---
title: "Lost-time claim — the unit behind almost every published Canadian injury rate"
description: "What a lost-time claim counts, why it is an insurer's definition rather than a safety one, and what that does to a rate you want to compare."
term: "Lost-time claim"
definition: "A workers' compensation claim accepted by a provincial board where the worker lost time from work beyond the day of injury, or received a permanent disability award. It is a claims-accepted count, not a count of accidents."
alsoKnownAs:
  - "LTC"
  - "Lost-time injury"
  - "LTI"
jurisdiction: "Canada"
locale: "en-CA"
publishedOn: 2026-09-06
reviewedOn: 2026-09-06
canonical: "https://safeally.net/en-ca/glossary/lost-time-claim/"
sources:
  - label: "National Work Injury, Disease and Fatality Statistics Program"
    url: "https://awcbc.org/data-and-statistics/national-work-injury-disease-statistics-program"
    publisher: "AWCBC"
  - label: "Schedule 1 claims — by the numbers"
    url: "https://www.wsib.ca/en/bythenumbers/schedule-1-claims"
    publisher: "WSIB Ontario"
  - label: "Work injury statistics — what they count"
    url: "https://www.ccohs.ca/oshanswers/information/injury_statistics.html"
    publisher: "CCOHS"
---

# Lost-time claim — the unit behind almost every published Canadian injury rate

A workers' compensation claim accepted by a provincial board where the worker lost time from work beyond the day of injury, or received a permanent disability award. It is a claims-accepted count, not a count of accidents.

Published Canadian injury rates are usually **lost-time claim rates per 100
workers**, computed from claims the board _accepted_ during the year. The
denominator is full-time equivalents, and the numerator is a decision made by an
insurer.

## What it means in practice

- **Acceptance is a decision, and it takes time.** A claim filed in December and
  accepted in March lands in a different year than the injury. Over a single
  year that noise is real; over three it mostly washes out, which is why board
  experience programs use multi-year windows.
- **An in-house count will not match the published one**, and neither is wrong.
  You count events as they happen; the board counts claims it accepted. If your
  own rate sits above the published one, the gap is usually definitional before
  it is a safety problem.
- **Coverage differs by province and by industry.** Some employers and some
  sectors are outside a board's compulsory coverage, which changes the
  denominator without changing anything on the floor.

## What it is not

**It is not a recordable-injury count.** A recordable injury needs medical
treatment beyond first aid; a lost-time claim needs an accepted claim _and_ time
lost. Most organisations have several times more of the former, and reporting one
figure as though it were the other is the most common way a safety report becomes
misleading without a single wrong number in it.

**It is not comparable to a French _accident avec arrêt_ or a German
_meldepflichtiger Arbeitsunfall_.** France counts accidents with at least one day
of stoppage on a base of one million hours worked; Germany only counts accidents
with more than three days of absence, per thousand full-time workers. Scaling one
into the other produces a figure that looks comparable and is not.