Average Weekly Wage (AWW)

How Florida calculates your average weekly wage

Florida uses a 13 week lookback. The carrier takes your gross earnings for the 13 weeks immediately before the week of your accident happened —excluding the week of the accident itself—and divides by 13.

The statute requires that you worked “substantially the whole” of those 13 weeks. Suppose you did not, because you were newly hired or seasonal, the carrier is supposed to use the wages of a similar employee performing similar work in the same community. In practice, this is one of the most frequently mishandled parts of a claim.

Gross means gross. Your AWW is calculated before taxes and before deductions.

What counts as wages

More belongs in your AWW than most injured workers realize:

• Regular hourly wages or salary
• Overtime actually earned during the 13 weeks
• Bonuses and commissions
• Reported tips
• Employer paid health insurance premiums, if the employer stops paying them after your injury
• Wages from a second job, if workers’ compensation also covered that job at the time of the accident

That last one is worth reading twice. If you were working two covered jobs, both sets of wages belong in the calculation. Carriers routinely calculate AWW from the accident employer’s payroll alone and never ask about concurrent employment.

How AWW becomes your weekly check

AWW is the input; your compensation rate is the output. For temporary total disability, the rate is two-thirds — 66⅔% — of your AWW.

A worker with an AWW of $900 has a TTD rate of $600 per week. That $600 is not taxed, which narrows the real world gap, but it is still a substantial cut in take-home pay.

Florida caps the weekly figure. Under § 440.12(2), the maximum weekly compensation rate equals 100% of the statewide average weekly wage, and it is set by your date of injury, not by the current year. For accidents on or after January 1, 2026, the cap is $1,358 per week. A 2025 injury remains capped at the 2025 figure even though you are still collecting benefits today.

Where AWW calculations go wrong

These are the errors that actually appear in Florida claims:

• Overtime dropped. The carrier pulls base wages only and omits overtime that shows plainly on your pay stubs.
• The wrong 13 weeks. Using the 13 weeks including the accident week, or the 13 weeks before you got a raise, both understate the figure.
• Concurrent employment ignored. Nobody asked whether you had a second job.
• Short-tenure workers averaged against zero. If you started six weeks before the accident, the carrier sometimes divides six weeks of pay by 13. That is not what the statute says.
• Fringe benefits omitted. The employer paid portion of health insurance is often left out entirely.

None of these are exotic. They are the ordinary product of a carrier calculating quickly from incomplete payroll records.

What this means for your claim

Ask the carrier for the wage statement it used. You are entitled to see how they built the number. Then compare it against your own pay stubs for the 13 weeks before the accident, including overtime, bonuses, and tips.

If the figures do not match, the correction is worth pursuing. AWW doesn’t affect one check—it affects temporary total disability, temporary partial disability, impairment income benefits, and any eventual settlement value. An AWW that is $150 too low costs $100 a week for as long as you receive benefits, and it reduces every downstream calculation.

You can correct AWW after the fact, including retroactively.