Your doctor signs off on light duty, and within days your employer hands you a written job offer. The form looks official. The deadline feels real. And the question hanging over everything is whether you have to say yes, what it’ll do to your paycheck, and what happens to your workers’ compensation benefits if you don’t. Most workers assume refusal means losing everything. That assumption can cost them.
New Mexico has a specific statute governing these situations, and it gives workers more protection than the generic national answer suggests. Whether a particular offer is one you must accept, one you can decline without penalty, or something worth scrutinizing before you sign depends on facts the law actually requires a workers’ compensation judge to weigh. Not just the insurer’s adjuster.
What Light Duty Restrictions Mean After a New Mexico Work Injury
The starting point is who gets to define your restrictions. Under NMSA 52-1-49, medical restrictions must come from your authorized treating health care provider. Not your employer, not the insurance adjuster. If your employer gives you a job description and asks whether you can do it, that question still goes back to your treating provider before anything else.
New Mexico’s Workers’ Compensation Administration (WCA) describes three return-to-work categories: your usual job at the same pay, a modified version restructured to fit your restrictions, or alternative work with the same employer that differs from your pre-injury role but stays within what your provider has cleared. In practice, restrictions are task-specific. A functional capacity evaluation might say no standing for more than 60 consecutive minutes, no overhead reaching, or a requirement for a stool at a workstation. “Light duty” is a shorthand label, not a legally meaningful standard on its own.
Is Your Employer Required to Offer You Light Duty Work?
No. New Mexico law doesn’t require an employer to create a light duty position if one doesn’t genuinely fit within existing operations. What the law does do is set the conditions under which a work offer can affect your temporary total disability (TTD) benefits. TTD covers wage replacement when a work injury prevents you from returning at your regular capacity before you reach maximum medical improvement (MMI), the point at which your condition has stabilized as much as it medically will.
Under NMSA 52-1-25.1(D)(1), a job offer only cuts off TTD eligibility if it meets three requirements simultaneously: it must be reasonable, it must pay at or above your pre-injury wage, and it must stay within the restrictions your treating provider has documented. An offer that fails any one of those three conditions isn’t something a worker is legally required to accept in order to keep receiving benefits. If no position meeting those requirements exists, Subsection B entitles you to TTD while the medical situation remains active.
When the employer and worker disagree about whether an offer was legitimate or a refusal was justified, NMSA 52-1-25.1(G) places that decision with a workers’ compensation judge (WCJ), a neutral adjudicator who weighs all the circumstances, not just the employer’s characterization of the offer.
What Happens If You Refuse a Light Duty Offer
The consequences of refusal depend entirely on whether the offer actually qualified as reasonable under the statute. Turning down an offer that met all three requirements under 52-1-25.1(D)(1) can end TTD eligibility. Turning down an offer that asked you to perform tasks your treating provider hasn’t cleared is a different situation, and the statute treats it differently.
New Mexico appellate case law illustrates how fact-specific this analysis is. In Ruiz v. Los Lunas Public Schools, 2013-NMCA-085, the Court of Appeals held that a worker’s refusal of two separate job offers wasn’t unreasonable because the return-to-work release was premature given the worker’s actual medical condition at the time. The worker retained TTD eligibility. The point isn’t that refusal is always safe. It’s that the reasonableness question is a legal one with real stakes on both sides.
There’s also a misconduct exception worth understanding. Under NMSA 52-1-25.1(D)(3), if a worker is terminated for misconduct unrelated to the injury, that termination can cut off both TTD and permanent partial disability modifier benefits, the wage-replacement payments that continue after MMI when a worker carries a lasting impairment affecting earning capacity. That exception has limits, though. If a workers’ compensation judge finds the termination was pretextual or retaliatory, Subsection E authorizes the judge to restore benefits and impose a fine of up to $10,000 on the employer. The 2024 case Martin v. N.M. Mutual Casualty, 2024-NMCA-036, addressed the meaning of “misconduct” under this provision, holding that the term carries its plain, ordinary meaning of improper behavior.
How Pay Works While You Are on Light Duty
Two provisions in NMSA 52-1-25.1 cover wages, and they address two different situations.
No Light Duty Position Available
If your treating provider releases you to modified work before MMI but your employer doesn’t make a reasonable work offer at your pre-injury wage, you continue receiving TTD equal to two-thirds of your average weekly wage under 52-1-25.1(B). This continues until a qualifying offer is made, you reach MMI, or your claim reaches its benefit limit.
Light Duty Position That Pays Less
If you return to a light duty position that pays less than your pre-injury wage, 52-1-25.1(C) entitles you to two-thirds of the difference between the two wage figures, in addition to what the light duty job pays. If your pre-injury average weekly wage was $900 and your light duty position pays $600, the two-thirds wage-differential calculation applies to the $300 gap, adding $200 per week on top of the $600 paycheck. The math varies depending on your actual wage history, but the formula is set by statute.
Medical benefits under NMSA 52-1-49 continue regardless of which wage-replacement calculation applies and don’t stop just because a dispute about a work offer is pending.
Protecting Your Rights When Restrictions Aren’t Followed
Returning to a job with documented restrictions doesn’t always mean those restrictions get respected. Supervisors under pressure, coworkers covering short-staffed shifts, and the general pull of workplace culture can all create situations where an injured worker feels pushed to do more than their treating provider cleared. If that happens, point directly to the written restriction, decline the specific task, and report the incident to a supervisor or claims representative in writing. Performing a task that exceeds your restrictions can complicate your medical treatment, affect your claim, and give an adjuster reason to argue the restrictions weren’t actually limiting you.
New Mexico’s WCA operates a free ombudsman program for injured workers and employers navigating return-to-work disputes without litigation. The WCA also runs an Early Return-to-Work Initiative that provides employers with free guidance on building accommodating positions and resolving job modification questions. Both programs exist because these disputes are common and often don’t need a courtroom to resolve.
Disputes under NMSA 52-1-25.1(D) and (G) turn on case-specific facts: the exact wording of the restriction, the wage comparison, the timing of the offer relative to your medical status, and what was communicated and when. Keeping every job offer, restriction update, and significant conversation documented in writing is the single most protective step a worker can take before a dispute reaches a judge.
Whether a specific light duty offer meets New Mexico’s reasonable-work-offer standard is worth reviewing before you accept or refuse, because the answer isn’t the same for every offer or every injury. Michael J. Doyle, Attorney At Law handles workers’ compensation cases on a contingency basis with direct attorney representation from start to finish. If you have questions about a light duty situation in Albuquerque or anywhere in New Mexico, call us at (505) 219-2176.