What are my return to work obligations with WSIB?
To stay in contact and to co-operate, starting as soon as possible after the injury. Your employer owes you the same thing, and that duty runs both ways from the day it happens.
Section 40 of the Workplace Safety and Insurance Act sets it out. Both of you contact each other as soon as possible after the injury, and both of you maintain communication throughout your recovery.
Most return to work disputes start as a communication failure rather than a disagreement about medicine.
What does my employer have to do?
Accommodate the work or the workplace, up to the point of undue hardship.
That obligation sits in the same part of the Act as the duty to co-operate. It is a duty to change the job or the place to fit what you can do, not a duty to wait until you can do what you did before.
The WSIB may contact both of you to check on progress, to decide whether either of you is meeting the obligation, and to see whether help is needed.
What happens if my employer does not co-operate?
The WSIB can charge them, and the amounts are not small.
The WSIB sets the penalties out on its page on return to work responsibilities. An employer who still does not co-operate fourteen calendar days after a penalty starts can be charged up to the full amount of the wage loss benefits you are receiving, plus the full cost of any return to work training services, and that can continue for up to twelve months.
Penalties stop the day after the employer tells the WSIB it is co-operating.
If the issue is your job rather than the process, the duty to take you back is a separate provision and it is set out in can you be fired while on a WSIB claim.
What happens if I refuse the work I am offered?
Your benefits can be reduced or stopped, if the work is inside what your medical reports say you can do.
The Office of the Worker Adviser states it directly on its page on early and safe return to work. Refusing work that falls within the abilities set out in your Form 8, your Functional Abilities Form or other medical reports means being treated as uncooperative.
That is why those forms matter more than they look. What they say becomes the measure of what you can be asked to do, and the way to change the measure is to correct the form with the practitioner who wrote it rather than to decline the work.
What should I be documenting during a return to work?
Every offer, every answer and every change, with its date.
- Each conversation. The date, who spoke, what was proposed and what you said back.
- Each offer of work. The duties, the hours, the pay and the physical demands as they were described to you.
- What happened when you tried it. The task, how long you lasted and the effect that evening and the next morning.
- Every change to hours, duties or pay, and the date each change started.
- What your practitioner said you could do, and the date they said it.
A return to work dispute is decided on dates and offers. Both sides are under the same duty, and the one who can show what was offered and when is the one whose version stands.
None of that feels worth writing down on the day. It becomes worth it the morning somebody asks what was offered in March, and neither of you is sure.
Every figure on this page comes from a named authority. How we check
Last verified: September 2026.
