interplay between maritime law and ordinary state-law tort principles, see Maritime Law vs. Common Law: What’s the Difference?.

MORROW & SHEPPARD CASE EXAMPLE : 
Borderline Classification Example — Jones Act over LHWCA: The Derrick Barge Welder
 
The Facts: 
Garza is a certified welder employed by a marine construction company that deploys him aboard a company-owned derrick barge performing offshore pipeline construction in the Gulf of Mexico.  He works 28-day hitches, sleeps and eats aboard the vessel, and performs all work from her deck — operating the barge's cranes, assisting with anchor deployment, and welding on structures being lowered by the barge's own lifting equipment.
 
The employer's payroll records classify him as a "day-rate contract welder."  After Garza suffers a serious lumbar injury when a rigging component fails during a lift operation, the employer's claims adjuster calls within 48 hours, steers him toward a company-selected physician, and opens a LHWCA claim — characterizing Garza as a maritime employee doing harbor-work-adjacent welding, not a seaman.
 
The Framework Fight:
When Garza contacts a lawyer at Morrow & Sheppard, LLP, the seaman-status analysis runs immediately.  The picture that emerges is straightforward on the numbers:  Garza worked aboard the same derrick barge for nine of the prior twelve months, spending more than 85% of his work time aboard her.  Seaman status requires that (1) the worker's duties contributed to the function of the vessel or the accomplishment of its mission, and (2) the worker had a substantial connection to a vessel in navigation in terms of both duration and nature.  
 
On duration, Garza clears the threshold comfortably.  However, seaman status confers benefits not available under the LHWCA.  So, Garza’s employer (and its insurers) is motivated to argue factors related to the nature of the work cut against Garza: welding is land-based work that happens to be performed at sea; the barge is merely the platform, not the thing his work serves.  Against this background, Morrow & Sheppard, LLP’s lawyers push back on the nature prong with specificity.  Garza isn't welding on a barge incidentally — he is operating the vessel's crane and rigging systems as part of the lift operations that are the barge's core commercial purpose.  His duties are vessel-operational, not vessel-adjacent.  A welder who bolts steel on a land-based fabrication yard is doing vessel adjacent tasks.  However, a welder who operates the crane, directs the rigging, and controls the lift from a derrick barge is doing something else. 
 
Garza’s employer's goal is to undercompensate Garza’s injury, a multi-level disc herniation requiring surgery, with permanent restrictions that end his offshore career.  Under the LHWCA, his recovery from his employer is capped at approximately two-thirds of his average weekly wage — around $1,100 per week given his day rate — with no pain and suffering, no mental anguish, and no future earning capacity beyond the wage-replacement formula.  However, with a credible seaman-status argument established, a Jones Act complaint filed alongside an unseaworthiness claim against the vessel owner can provide Garza with substantial pain-and-suffering and future earning capacity components that would have been categorically unavailable under the LHWCA framework.

What the Money Looks Like in Practice

The financial gap between the three tracks is rarely small. Consider three workers with similar serious back injuries that end careers:

• A Jones Act seaman can recover lifetime lost earning capacity, full medical expenses, pain and suffering, mental anguish, and — where unseaworthiness is established — strict-liability damages against the vessel owner. On serious-injury cases, recoveries routinely run into the millions. Maintenance and cure paid throughout the case adds further leverage. Punitive damages are available where employer conduct is willful or arbitrary, as in Griffin.
• An LHWCA longshore worker is limited to scheduled benefits and medical care from the employer. Even with a strong §905(b) claim against a vessel owner, the worker’s recovery against the longshore employer remains capped by statute. Without a viable third-party claim, total recovery on a serious-injury case can be a small fraction of what a comparable Jones Act case would yield.
• A Texas non-subscriber claim can match or exceed Jones Act recoveries on the right facts because it allows full tort damages without the common-law defenses. Subscribed state workers’ compensation claims, by contrast, are firmly capped by state schedules.

A representative comparison from our practice: in Griffin, the Jones Act track produced a recovery that, with interest and fees, exceeded $4 million for a deckhand. By contrast, in a recent port shipping-container case, the firm secured a $490,000 settlement for a longshoreman who suffered a serious rotator cuff tear when his safety harness caught on a shipping container — a meaningful recovery that nonetheless reflects the structural ceiling of the LHWCA when no §905(b) angle is available against a vessel.

Common Misclassification Scenarios — and Why It Pays to Get the Framework Right Early

Several recurring fact patterns generate framework disputes:

• The contractor working on a jack-up rig. Welders, electricians, and other specialists who service offshore rigs are often pushed into LHWCA classification under the Fifth Circuit’s Sanchez v. Smart Fabricators of Texas, L.L.C., 997 F.3d 564 (5th Cir. 2021) (en banc). Whether they remain there or move to the Jones Act track turns on the Sanchez nature factors discussed in our companion seaman-status piece.
• The shipyard worker. Most shipbuilders and ship repairers are LHWCA workers, not seamen — but the analysis becomes fact-intensive when the worker also performs sea trials or works on vessels under their own power.
• The day-rate or hall-dispatched offshore worker. Harbor Tug & Barge Co. v. Papai, 520 U.S. 548 (1997), limits the fleet doctrine to vessels under common ownership or control. A worker dispatched across multiple unrelated employers may struggle to establish the duration prong of seaman status.
• The Texas oilfield worker. Often the right framework is a Texas non-subscriber suit against the operator or a third-party negligence claim against the well-services contractor — not workers’ compensation at all.

In every case, classification should be evaluated promptly, with all three tracks on the table, before timesheets and rotation logs grow stale and before the employer’s narrative hardens around the lower-paying framework.

Talk to a Maritime and Offshore Injury Lawyer Before You Talk to the Company

At Morrow & Sheppard LLP, we represent injured maritime, offshore, and oilfield workers across Texas, Louisiana, and the Gulf Coast. The framework question is the first one we run, and it is the question most likely to be answered wrong by the company doctor, the safety manager, or the claims adjuster who calls in the days after an injury. Our consultations are free and confidential.

If a representative of your employer is asking you to give a recorded statement, sign a release, accept a quick payment, or attend an examination by a company-selected physician, contact us first. The framework analysis is easier to run, and easier to win, when we are involved early.

Call our office today to speak with a maritime injury attorney about your case.

For a deeper view of the firm’s offshore practice, see our Jones Act Lawyer practice page.Our maritime and Jones Act results include the $3.2 million unanimous jury verdict (affirmed by the Fifth Circuit) in Griffin v. REC Marine Logistics, which included $1.5 million in punitive damages for the defendants’ willful refusal to provide maintenance and cure; an $8 million Jones Act settlement on behalf of an injured tugboat seaman, secured days before trial after approximately ten depositions exposed the employer’s effort to reverse the company’s own incident investigation; a $5.9 million maritime injury settlement; a $4.9 million Jones Act settlement on behalf of an offshore worker; a $3.3 million Jones Act settlement; and a $1.35 million jury verdict on behalf of a crab fisherman injured aboard the F/V Time Bandit, one of the vessels featured on Discovery Channel’s Deadliest Catch.

Call our office today to speak with a maritime injury attorney about your case.

Disclaimer: This article is for general informational purposes only and is not legal advice. Reading or sharing it does not create an attorney-client relationship. Prior results do not guarantee a similar outcome. Every offshore injury claim turns on its own facts. If you have been hurt at work on or around a vessel, contact a maritime injury attorney for advice on your specific situation.