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Average Weekly Wage, or AWW, is the average of your gross earnings during the 13 weeks immediately before your workplace accident. Under Florida Statute § 440.14, the insurance carrier uses this single figure to calculate every wage benefit in your claim, so an error in your AWW repeats itself in every check you receive.
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.
More belongs in your AWW than most injured workers realize:
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.
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.
These are the errors that actually appear in Florida claims:
None of these are exotic. They are the ordinary product of a carrier calculating quickly from incomplete payroll records.
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.
Request the wage statement from the workers’ compensation adjuster handling your claim. Carriers are required to calculate AWW from your employer’s payroll records, and you are entitled to see that calculation. If the adjuster will not produce it, that’s another reason to speak with an attorney.
Yes. Overtime actually earned during the 13 weeks before your accident is part of your gross wages and belongs in the calculation. So do bonuses, commissions, and reported tips. Omitted overtime is one of the most common AWW errors in Florida claims.
Florida Statute § 440.14 does not simply average your short earnings across 13 weeks. When you haven’t worked substantially for the full 13 week period, the carrier must use the wages of a comparable employee doing similar work in the same community. Short tenure workers are frequently underpaid on this point.
Yes. If the AWW was calculated incorrectly, it can be recalculated, and the underpayment recovered, including for weeks already paid. Because AWW drives every wage benefit in the claim, correcting it is often the single highest value adjustment available.
Reviewed by: Scott J. Sternberg