Last Updated: October 14, 2022

What Do The TECHNICAL TERMS in Workers Comp Mean? AWW? TTD? PPD?

In this article, I'm going to tell you what the technical workers comp terms mean. So, what are the technical terms?

Well you might hear a lawyer or a judge or defense attorney or the insurance company lawyer who's trying to make sure you get nothing throw around terms like AWW and TTD and PPD. What does that mean? What do the technical terms in Workers Comp mean?

You should know what they mean. And it's hard to keep them straight but i just thought i'd explain all this because i was talking to a lady who had a work injury who didn't know what that stuff meant. So I explained it to her, so now i'm going to explain it to you.

AWW or Average Weekly Wage

AWW means average weekly wage. That's basically the number of average hours you work at work a week times your rate. In other words, let's say you work 30 hours a week and you make 10 bucks an hour, that's 300 bucks. You make 20 bucks an hour, you work 30 hours a week, it’s 600 bucks. It is the most common of the technical terms in Workers Comp I get questions about.

Basic math.

Why is AWW or average weekly wage so important in illinois workers comp cases?

Well because everything is calculated based on your average weekly weekly wage, including the lump sum of money you get at the end of the case to represent the damage that was done to your body.

So here's the example I use all the time. Two guys get hurt. One guy makes 20 bucks an hour. One guy makes 10 bucks an hour. They both break the same leg, go to the same doctor, they're in the hospital at the same time, they have the same surgery and they have the same outcome. The guy who makes 20 bucks an hour is going to end up with about double the money as the guy who makes 10 bucks an hour.

Is it fair? Probably not, but that's the way comp works. The bigger your injury, the more money you get. But the more money you make per hour or the bigger AWW or average weekly wage, the more money you get right.

So what are the other technical terms in Workers Comp? Well, there's TTD, temporary total disability.

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What is TTD?

TTD is the money you get paid while you're off work. You're supposed to get two thirds of your pay while you're off work with a doctor's note. You always need to have a doctor's note that says you're not supposed to be working and if you have that note and you got hurt at work and you're an employee you're entitled to TTD.

That doesn't mean that they always pay for it. In fact, the number one fight I have with insurance companies and employers when somebody hires me? The most common one by far is fighting over TTD. In other words, as soon as i get hired, I go out of my way to make sure my clients are getting paid their or time off work. Temporary Total Disability.

PPD or Permanent Partial Disability

So the last technical term i want to talk to you about is PPD or permanent partial disability. That’s the lump sum of money you get at the end of the case.

How is that calculated?

Well it's 60% of your AWW or average weekly wage times a number of weeks that your injury is rated at. There's literally like a chart that says an entire leg is worth so many weeks. Each body part is worth a certain number of weeks of work.

So if you have injury to your right leg, for example, it's not worth an entire leg because you can walk but maybe it's worth 40 percent of a leg. When we look at that number of weeks times your average weekly wage times 60 percent times that number of weeks and it gives us a number. That will be your PPD award at the end of the case, or at least a starting poitn for negotiating.

Now i'm always going to go way high on that and the insurance company and the employer is always going to go way low. So we meet in the middle if we can settle the case, And if we don't we go to court. And what happens a lot is we'll go and do a pre-trial in front of a judge and the judge will bring you know get them to come down or come up and get us to come down and hopefully meet us in the middle.

It's usually the judge who's going to hear the case. If it goes to trial so i tell my clients to take what the judge says seriously because there's not too many judges who at pre-trial are gonna tell you to take let's say a twenty thousand dollar offer and then later tell you you know not to after a trial. In other words, it's very unlikely that you're going to get a judge who tells you at pre-trial $20,000 is fair, and then you go to trial and they award you $40,000.

They're going to keep that decision around what they recommended at the pre-trial level because they've already evaluated the evidence. So that's what i tell people.

Those are the technical terms. Those are what they mean and i've done a short a little job of explaining you why they're important for you to know. I never use those terms when I'm talking to clients unless they accidentally slip out of my mouth.

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