Joseph Mayor won his workers’ compensation case. In March 2023, a workers’ compensation judge found him permanently and totally disabled, one of the most significant awards available under California workers’ compensation law. His employer, Ross Valley Sanitation District, timely filed a Petition for Reconsideration asking the Workers’ Compensation Appeals Board to review that decision.
At the time, the law gave the WCAB 60 days from the filing of the petition to act. Sixty days passed without a decision. Then 100 days passed. Finally, 144 days after the Petition for Reconsideration was filed, the WCAB issued an order granting reconsideration and attempted to keep the case alive.
That delay was not merely an academic problem about how to count days. Nearly a decade after Mayor’s injury, he had finally obtained a 100% permanent disability award. At oral argument before the California Supreme Court, his attorney confirmed that Mayor had not received compensation since the March 2023 award. More than three years later, the parties were still fighting about whether the WCAB had the power to continue reconsideration proceedings in the first place.
On August 24, 2026, the California Supreme Court unanimously drew a line. In Mayor v. Workers’ Compensation Appeals Board, the Court held that the WCAB cannot extend, or “equitably toll,” its own statutory deadline simply because an administrative problem prevented the petition from reaching the Board on time.
For injured workers and attorneys who have watched cases sit at the Appeals Board for months or even years, the practical point is much simpler than the legal terminology: the WCAB gets a deadline too.
A 60-Day Deadline That Had Become Much Longer
Mayor suffered an industrial injury in December 2013 while working for Ross Valley Sanitation District. On March 2, 2023, a workers’ compensation judge found him permanently and totally disabled. Ross Valley filed its Petition for Reconsideration on March 23, 2023.
Under the version of Labor Code section 5909 that applied at the time, a Petition for Reconsideration was deemed denied unless the WCAB acted within 60 days from the date it was filed. The regulations also required the trial judge to take action within 15 days, generally by preparing a report and recommendation for the Appeals Board. For reasons the Supreme Court said were unclear from the record, that did not happen.
The 60-day deadline expired without action. Ross Valley sent a status letter on day 74, and the record showed no response from the Board. On day 144, the WCAB issued an order granting reconsideration along with what it called a Shipley notice. The Board said it first received notice of the petition “on or about” June 15, 2023 and took the position that its 60 days should effectively run from when it actually received notice rather than when the law said the clock began.
That practice created an obvious problem. If a petition or case file became stuck somewhere inside the workers’ compensation system, the statutory deadline could become almost meaningless. The WCAB could take the position that the clock did not really begin until the case reached the right place internally, even when that occurred long after the deadline written into the Labor Code.
This was not an isolated concern. In Zurich American Insurance Co. v. WCAB, another important case discussed by the Supreme Court, the Board granted reconsideration more than nine months after the petition had been filed. The Supreme Court described the WCAB’s reliance on Shipley as a “workaround” for a “recurring, systemic problem” involving the Board’s failure to receive reconsideration petitions or case files in a timely manner.
That language matters. The problem was no longer a single lost file. The practice had become a way of dealing with an administrative system that repeatedly failed to meet its own statutory deadline.
The Supreme Court Said the WCAB Cannot Toll Its Own Deadline
The legal doctrine at issue is called equitable tolling, but the concept can be explained fairly simply. Equitable tolling is generally used to protect someone who misses a filing deadline despite acting reasonably and in good faith. In the right circumstances, a court may allow additional time so that a legitimate claim is not lost because of a technical deadline.
That was not what happened in Mayor. Ross Valley did not miss its filing deadline. It filed its Petition for Reconsideration on time. The missed deadline belonged to the WCAB itself.
The Supreme Court explained that the WCAB is not a litigant attempting to preserve a claim, and section 5909 is not a statute of limitations requiring a party to file something by a particular date. Instead, the statute tells the Board how long it has to act. The Court said it was unaware of precedent allowing an adjudicative body to use equitable tolling to extend a deadline imposed on itself.
The language of section 5909 also provided a clear consequence for missing the deadline. If the Board did not act in time, the Petition for Reconsideration was deemed denied. Allowing the WCAB to restart or extend that clock because of its own administrative problems would largely defeat the purpose of having the deadline at all.
Why the Delay Matters to Injured Workers
California workers’ compensation cases can already take years to resolve. A seriously injured worker may go through treatment disputes, medical-legal examinations, depositions and trial before finally receiving an award. We have discussed this problem in our guide to how long a California workers’ compensation case can take to settle.
Reconsideration adds another layer. The losing party generally has the right to ask the WCAB to review a judge’s decision, and there is nothing improper about using that process. But there must eventually be a point when everyone knows whether reconsideration has been granted or denied.
Without a meaningful deadline, a worker could win a substantial award and still have no idea when that award will actually become final. A case could remain in limbo because of an internal routing problem, a delayed report or another administrative failure that had nothing to do with the injured worker.
Mayor’s case demonstrates the consequences. He was found permanently and totally disabled in March 2023, yet the fight over whether reconsideration was even still alive continued all the way to the California Supreme Court in August 2026.
The Court recognized that California’s workers’ compensation system is supposed to accomplish substantial justice, but the California Constitution also requires that justice be administered expeditiously and inexpensively. Those principles mean little if statutory deadlines can simply be extended whenever the administrative system fails to process a case on time.
What Happened to Shipley?
The WCAB relied heavily on Shipley v. Workers’ Compensation Appeals Board, a 1992 case that had been cited for decades when reconsideration was not handled within the statutory period. The Supreme Court did not completely eliminate Shipley, but it substantially narrowed what the decision means.
The facts in Shipley were extreme. An injured worker timely filed for reconsideration, but the WCAB misplaced his file and apparently sent it to archives. He repeatedly contacted the Board and was assured that his petition would eventually be considered. He ultimately ended up reconstructing a duplicate file himself so that the matter could proceed.
The Court of Appeal concluded under those circumstances that denying the injured worker his opportunity for review would violate due process. The California Supreme Court explained in Mayor that Shipley was therefore fundamentally a due process case, not a decision giving the WCAB a general power to extend its own deadlines.
There may still be unusual circumstances where a party can demonstrate that a failure to consider a timely Petition for Reconsideration violates due process. The Supreme Court intentionally left that possibility open. But a timely filed petition combined with ordinary administrative delay is not enough, and the Board cannot simply invoke someone else’s due process rights every time its own system misses the deadline.
The Supreme Court expressly disapproved Shipley to the extent it suggested that every party necessarily has a due process right to WCAB consideration of a Petition for Reconsideration after the statutory period expires.
The Deadline Is Mandatory, With One Important Legal Distinction
The Supreme Court agreed that section 5909 imposes a mandatory deadline, but it rejected the argument that expiration of the deadline completely destroys the WCAB’s “fundamental jurisdiction” over the case.
For lawyers, that distinction matters. California law distinguishes between a court or agency lacking fundamental jurisdiction and one that has jurisdiction over a case but acts beyond the authority given to it by statute. The Supreme Court concluded that a late WCAB order under section 5909 falls into the second category: the Board acts “in excess of jurisdiction.”
For an injured worker, the practical point is easier. Once the statutory deadline expires, the WCAB cannot simply issue a late reconsideration order and make it timely by saying the case did not reach the Board soon enough.
A late order also should not simply be ignored. An affected party needs to challenge what the WCAB has done rather than assume that the order will disappear on its own.
The 45-Day Deadline After Reconsideration Is Deemed Denied
There is another deadline that makes Mayor especially important for workers’ compensation practitioners.
Under Labor Code section 5950, once a Petition for Reconsideration is denied, a party generally has 45 days to seek a writ of review in the Court of Appeal. In Mayor’s case, the Supreme Court noted that Ross Valley’s deadline to pursue that review expired on July 6, 2023.
That is one reason section 5909 cannot operate as a flexible or open-ended deadline. The parties need to know when reconsideration has been denied so they can determine when the next appellate deadline begins to run and when an award becomes final.
Mayor Did Not Have to Wait for the WCAB to Finish
The Supreme Court also rejected the argument that Mayor should have been required to wait until all reconsideration proceedings were completed before seeking help from the Court of Appeal.
Mayor was not claiming that the WCAB had simply reached the wrong result after reconsideration. His position was more basic: the reconsideration proceedings should not have continued at all because the statutory deadline had already expired.
Requiring Mayor to continue litigating for months or years and challenge the issue only afterward would make the deadline almost worthless. The Supreme Court therefore agreed that extraordinary writ relief was appropriate. The Court noted that a writ of prohibition technically would have been the more precise procedural mechanism, but that distinction did not change Mayor’s victory.
The Grant-for-Study Question Remains Unresolved
The Supreme Court addressed, but did not decide, another practice familiar to workers’ compensation attorneys: the WCAB’s use of “grant for study” orders.
The Board sometimes grants reconsideration before the statutory deadline expires for the stated purpose of further study and then issues its actual decision much later. Friend-of-the-court briefs asked the Supreme Court to decide whether simply granting reconsideration for study satisfies the Labor Code or whether the Board must issue a true decision on the merits within the statutory period.
The Supreme Court expressly declined to answer that question.
So Mayor closes one avenue for extending reconsideration proceedings, but it does not decide whether the WCAB may continue using timely grant-for-study orders followed by decisions issued months later. That issue remains open.
Other WCAB Reconsideration Cases Are Still Waiting
The Supreme Court had also granted review in several other cases raising related section 5909 issues and held them while Mayor was pending.
That includes City of Salinas v. WCAB, where the Court of Appeal had concluded that section 5909 was mandatory but allowed equitable tolling under the facts presented there, as well as Zenith Insurance Co. v. WCAB. Those cases will now have to be addressed in light of the Supreme Court’s decision in Mayor.
For workers’ compensation attorneys following the reconsideration cases closely, Mayor is therefore unlikely to be the last development.
The 60-Day Rule Is Different Today
Anyone dealing with a current Petition for Reconsideration needs to understand that the version of Labor Code section 5909 involved in Mayor’s case is no longer the law.
When Ross Valley filed its petition in 2023, the WCAB’s 60 days began running from the date the Petition for Reconsideration was filed. In 2024, the Legislature amended section 5909 so that the 60 days now begin when the workers’ compensation trial judge transmits the case to the Appeals Board.
That change was initially scheduled to expire on July 1, 2026. The Legislature subsequently removed the sunset through Senate Bill 171, effective July 13, 2026. We discussed other important provisions of that legislation in our article concerning California’s new SIBTF rules.
The Legislature therefore addressed the administrative problem by changing when the 60-day clock begins. It did not give the WCAB permission to ignore the clock once it has started.
Under current law, tracking when the trial judge transmits the case to the Appeals Board is critical.
Why Mayor v. WCAB Matters
Mayor gives an important measure of finality to a system where cases can already move painfully slowly. Employers and insurance carriers have every right to seek reconsideration of an unfavorable decision, just as injured workers can seek reconsideration when a decision goes against them. But the process has deadlines for everyone, including the Appeals Board.
The California Supreme Court has now made clear that ordinary administrative delay does not give the WCAB an unlimited ability to keep reconsideration proceedings alive. For an injured worker who has already spent years trying to obtain benefits and finally wins an award, that distinction can have very real consequences.
Questions About a Serious California Workers’ Compensation Case?
I’m David A. Lee, a California State Bar Certified Specialist in Workers’ Compensation Law and a partner at Lee Partners Law: Work Injury Attorneys. Before representing injured workers, I spent approximately 15 years defending workers’ compensation claims for employers and insurance companies. Today, I represent injured workers in complex cases involving permanent total disability, serious orthopedic injuries, amputations, brain injuries, denied medical treatment and other significant workers’ compensation disputes.
Lee Partners Law represents injured workers throughout California, including Los Angeles and the San Fernando Valley, the San Gabriel Valley, Orange County, the Inland Empire, Ventura County, the High Desert, San Diego and surrounding communities. We can handle many cases remotely, so you do not need to live near our office to speak with us about your claim.
You can call or text Lee Partners Law at 310-295-0822 to discuss what is happening with your case and what options may be available.
Case Information
Mayor v. Workers’ Compensation Appeals Board and Ross Valley Sanitation District (Aug. 24, 2026, S287261). The California Supreme Court unanimously affirmed the judgment of the Court of Appeal.
The California Supreme Court opinion and the current text of Labor Code section 5909 are available online.
