On June 11, 2026, New York’s Appellate Division, Third Department, issued two decisions that affirmed denials of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) workers compensation claims, Matter of Croom v New York State Department of Corrections and Community Supervision (CV-24-1886) and Matter of Williams v New York City Transit Authority (CV-24-0860). Both applied the old standard for mental-stress claims. Both predate the statute that replaced it. That timing, not the denials themselves, is the reserve story.
In Croom, a correction sergeant at Albion Correctional Facility developed PTSD after an incarcerated person died despite CPR and defibrillator use, and stopped working in November 2023. The Workers’ Compensation Board disallowed her claim in October 2024. The court affirmed and, critically, refused to apply Workers’ Compensation Law section 10(3)(c) retroactively. That provision, “as added by L 2025, ch 79, § 1,” bars the Board from disallowing a covered employee’s PTSD, acute stress disorder, or major depressive disorder claim “upon a factual finding that the stress was not greater than that which usually occurs in the normal work environment.” The court noted the Legislature set it to “not take effect until June 4, 2025, almost four months after its approval,” and held that a statute “will ordinarily have only prospective effect,” so it does not reach Board determinations already completed.
In Williams, a train conductor for the self-insured New York City Transit Authority claimed PTSD after a passenger fell between train cars and died on March 15, 2021. The court affirmed that the employer preserved its right to controvert despite an early “L-With Liability” entry on its First Report of Injury (a system artifact the Board stopped requiring on September 26, 2024), then upheld the disallowance on the merits: the Board found the conductor’s stress “was no greater than that which similarly situated workers experienced,” so there was no compensable accident under the pre-amendment rule.
Both decisions sit downstream of Matter of McLaurin v New York City Transit Authority, the Court of Appeals’ 4-3 ruling of November 2025 that denied PTSD benefits to a set of transit and municipal workers claiming pandemic-related stress, holding that a claimant must show stress “greater than that which other similarly situated workers experienced in the normal work environment.” The 2025 amendment was the Legislature’s answer to that line of cases. The appellate court is now closing out the inventory of claims that the old standard still governs.
Who it affects
The direct audience is self-insured public employers in New York: transit authorities, correction systems, police and fire agencies, emergency medical services, dispatch centers, public hospitals, and city or county risk pools. Captive and pooled programs with New York public-sector payroll should treat this as a data-segmentation problem too. After these rulings, a correction payroll, a transit payroll, and an EMS payroll no longer share one PTSD claim pathway across the June 4, 2025 line.
The reserve mechanism
The lever is claim frequency, with a secondary effect on tail factor selection and IBNR. The 2025 amendment is the larger of two recent shifts. Chapter 546 of the Laws of 2024, signed December 6, 2024, opened mental-stress coverage to all covered employees rather than only the first responders reached by the 2017 law; Chapter 79 of 2025 set the operative effective date at June 4, 2025 and is the provision the Croom court construed. The combined effect is that for accident dates from June 4, 2025 forward, the Board can no longer dismiss a qualifying PTSD, acute stress, or major depressive disorder claim merely because the triggering stress matched the job’s normal baseline, provided the worker offers DSM-based medical evidence tied to a distinct extraordinary work event. The “normal-stress” filter that produced the denials in Croom, Williams, and McLaurin is gone for the new accident years.
Two features make that frequency increase land hard on transit and public-safety reserves. First, the exposure base is rising independently of the law. Federal Transit Administration data analyzed by the Urban Institute show “major” assaults on transit workers, those causing a fatality or an injury requiring medical transport, nearly tripled nationwide from 168 in 2008 to 492 in 2022, and the FTA’s high reporting threshold makes that an undercount. Each fatal or severe passenger incident is exactly the kind of “distinct work-related event” the amended statute contemplates, and transit operators witness them at a structurally higher rate than most employer classes. The same assault frequency surge that drives indemnity severity in cases like Connecticut’s 100% wage-replacement law for assaulted workers, and that NCCI clocked at a 62% rise in workplace assault rates per 10,000 FTEs from 2011 to 2022, now feeds a newly compensable mental-injury channel in New York.
Second, mental-injury claims cost more and develop longer than the physical-injury claims most triangles are calibrated on. NCCI reports that claims carrying a mental-health component run roughly 2.5 times the cost of those without, and disability-guideline benchmarks show a representative back claim stretching from about 43 days and $13,400 to roughly 82 days and $25,300 once behavioral-health factors attach. PTSD claims often show low early paid loss, then develop through extended therapy, work restrictions, attorney involvement, and indemnity conversion. That profile pushes paid development into the tail, so link ratios drawn from historical physical-injury patterns understate ultimate, and the effect concentrates in the workers compensation IBNR for the post-June 2025 accident years.
The practical error is blending the two regimes. A single “New York PTSD trend” computed across the June 4, 2025 boundary overstates older accident years, where Croom and Williams confirm denials still stick, and understates the newer ones, where the filter is gone. If adjusters recode older claims after the statute change, the movement can read as case reserve strengthening rather than genuine new emergence unless the triangle is tagged by accident date, Board status, and job class. The same discipline that the Wisconsin EMS PTSD presumption demands, segmenting mental-injury claims into their own development pattern, applies here, except New York’s change is a date-bounded standard shift rather than a presumption.
The call
Directionally, expected mental-injury claim frequency and ultimate severity for New York transit and public-safety employers should be set higher for accident years beginning June 4, 2025, and held at the pre-amendment level for earlier years that have reached final Board determinations. Do not run one blended trend across the line. The most exposed programs are self-insured transit authorities and correction systems, where the witnessed-trauma rate is highest and the new “distinct extraordinary event” path is easiest to satisfy; large municipal risk pools with concentrated public-safety payroll are next. The most exposed reserves are the ones still anchored to a decade of suppressed mental-injury frequency, the same favorable-assumption risk flagged for New York’s broader benefit-decline reversal.
What to watch: the first cohort of post-June 2025 transit PTSD claims as it converts from medical-only to indemnity over the next several reviews; whether NCCI or the New York rating mechanism signals a loss-cost adjustment for the affected classes; and how the Board reads “distinct work-related event” for cumulative or repeated exposure, which would widen the covered population beyond single-incident trauma. Put New York mental-injury claims on the next reserve study or interim monitoring agenda, with separate exhibits for transit, correction, dispatch, police, fire, EMS, and public-hospital safety staff, split before and after June 4, 2025, showing reported count, average case reserve, and paid-to-incurred ratio by accident year and claim posture.
Sources
- Matter of Croom v New York State Department of Corrections and Community Supervision, App Div 3d Dept, CV-24-1886 (June 11, 2026)
- Matter of Williams v New York City Transit Authority, App Div 3d Dept, CV-24-0860 (June 11, 2026)
- Matter of McLaurin v New York City Transit Authority, NY Court of Appeals, Nos. 88-91 (Nov. 2025)
- New York Workers’ Compensation Board, recent appellate decisions
- New York Workers’ Compensation Law section 10
- Governor Hochul signs mental-injury workers’ compensation expansion (Chapter 546, Laws of 2024)
- Urban Institute: Assaults on Transit Workers Have Tripled in the Past 15 Years (FTA National Transit Database)
- NCCI: Examining PTSD - What’s the Impact on Future Workers Compensation Costs