If you were injured while working at sea, you have rights that predate most of modern labor laws. Maintenance and cure is one of the oldest and most fundamental protections in maritime law, and it exists for injured seamen who need medical care or basic financial support while they recover. Despite this, many offshore employers delay, reduce, or outright deny these benefits, leaving workers in a difficult position at one of the most vulnerable moments of their lives.
At Falcon Offshore Injury, our maritime injury attorneys represent injured seamen throughout the Gulf Coast who are fighting to receive the benefits they are legally owed. This guide explains what maintenance and cure means, how it works, and when a denial crosses the line into a legal claim that may entitle you to additional compensation.
Maintenance and cure is a no-fault obligation under general maritime law that requires a vessel owner or employer to provide two distinct categories of support to an injured seaman:
Critically, maintenance and cure is owed regardless of fault. It does not matter whether the employer was negligent, whether the seaman made a mistake, or whether the injury seems minor. As long as the injury or illness occurred in the service of the vessel, the obligation applies.
To qualify for maintenance and cure, a worker must meet the legal definition of a seaman under maritime law. Generally, this means the worker was assigned to a vessel or fleet of vessels in navigation and performed a significant portion of their work on that vessel. Offshore workers including deckhands, engineers, crane operators, divers, and others regularly qualify as seamen depending on the nature of their duties and their connection to the vessel.
The injury or illness does not need to have occurred on the vessel itself. Benefits are owed if the condition arose during the period of service, which courts have interpreted broadly. Even illnesses that develop gradually or conditions that existed before employment may qualify if they were aggravated or worsened during service. If you are unsure whether you qualify, speaking with a Jones Act lawyer is the most reliable way to find out.
The maintenance rate, meaning the daily living allowance, has historically been a point of significant dispute. For many years, vessel owners paid rates as low as eight to ten dollars per day, which courts eventually recognized as inadequate. Modern courts have moved toward requiring maintenance rates that more accurately reflect actual living costs, and in many cases injured seamen have successfully argued for rates of forty to sixty dollars per day or more depending on their documented expenses.
Cure payments should cover the actual and reasonable cost of all necessary medical treatment. Employers do not have the right to dictate which doctors a seaman must see or to refuse treatment that a physician has determined is medically necessary. If your employer is limiting your medical care or refusing to authorize recommended treatment, that refusal may itself constitute a legal violation.
Despite the clear legal obligation, employers and their insurers routinely use tactics to reduce or avoid paying full maintenance and cure benefits. The most common include:
These tactics are not legitimate legal defenses. They are strategies designed to minimize what an employer pays out, and they can cause serious harm to injured workers who depend on these benefits to survive during recovery.
When an employer refuses to pay maintenance and cure without a reasonable basis, that refusal gives rise to an independent legal claim. A wrongful denial of maintenance and cure is not simply a benefits dispute. It is a separate cause of action under maritime law that can result in the employer being required to pay not only the withheld benefits but also attorney fees and additional damages.
The threshold for establishing a wrongful denial is not as high as it might seem. Courts have found that an employer’s obligation to investigate a maintenance and cure claim is affirmative, meaning employers cannot simply ignore a claim or deny it without conducting a reasonable inquiry. If your employer has denied your benefits, delayed payment without explanation, or cut off your medical care before you reached genuine maximum medical improvement, you may already have grounds for a separate legal claim.
When an employer’s conduct goes beyond a simple dispute and rises to the level of willful, wanton, or callous disregard for a seaman’s rights, courts may award punitive damages. The U.S. Supreme Court confirmed in Atlantic Sounding Co. v. Townsend that punitive damages are available in maintenance and cure cases where the employer acted in bad faith.
Bad faith can take many forms, including deliberately misrepresenting the results of a medical evaluation, manufacturing pretextual reasons to deny benefits, cutting off payments to coerce an injured worker into settling for less than they are owed, or retaliating against a seaman for asserting their legal rights. Punitive damages in these cases are designed to punish the employer and deter similar conduct, and they can significantly increase the total compensation available to an injured seaman.
Maintenance and cure disputes are rarely straightforward. Employers have legal teams and insurance adjusters whose job is to minimize what they pay. Injured seamen deserve the same level of representation, particularly when their ability to pay for medical care and meet basic living expenses depends on receiving benefits they are legally owed.
At Falcon Offshore Injury, our team handles maintenance and cure disputes as part of a comprehensive approach to maritime injury representation. We review the full picture of what happened, identify every available legal claim, and fight to make sure our clients receive every dollar they are entitled to under the law. When employers act in bad faith, we pursue punitive damages aggressively.
Contact us today at (956) 232-3089 to schedule your free and confidential consultation. If your maintenance and cure benefits have been delayed, reduced, or denied, do not wait to find out where you stand legally.
