One of the most important damages victims will typically claim after an injury is compensation for lost wages. These damages are available any time that your injury keeps you from being able to return to work, even if the injury or initial accident had nothing to do with your work duties. However, calculating lost wages can be difficult if you work irregularly or if your injury will affect you for years to come.
In general, past lost wages that already happened are simple to calculate if we know how much you usually make and how much time you missed at work. Future lost wages are calculated by comparing how much you make now (which might be nothing) to how much you would have made going forward. This takes some educated guesses and predictions, which financial experts can sometimes help with. In some cases with irregular work, calculating lost wages can be more difficult, but again, experts can help.
For a free evaluation of your potential injury case, call our Maryland personal injury lawyers at Rice, Murtha & Psoras at (410) 694-7291.
Calculating Past Lost Wages for an Injury Claim in Maryland
When you are hurt in an accident and have missed some amount of work so far, calculating the lost wages from the date of injury to today is somewhat straightforward. In many situations, you will have healed up completely, so we have a set number of days/weeks/months that you missed work, and now you are back to working at full capacity. Alternatively, we may be looking at lost time at work that will continue after today, but calculating lost wages from the date of injury to today is simple.
In this situation, we can look at the wages you made before the accident and simply multiply that by the time you were out of work. For example, if you missed 10 days of work while you recovered, and you made $115 per day, that’s $1,150 in lost wages. If you missed 2 months and have an annual salary of $51,000 ($4,250 per month), then that’s $8,500 in lost wages.
Things can be more complicated if you have an irregular work schedule, but we will address that separately below.
Calculating Future Lost Wages for an Injury Claim in Maryland
Our Baltimore personal injury lawyers often deal with injury cases that involve disabilities that will stop someone from returning to work at full capacity. In some situations, they will be able to return to work at a limited capacity, either right now or in the future. In others, they might be totally disabled, requiring lost wages for the rest of their life.
To determine what wages were lost, we need to determine what wages you would have made before the accident and then subtract any wages you are projected to make now. Both of these projections can involve some detailed analyses of job markets, your skills and training, and projections about your age and future health before the accident, all of which we can hire experts to attest to.
Calculating Old Projected Wages
To determine how much you would have made before your injury, we need to look at your salary before the accident and estimate how that might have grown or changed over the years. Would you have gotten promotions or raises? Would you have changed careers? What would your salary have been in 5 years? 10 years? 20 years?
We also need to project how much longer you would have worked for. If you were 2 years from retirement, calculating future wages is somewhat simple, but if you were in your 20s and planned to work until you physically can’t, we would need to get opinions about your potential future retirement age, health, lifespan, etc. to determine how much you would have made in the rest of your life without the injury.
Inflation and cost-of-living changes are also to be taken into account.
Calculating New Projected Wages
From there, we make the same kinds of projections about your ability to earn money now, post-injury. If you are totally disabled and all medical evidence points to you staying totally disabled, then you are likely to make $0 going forward. However, if you can now or might soon be able to return to work at full earning power or limited/light duties, we can take that into account as well.
This means looking at factors such as how much of an impact your injury will have on your potential career track – e.g., will it prevent future promotions, or will you be able to get back on track after a few years of recovery? Additionally, how much money can you make now, given your present (and future) disabilities? Will you be able to get back up to the same level of earnings? Will you be stuck with light-duty work forever?
Once we have these projections, we can subtract your projected future wages from your projected pre-injury wages to arrive at the total lost wage value.
How Are Lost Wages Calculated if I Work Irregular Hours or Work Seasonally?
Not everyone has a “9-to-5” job, and not everyone works consistent or regular hours for regular pay. Many “gig workers” do lots of different jobs and make unpredictable monthly wages. Especially if you are an artist or creator of some kind – painter, writer, musician – your income might come in waves, with months of no income and months of big paychecks when your work is sold or finished. Others simply work seasonally, meaning that 3/4 of the year, they make far less than they do in the other 1/4. There are a few ways to take this into account, depending on the length of your injury, and experts might be able to help with these calculations when needed.
If you work seasonally or have certain points in the year with higher sales, we can compare what you missed or will miss in one season to what your income looked like in the previous season. We can also compare this to “normal” income from the rest of the year to get a projected income.
If you work hourly, but your hours change, we can average these values out to daily, weekly, monthly, or annual wages and use them as a starting point in calculations.
Call Our Maryland Injury Attorneys for Help Today
If you were injured in an accident, call (410) 694-7291 for a free case evaluation with Rice, Murtha & Psoras’ Annapolis, MD personal injury lawyers.