Understanding the Texas DWC-073 Work Status Report

What the DWC-073 Is — and Why It Lands on Your Desk

A claim opens on a Tuesday. By Thursday, you have a faxed document from the treating physician's office: the Texas DWC-073, Work Status Report. It is a one-page form, but every checkbox and every blank on it controls what you can legally offer the injured worker, what you must document, and — if the worker refuses — whether the insurance carrier can reduce or suspend indemnity benefits.

The DWC-073 is not a suggestion. Under the Texas Division of Workers' Compensation (TDI-DWC) system, it is the treating physician's official communication of the worker's functional status. It defines the restriction window your return-to-work (RTW) process must work inside. Miss a restriction, draft a job description that exceeds its limits, or skip the written offer — and your Bona Fide Offer of Employment (BFOE) loses its legal standing under 28 TAC §129.6.

This article explains how to read the Texas DWC-073 work status report section by section, how to translate its clinical language into operationally useful restrictions, and how to connect it to a compliant light-duty assignment and written offer. By the end, you will know exactly which fields drive your documentation and what happens if any of them change at the next physician visit.

Confirm the current form version. TDI-DWC revises its forms periodically. Before using any DWC-073 in a live claim, verify you have the current version directly with TDI-DWC at dwd.texas.gov. The form reference in this article reflects the form as understood at publication; the publisher makes no representation that a particular revision number is current.

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The DWC-073 at a Glance: Four Sections That Drive RTW

The DWC-073 is structured to move from administrative identity (whose claim, whose employer) to clinical opinion (what the worker can and cannot do) to timeline (when do we revisit this). Each section feeds a different part of your RTW documentation workflow.

Section 1 — Claim and party identification. This section names the injured employee, the date of injury, the employer of record, and the treating physician. Before you read a single restriction, confirm the employer name matches your business unit and the date of injury matches your FROI (First Report of Injury). A form that references the wrong employer or a different date of injury is a flag to call the adjuster before you act on it — not after.

Section 2 — Work status and physical restrictions. This is the operational core of the texas dwc-073 work status report. The physician checks one of three work-status positions:

1. Full duty, no restrictions — the worker can return to the pre-injury job; no transitional assignment is needed.
2. Modified/light duty with restrictions — the worker can work within specified limits; this is your RTW window.
3. Off work — no work of any kind is authorized; a transitional assignment cannot be offered for this period.

When the physician checks modified/light duty, the restriction checkboxes and fill-in fields become your working document. Common restriction categories include:

• Lifting limits — maximum weight for occasional, frequent, and continuous lifting, usually in pounds. These are not interchangeable: "occasional" typically means up to one-third of the workday; "frequent" means one-third to two-thirds; "continuous" means more than two-thirds. The DWC-073 may use these definitions explicitly or leave interpretation to the provider's note.
• Pushing and pulling limits — stated separately from lifting; relevant in warehousing, healthcare, and any job involving carts, pallets, or equipment.
• Positional restrictions — prohibitions or time limits on standing, sitting, walking, bending, kneeling, squatting, climbing, or reaching overhead.
• Hand and upper-extremity restrictions — gripping, pinching, keyboard use, tool operation; often the controlling restriction for office-based transitional assignments.
• Other restrictions — driving, operating machinery, working at heights, exposure to specific hazards. Read these carefully; a "no driving" restriction eliminates an entire category of transitional tasks that might otherwise seem appropriate.

Section 3 — Next visit date and signature. The treating physician's signature and the date of the next scheduled visit are in this section. That next-visit date is not administrative noise — it is the date on which every restriction on the DWC-073 may change. Build it into your calendar the day the form arrives. If the restrictions tighten, you may need to modify or withdraw the transitional assignment. If they loosen, a new or expanded offer may be appropriate.

Narrative or addendum lines. Some physicians add free-text qualifications beyond the checkboxes — "no repetitive hand motions," "elevate affected limb," "avoid cold environments." These carry the same clinical authority as the checkboxes. Log them verbatim; do not paraphrase into something easier to assign against.

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Translating Restrictions into a Compliant Job Description

A DWC-073 restriction list is written in clinical shorthand. A transitional duty job description must be written in operational terms a supervisor can enforce and a physician can approve. That translation is where most documentation errors occur.

Step 1: Extract every restriction into a structured intake log. Do not work from memory or a yellow sticky note. Log each restriction — category, limit, and any narrative qualifier — in a format you can reference against a job description line by line. Our restriction intake best practices guide covers the intake format in detail.

Step 2: Map restrictions to physical demand categories. The US Department of Labor's physical demand classification system — sedentary, light, medium, heavy, very heavy — provides a bridge between clinical restriction language and job-description drafting. A physician who restricts lifting to 10 pounds maximum is effectively authorizing sedentary to light physical demand. A job description for the transitional assignment should explicitly state its physical demand level and confirm it falls within those limits.

Step 3: Draft the transitional job description against the restriction envelope, not against the pre-injury job. The DWC-073 defines what is medically authorized. The pre-injury job description is irrelevant for this purpose — it is what the worker will eventually return to, not the basis for the transitional assignment. If the transitional job exceeds any DWC-073 restriction, the offer is non-compliant. If the worker performs work exceeding their restrictions on any given day, you have a liability and documentation problem regardless of what the offer letter says.

For guidance on structuring the job description itself, see our light-duty job description guide.

Step 4: Confirm duty candidates against the restrictions before the offer goes out. This is the duty-matching step. For employers with multiple departments or job families, there is often more than one candidate assignment. Each candidate should be evaluated against the full restriction list — not just the most visible restriction (usually the lifting limit). A sedentary office role that requires significant keyboard use, for example, may be disqualified by an upper-extremity grip restriction that the lifting limit didn't flag.

For a structured approach to matching O*NET task data against restriction profiles, see our O*NET duty matching guide.

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The BFOE Connection: Why the DWC-073 Is the Foundation of the Written Offer

Under 28 TAC §129.6, a Bona Fide Offer of Employment must be made in writing and must describe work that is within the injured worker's physical and medical restrictions. The DWC-073 is the document that establishes what those restrictions are at the time of the offer.

This creates a direct chain of custody:

1. DWC-073 received → restrictions extracted and logged.
2. Transitional job description drafted within those restrictions.
3. Written BFOE issued, referencing the job's physical demands in terms the worker and their physician can evaluate against the DWC-073.
4. Worker and, as appropriate, the treating physician informed of the offer.

If the worker refuses a valid written BFOE, the carrier may treat the offered wages as post-injury earnings on the earlier of the worker's rejection or the seventh day after deemed receipt - the offer being deemed received five days after mailing (28 TAC §129.6(g), 2024). That timeline underscores why the documentation chain must be airtight from the moment the DWC-073 arrives: a procedural gap in the offer — wrong form, missing restriction reference, unsigned job description — can invalidate the BFOE and the carrier's ability to act on the refusal.

For a full walkthrough of the BFOE process, including the required content under 28 TAC §129.6, see our Texas bona fide offer RTW guide.

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When the DWC-073 Changes Mid-Assignment

The DWC-073 is a point-in-time document. The next-visit date in Section 3 is the earliest it can be superseded — but a physician can also issue a revised DWC-073 between scheduled visits following a change in the worker's condition, a specialist consultation, or a surgical procedure.

When a new DWC-073 arrives:

• Compare it to the prior form restriction by restriction. Do not assume the restrictions are the same because the checkboxes look similar. A single changed field — a lifting limit dropped from 20 to 10 pounds, or a "modified duty" status changed to "off work" — changes the entire assignment.
• Suspend the assignment if the new restrictions disqualify the current transitional role. Continue to document that you received the updated form and the date on which the assignment was modified or ended.
• Issue a revised or new BFOE if the restrictions expand and a different or broader assignment is now appropriate.
• Retain both versions of the DWC-073 in the claim file. An audit or dispute may require you to show exactly which restrictions were in effect on any given day of the transitional assignment.

This version-control problem — tracking which DWC-073 was operative on which date — is one of the practical reasons a spreadsheet breaks down quickly when three or more claims are open simultaneously.

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Building the DWC-073 into Your RTW File from Day One

The Texas DWC-073 work status report is not background paperwork. It is the clinical authority that makes a transitional assignment valid or invalid, and it is the document a claims adjuster, an attorney, or a TDI-DWC examiner will go to first in any dispute about whether the employer made a compliant offer.

Practical steps for every claim:

1. Log the receipt date of every DWC-073 — not just the form date printed by the physician.
2. Extract all restrictions immediately, including free-text qualifications. Do not defer this to when you are ready to draft a job description.
3. Calendar the next-visit date and set a reminder one business day before to check whether a new form has been issued.
4. Retain every version of the DWC-073 received on a claim, in date order, as part of the permanent claim file.
5. Link the job description to the specific DWC-073 version it was drafted against, so the documentation chain is clear if restrictions change and the assignment changes with them.

If you are managing transitional assignments across multiple concurrent claims, a structured intake and tracking process is not optional — it is the only way to ensure each claim's offer is built on the right restriction set at the right point in time. See our restriction intake best practices guide for a replicable intake format.

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Ready-to-Use Texas RTW Documentation

Translating the DWC-073 into a compliant written offer requires the right templates — a transitional job description format, a BFOE letter that meets 28 TAC §129.6 requirements, and a restriction intake log that captures every field the form contains.

The Texas RTW & Bona Fide Offer Pack at /store/texas-rtw-bona-fide-offer-pack includes ready-to-use templates built around the DWC-073 intake and BFOE workflow described in this article. Download the pack to have the documentation structure in place before the next DWC-073 lands on your desk.

Nothing in this article constitutes legal advice. Confirm form versions, filing requirements, and regulatory thresholds with TDI-DWC or qualified Texas workers' compensation counsel before acting on any specific claim.