A one page report from your treating health professional saying what you can physically do right now. Walking, standing, sitting, lifting from floor to waist and from waist to shoulder, stairs, ladders and travel to work.
The WSIB calls it the Functional Abilities Form for Planning Early and Safe Return to Work, form 2647A. Section 37 subsection 3 of the Workplace Safety and Insurance Act is the authority that lets a health professional share that information with you, your employer and the WSIB.
Why does the Functional Abilities Form matter so much?
Because turning down work that fits your stated abilities can cost you your benefits.
The Office of the Worker Adviser puts it plainly on its page on early and safe return to work: if you refuse work that falls within the abilities set out in these reports, you will be treated as uncooperative and your benefits may be reduced or taken away.
So the form is not paperwork. It is the boundary of what you can be asked to do, and it was drawn by somebody who saw you for one short appointment.
Who fills in the Functional Abilities Form?
Your treating health professional completes the clinical part. A doctor, a physiotherapist or another licensed health care professional who is treating you.
Either you or your employer can ask for one. The WSIB says on its Functional Abilities Form page that the form is optional and is primarily a communication tool for the workplace parties, meant for use when you are functionally able to return to some kind of work.
You sign it. Your signature authorizes the release of functional abilities information to your employer and to the WSIB. That consent is limited to functional information. Employers using their own version are told by the WSIB not to request diagnostic or confidential information.
Is a functional abilities evaluation the same thing?
No. A functional abilities evaluation is a physical assessment where somebody watches you lift, carry, bend and reach, and measures what you manage.
The Functional Abilities Form is a report your own treating practitioner fills in, often from what they already know about you. The two get used interchangeably in conversation and they are not the same, so ask which one has been arranged before you go.
What should I do before my appointment?
Bring the specifics, because your practitioner cannot invent them.
- What your job actually involves. The weights, the reaches, the hours on your feet, the stairs, the ladder, the cold, the vibration.
- What a bad day looks like as well as a good one. An appointment that lands on a good morning produces a form describing a good morning.
- What you tried and could not finish. The task you started at home and handed to somebody else is evidence of a limit.
- How long you last. Not whether you can lift the box, how many times, and what happens the next day.
Take it in written form. A person in pain describing a week from memory understates it, reliably and in the same direction.
What if the form does not match how I actually am?
Go back to the practitioner who wrote it and say so.
The Office of the Worker Adviser advises exactly that: if the Form 8, the FAF or any other medical report does not accurately state your condition, discuss it with your health professional. A form written from an incomplete picture is corrected the same way it was made, by the person who made it.
What will not work is refusing the work instead. The consequence lands on your benefits rather than on the form.
How does this connect to the rest of my claim?
It sets what suitable work means for you, which drives the return to work process and every decision after it.
If you have already been asked back and it went wrong, our article Return to Work and WSIB in Ontario sets out the obligations on both sides. If a decision has gone against you, a return to work decision carries the shorter thirty day objection limit, set out in our article How Do I Appeal a WSIB Decision?
One short appointment is what your practitioner has. What you walk in with decides what goes on the form, and a week described from memory is not the same week.
Every figure in this article comes from a named source. How we check
Last verified: September 2026.
