Nobody tells you there is a limit until you are close to it. Then a receptionist mentions your funding is nearly used up and the recovery you were partway through turns into a budgeting problem.
How many physiotherapy sessions you get after a car accident is decided by a dollar limit rather than a session count. In Ontario, injuries classified as minor carry a total of $3,500 for all medical and rehabilitation treatment, usually delivered as a twelve-week program of care. Injuries that fall outside that classification can access up to $65,000, and catastrophic injuries up to $1,000,000.
At typical Ontario rates of roughly $70 to $150 a session, $3,500 buys fewer visits than people assume. That number also has to stretch further than most people realize, which is the part of this article worth reading closely.
What is the Minor Injury Guideline and why does it matter so much?
The Minor Injury Guideline, usually shortened to the MIG, is the classification that decides whether your treatment budget is $3,500 or up to $65,000. That is a difference of roughly eighteen times, and it is the single most consequential decision made about most Ontario car accident claims.
The MIG covers soft tissue injuries. Sprains, strains, whiplash-associated disorders, contusions, abrasions and similar. Most people are placed in it by default in the early weeks, because that is what most collision injuries look like at first.
The classification is made before anyone knows how your recovery will actually go. That is the problem. An injury that seemed like a strain in week two and is still stopping you working in month five was never a minor injury, but the file already says it was.
How do you get out of the Minor Injury Guideline?
With medical evidence, submitted by a health professional, showing your injury falls outside the guideline or that a pre-existing condition means the guideline will not allow you to recover adequately.
Grounds that commonly take a claim outside the MIG include a fracture, a disc herniation, nerve involvement, a concussion or brain injury, a psychological injury and chronic pain that persists well beyond expected healing. A documented pre-existing condition, supported by your medical records, can also do it.
What decides these disputes is documentation, and specifically documentation from the time rather than recollection afterwards. A record showing that you reported numbness in week one, that headaches started on day three and that you have not slept a full night since April is very different from telling someone the same thing in month seven.
Raise it early. The people best placed to help are your family doctor and your treating physiotherapist, and many people never think to ask them.
Does the $3,500 only pay for treatment?
No, and this catches almost everyone.
The limit covers everything medical and rehabilitative on your file, not only the hands-on sessions. Assessments come out of it. Treatment plans come out of it. The reports your clinic writes to request more funding come out of it.
So the paperwork that asks your insurer for further treatment is itself paid for from the money that would have bought the treatment. A single assessment and report can consume several hundred dollars of a $3,500 budget before anyone touches you.
This is not anyone behaving badly. It is how the framework is built. It does mean that the honest answer to how many sessions you get is fewer than the arithmetic suggests, and it is worth asking your clinic directly at the start: how much of my limit will assessments and reporting use.
How long does physiotherapy last after a workplace injury?
A WSIB claim works differently. Where a claim is accepted, approved treatment is covered in full and the clinic bills the board directly rather than charging you. There is no dollar cap in the same sense.
What there is instead is a program length. Treatment is generally delivered as a standard program of care running around eight weeks. If you need more, your physiotherapist submits a request for an extension or for supplementary care, supported by clinical reasoning.
The pressure point is therefore not money but justification. Extensions turn on whether the file shows measurable ongoing impairment, so what your provider is able to write becomes the whole question.
What happens when your physiotherapy funding runs out?
You have four routes and most people only know about the last one.
Request more. Your provider submits a further treatment plan with medical justification. If you are inside the MIG, this is also the moment to ask whether your injury still belongs there.
Dispute a refusal. A denial can be challenged. In Ontario, accident benefit disputes go to the Licence Appeal Tribunal, and the clock runs from a clear refusal rather than from your accident. Do not treat a denial letter as the end of the conversation.
Use your other coverage. Extended health benefits through work or a spouse sit separately from accident benefits and are often untouched. Many people burn through one while forgetting the other exists.
Pay privately. Sessions in Ontario commonly run $70 to $150. Publicly funded physiotherapy exists but reaches only four groups: people 65 and over, people 19 and under, people receiving ODSP or Ontario Works, and people recovering from a recent hospital stay or day surgery. Most working-age adults do not qualify.
Do the same limits apply in every province?
No. The structure is similar everywhere and the numbers are not.
Every province has some version of the same three things: a pot of money or a program length, a treatment plan that has to be approved, and a route to ask for more when it runs out. What changes is who holds the money. Ontario, Alberta and the Atlantic provinces run through private insurers. British Columbia, Saskatchewan, Manitoba and Quebec run through public insurers, with their own limits, forms and approval processes.
The figures above are Ontario. If you were hurt elsewhere, the mechanism will be recognizable and the numbers will not be. Your provincial guide carries the specifics where you live.
What should you track from your first session?
Not because tracking is virtuous. Because every route above runs on evidence you can only gather as it happens.
- The date of every session, and every session offered that you could not attend, with the reason
- What was done and what you were told about your progress
- Your symptoms across the week, not only on treatment days
- What you still cannot do, named as a specific task rather than as a pain score
- Every approval, denial or funding letter, with the date it arrived
- Roughly how much of your limit has been used, which your clinic can tell you if you ask
Ask for your remaining balance at week four rather than week eleven. The people who get extensions approved are almost always the people who asked early and had something to show.
The Physiotherapy and Rehabilitation Tracker, Free Starter Edition gives you a page per session. The Ontario MVA Companion Guide carries the forms, the limits and the dispute routes in one place.
Read next
- What happens at a physiotherapy appointment
- What to do after a car accident in Ontario
- What happens at a functional abilities evaluation
Last verified August 2026. This article is general information for people in Canada and is not medical, legal or insurance advice. Confirm your own limits with your insurer.