Pennsylvania: 120-Day Notice Period Does Not End on Sunday Even if Employer is Open for Business

That an employer operates its business on Sundays and, therefore, would have been able to receive a notice of injury by an injured employee on that day, has no effect on the 120-day notice period found in Section 311 of the Pennsylvania Workers’ Compensation Act [77 P.S. §631], held the state's Commonwealth Court. Accordingly, where the 120-day period for the notice of injury ended on a Sunday, the employee had an additional day to serve her notice. The Court stressed that the employer sought to add language to Section 311 to make the calculation of the 120-day notice period dependent on whether the employer operated over the weekend. The Court added that it was not for the courts to add, by interpretation, to a statute, a requirement that the legislature itself had not seen fit to include.

Thomas A. Robinson, J.D., the co-Editor-in-Chief and Feature National Columnist for the LexisNexis Workers’ Compensation eNewsletter, is co-author of Larson’s Workers’ Compensation Law(LexisNexis).

LexisNexis Online Subscribers: Citations below link to Lexis Advance.

See Holy Redeemer Health Sys. v. Workers’ Comp. Appeal Bd. (Figueroa), 2020 Pa. Commw. LEXIS 833(Dec. 31, 2020)

See generally Larson’s Workers’ Compensation Law, § 126.13.

Source: Larson’s Workers’ Compensation Law, the nation’s leading authority on workers’ compensation law

For a more detailed discussion of the case, see

Sign up for the free LexisNexis Workers’ Compensation enewsletter at www.lexisnexis.com/wcnews.