How to Get Reimbursed by Washington's Stay-at-Work Program: A Complete Employer Guide

What Is the Stay-at-Work Program?

Washington's Stay-at-Work (SAW) program, administered by the Department of Labor and Industries (L&I), reimburses employers who keep injured workers on the job in light-duty or modified work during the recovery period. For injuries on or after January 1, 2025, the program reimburses 50% of base wages paid to the injured worker for approved light-duty days — up to 120 workdays and a maximum of $25,000 per claim.

L&I paid $16 million in SAW reimbursements in 2024 and attributes persistent underuse to documentation friction, not a lack of qualifying claims. That gap is recoverable — if you have the right documentation process in place before the claim closes.

Who Qualifies?

To qualify for SAW reimbursement, four conditions must all be true:

• The worker is injured on the job and has an open L&I claim (State Fund)
• The attending provider has authorized light-duty or modified work in writing (typically via the Activity Prescription Form)
• The employer offers a job that fits within the physician's stated restrictions
• The worker performs the approved light-duty work

The injury date matters: the current program rates and caps apply to injuries on or after January 1, 2025. Claims with earlier injury dates are subject to the prior program parameters — verify with L&I if you have multi-year claims.

The Documentation Requirements

The SAW reimbursement application requires you to demonstrate, for each approved day, that:

1. The worker performed the approved light-duty job on that date
2. The physician's restriction authorization was active on that date
3. The job offered was within the stated restrictions
4. The base wages paid for that day are accurately recorded

This is what L&I calls approved-dates-only logic — and it's where most reimbursement applications fall short. Days when the worker performed tasks outside the approved job, days before physician approval was documented, or days after the restriction expired cannot be counted toward the reimbursement total.

If your approved-day log has gaps — because you reconstructed it from timesheets and email threads after the fact — L&I auditors will disqualify those days. The result is a partial reimbursement at best, or a full denial and potential clawback at worst.

What the Employer's Job Description Form Must Include

Before the reimbursement application, L&I requires that the light-duty job be documented on the Employer's Job Description Form (Form F242-388-000). This form must show:

• The specific duties the worker will perform
• The physical demands of the job (lifting limits, posture requirements, hours per day)
• That the job falls within the attending provider's stated restrictions
• Physician signature confirming the job is within the worker's current restrictions

The physician's approval of the Employer's Job Description Form is a prerequisite for the wage reimbursement — not an optional step. If you generated offer letters and tracked approved days but never got the job description signed, the claim is not SAW-eligible.

The Reimbursement Filing Process

Applications are filed through My L&I, the employer's online portal. You will need to upload the approved Activity Prescription Form, the signed Employer's Job Description Form, and documentation of approved wages paid on each qualifying day. L&I typically reviews applications within 60 days and reimburses via direct deposit to the employer.

The filing window is one year from the date the eligible light-duty wages were first paid. This is not a rolling window — if the claim is more than a year old, the filing opportunity is closed. Employers who discover a missed SAW window too late cannot recover those reimbursements.

Why Most Employers Miss the Filing Window

The most common reason eligible employers don't file is not ineligibility — it's incomplete documentation assembled after the fact. Approved-day logs reconstructed from payroll exports and email threads rarely hold up to L&I's documentation standard. Physician approval dates that were never formally recorded. Offer letters that were generated but not tracked with an acceptance or refusal record.

The documentation required for SAW reimbursement is exactly the documentation you need to produce anyway for a defensible RTW record. The difference is whether that documentation was assembled in real time, as the case progressed, or reconstructed after the claim closed.

What to Do Before the Next Claim Opens

The time to build a SAW-ready documentation process is before the next injury event — not after the physician form arrives. Specifically, every WA State Fund employer should have in place before the next claim:

• A site-scoped library of light-duty jobs with documented physical demands (your "task bank")
• A structured process for capturing physician restrictions at intake — not transcribed from a fax, but entered into a system that links those restrictions to every downstream document
• A day-by-day approved-day log that tracks the approved job, the active restriction window, and the wages paid
• A process for generating, sending, and tracking the Employer's Job Description Form through physician approval before the offer is made

An employer with three qualifying SAW claims per year who has this process in place recovers up to $75,000 in annual wage reimbursement. An employer without it forfeits the same amount — not because they don't qualify, but because the documentation doesn't support the application.

Next Steps

Download the WA SAW reimbursement workbook to build your approved-day tracking process today, or use the ROI calculator to estimate how much your organization is currently forfeiting annually.