Offices

Estes v. Palm Beach Cnty. Sch. Dist., No. 1D2025-0079, 2026 (Fla. 1st DCA Mar. 23, 2026) The First District Court of Appeal issued another opinion in the court’s ever-developing interpretation of the statute of limitations provision of Florida Statutes Section 440.19(2). The court did so en banc, moreover, because it intended to correct the court’s interpretation of Section 440.19(2) in a way that directly conflicts with how several previous panels of the court applied the tolling provision. The Estes case clarifies that the proper methodology for determining whether the statute of limitations has run is akin to the “master timer/tolling timer” methodology of Ortiz v. Winn-Dixie, Inc., 361 So. 3d 889, 893 (Fla. 1st DCA 2023), which was superseded by Ortiz v. Winn-Dixie, Inc., 402 So. 3d 301 (Fla. 1st DCA 2024). In Estes, the petition for benefits at issue had been filed in June 2024, which was more than two years after the accident, and more than one year after the furnishment of the last compensation benefit. The Judge of Compensation Claims (JCC) followed the statute-of-limitations approach from prior cases and concluded that Section 440.19(1)’s two-year statute of limitations had lapsed after having never been suspended or abated by operation of Section 440.19(2).  The court analyzed the history of Section 440.19 and noted that the 1994 statutory amendments changed the provision from an extension-based analysis to a tolling-based one.  Section 440.19(1) of the post-1994 statute provides that an PFB must be filed within two years of the date when the claimant knew or should have known that the injury arose out of work performed in the course and scope of employment. Section 440.19(2) states that the provision of benefits “shall toll the limitations period set forth above for 1 year from the date of such payment.” Older cases had held that the one-year tolling period did not apply to the initial two-year period; the court in Estes clarified that it does. The court further clarified that “tolling” means to “suspend,” “stop temporarily,” or “abate.” In Estes, the court noted that the employer/carrier began providing benefits starting within just two days of the claimant’s accident in 2021 and continued doing so through January 2023.  Consequently, the court held that the subsection (2) one year “tolling clock” promptly stopped the running of what the opinion refers to in different places as subsection (1)’s two year “limitations-period clock,” the “ultimate clock,” and the “master clock,” which is the “ultimate arbiter of time.” In other words, at the moment Estes received her first benefit, the two-year master clock stopped ticking and would only start again after one year from receipt of that benefit.  However, since Estes continued to receive benefits, the master clock would never start until one year after she received last of these benefits—through at least January 2024. Therefore, when Estes filed her PFB in June 2024 (seeking a one-time physician change and benefits for the same injuries), she was only about six months into the running of the two-year master clock. The majority opinion rejected the various arguments raised by the two dissenting opinions that centered their objections on the practical workability of the new methodology, its economic impact, and stare decisis. The majority centered its approach on the “plain and ordinary meaning of the enacted text.” The plain and ordinary meaning of the Estes case itself is that the older “two years from the accident date/one year from the last benefit” methodology is gone.  Unless the Supreme Court reversed Estes or the legislature amends the statute, parties must understand that provision of benefits at the outset of a claim will stop the clock, potentially for significant lengths of time.