The promise that doesn’t ask whose fault it was
The day a seaman is hurt in the service of his vessel, two clocks start. The first is medical: the injury is getting better or getting worse. The second belongs to the company: how fast can it steer him to its clinic, set his maintenance at a number from another century, and start building the file that ends his benefits.
The law saw this coming, centuries ago. Maintenance and cure predates the Jones Act, predates workers’ compensation, predates the United States itself. It is the promise the law extracts from every vessel owner in exchange for the right to send crews to sea: if the sea breaks them, you feed them, house them, and heal them. Nobody has to prove fault. Nobody has to prove negligence. The only questions are whether you’re a seaman and whether you were in the service of the vessel. Even an illness with no connection to your work duties is covered if it showed up while you served.
That is the promise. What follows on this page is what companies actually do with it, and what we do about that.
What the company owes: maintenance
Maintenance is a daily allowance that must reflect your actual, reasonable, documented living expenses ashore, including rent or mortgage, utilities, food, insurance and property taxes. Not a token rate.
For decades, companies paid $8.00 a day, a number frozen in the mid-twentieth century, and dared injured seamen to complain. Courts today require a realistic rate tied to what your household actually costs. The company’s counter-move is predictable: pay a flat lowball rate and wait to see if you know better. The answer is documentation, your fixed household bills assembled and demanded formally, and a firm the company believes will put the shortfall in front of a jury.
What the company owes: cure, and your choice of doctor
Cure is every reasonable and necessary medical treatment for your injury or illness until you reach maximum medical improvement (MMI), and you have the right to choose your own treating physician.
The company’s first move after an injury is almost always the same: its clinic, its doctor, its telemedicine line. Company-selected doctors have a way of finding injuries small and recoveries fast. You are entitled to an independent treating physician. The company may send you for its own periodic examination, but it does not get to run your care.
We have watched what happens when this right is ignored, in our own cases. A captain whose vessel-borne illness went untreated while the paralysis spread. A relief captain whose company treated prompt medical care as a courtesy instead of a duty. That case ended in a $10 Million result. A seaman kept aboard and put to work in a sling because the vessel was short-handed. When a company controls the medicine, the medicine serves the company.
MMI: where every benefits fight ends up
The company owes maintenance and cure until your condition has genuinely stabilized, not until its hired examiner writes the word “MMI” on a report.
Because MMI is the off-switch for the company’s obligation, it is where the pressure concentrates: an “independent” medical examination, a report finding you as good as you’ll get, and a letter cutting off benefits. Often while your own surgeon is still planning your next operation.
Here is what that fight looks like when it’s done right. In 2025, we tried a Jones Act case for a processor whose broken foot went untreated for nine days at sea. The jury returned $4,081,047, and made a second finding: he had not reached maximum medical improvement. Which meant the company’s maintenance and cure obligation kept running even after the verdict. Companies count on injured seamen not knowing MMI is a medical fact to be proven, not a decision they get to make.
The McCorpen defense, and how to survive it
A company can escape maintenance and cure only by proving you intentionally concealed a material medical condition on a pre-employment questionnaire, and that the concealed condition is connected to your new injury. All three elements, or nothing.
The McCorpen defense is the company’s favorite escape hatch, and it gets stretched over everything: a decade-old clinic visit, a checkbox on a form filled out on a tailgate. We have beaten it with the documents that actually matter: passed fitness-for-duty examinations, the exact wording of the questionnaire, and treating records that show the old complaint and the new injury are strangers. If you’re facing a McCorpen letter, the worst move is answering the company’s adjuster without counsel.
And when a company cuts off benefits it knows are owed? The law has an answer with teeth: a willful, arbitrary refusal to pay maintenance and cure can support punitive damages and attorney’s fees. We have made that argument with the company’s own claim file as Exhibit A.
Three claims, one case
Maintenance and cure is the floor, not the ceiling. It pays your bills and your treatment. It does not pay for your lost future. Most seriously injured seamen run three claims at once: maintenance and cure (no fault required), Jones Act negligence (the lightest causation standard in American law), and unseaworthiness (the vessel’s condition, not the owner’s conduct). The full comparison lives on the Unseaworthy Vessel page. The short version: settling for a maintenance check when you have a Jones Act case is how injured seamen get robbed politely.
