What self-employed workers and small-business owners should know about injury accidents

Income is not always about salary. For self-employed workers and small business owners, the calculations are much more complex. Injury accidents can leave workers with medical conditions that prevent or limit their day-to-day work. Filing insurance claims after these accidents and receiving the full value of the loss to a business is difficult when insurance companies favor the neat and tidy wages that come from hourly or salaried paychecks. This issue is structural and has less to do with the merits of someone's injuries and more to do with how tort and insurance systems value earnings, proof and risk. The problem is systemic and predictable. The reasons are many.

Income volatility conflicts with insurance companies' preferences for predictability

It is far easier to calculate lost wages and lost earning capacity when records involve stable salaries, regular pay periods and employer-verified records. But small-business owners and the self-employed often face irregular, seasonal and contract-dependent income. As a result, most insurers default to averages, conservative baselines or “historical lows,” even when the business may have an upward trajectory or pipeline contracts suggest higher future earnings. The result is that the uncertainty of this income is discounted.

Gross revenue ≠ personal earnings

For employees, wage loss is straightforward: hours missed x wage rate. But for businesses, earnings require an insurance adjuster to untangle:

• Gross receipts
• Business expenses
• Capital reinvestment
• Owner draw versus retained earnings

Insurance companies routinely argue that only net taxable income is compensable, business growth or goodwill is speculative and reinvested profits are “business choices” rather than personal loss. This completely ignores the reality that many self-employed workers deliberately minimize taxable income while still deriving economic benefits from the business. In this way, insurers systematically undervalue real earning power.

Documentation standards are biased against sole proprietors

Self-employed people are often asked to prove business losses with tax returns, profit and loss statements, and industry benchmarks, while employees need only pay stubs and an affidavit of lost hours from a supervisor. Many times, complex records are characterized as speculative, self-reported and unverifiable, which translates into lower damages offers.

Arguments regarding mitigation are weaponized against the self-employed

Insurers regularly argue that a self-employed plaintiff could have hired temporary help, outsourced the duties, shifted to lighter duties, or sold or paused the business. Self-employed people have difficulty proving business losses because of the difficulty of categorizing and valuing all the aspects and pieces of what they do.

While employees lack control over staffing or delegation, self-employed workers have entrepreneurial control, which is reframed as a duty to mitigate even when delegation or hiring is unrealistic and financially destructive.

Adjusters undervalue nonlinear careers

Tort evaluation tends to reward linear, predictable career paths, long tenure, and employer-verified promotions and raises, while self-employed workers are early-stage founders or are transitioning from employee to owner. Future earning capacity is often assessed conservatively with skepticism toward growth projections, new ventures and nontraditional careers.

Business losses are artificially separated from personal injury losses

Insurers often draw a sharp line between personal injury damages and business losses such as missed contracts, delayed launches and lost clients. For self-employed workers and small-business owners, the injured person is the business asset. Many losses are seen as consequential, corporate, remote or speculative.

All the reasons listed above result in recovery for physical injuries but not for the full economic consequences of being unable to work as a business owner. Self-employed and small-business owners are undercompensated not because their losses are smaller, but because the standard compensation system favors wage labor models, the economic realities of entrepreneurship are misunderstood or discounted, and risk and growth are treated as speculation rather than value. The only true weapons these workers have are the strength of their documentation and business records, along with help from business experts, accountants and attorneys.

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Renee Blocker is a senior counsel at law firm Joseph Greenwald & Laake. Contact her at [email protected].