The Nebraska Scheduled Injury Chart

When a work injury permanently damages a listed body part, Nebraska does not negotiate its value from scratch — the Legislature already assigned it a number of weeks, printed in Neb. Rev. Stat. § 48-121(3). Below is the complete schedule, followed by the rules that actually govern how it is applied: the finger fractions, the amputation equivalencies, and the provisions that turn several “partial” losses into a total disability.

Bookmark the chart. Then read past it, because the schedule’s fine print changes outcomes as much as the headline numbers do.

The Complete Schedule

Each entry pays 66⅔ percent of wages for the listed weeks upon total loss of the member — and for the corresponding percentage of those weeks upon partial permanent loss of use, subject to the statutory maximum and minimum weekly rates.

Read the hierarchy the Legislature built and it tells you something about how the law thinks: the arm outranks the leg by ten weeks, the hand is worth exactly seven index fingers, an eye is worth more than two thumbs, and losing the hearing in an ear is worth twice as much as losing the ear itself. None of these ratios came from your case — which is both the schedule’s virtue (certainty) and its vice (indifference to what the loss means to your work and your life).

The Formula: Weeks × Percentage × Rate

Three numbers combine to produce a scheduled award, and each one is contestable ground.

The weeks come from the chart above and are fixed — the one input nobody argues about.

The percentage is your permanent impairment of that member, assigned by a physician at maximum medical improvement. Multiply it against the weeks: a twenty percent impairment of a foot is twenty percent of 150 — thirty weeks. This is where medical opinions collide, and where a five-point disagreement between your treating doctor and the insurer’s examiner is not academic. On a leg, five percentage points is more than ten weeks of benefits; the mechanisms for fighting that fight — including the court-appointed examiner the employer pays for — are covered on the IME page.

The rate is 66⅔ percent of your average weekly wage, capped and floored by the statutory weekly limits that adjust over time. The wage computation deserves more suspicion than it gets: overtime, shift premiums and second employment belong in it, and every dollar the average weekly wage is understated is deducted, silently, from every week the chart awards. Before disputing a percentage, audit the rate — it multiplies everything.

Worked through once: a laborer earning $750 a week suffers a 30 percent permanent impairment of the hand. Rate: $500. Weeks: 30 percent of 175 = 52.5. Award: $26,250, alongside the medical benefits. Change any of the three inputs and the number moves with it — which is precisely why all three get litigated.

Fingers and the Fraction Rules

The schedule’s most intricate machinery governs its smallest members, and it decides real money in the crush, saw and press injuries that fill Nebraska’s plants and shops.

• Loss of the first phalange — the tip segment — of a thumb or finger is compensated as one-half of the whole member. A first phalange of the thumb is 30 weeks; of the index finger, 17.5.
• Loss of half of the first phalange is compensated at one-fourth of the member — the statute descends all the way to quarter-fractions of a fingertip.
• Loss of more than one phalange is treated as loss of the entire finger or thumb. Lose the tip and middle segments of the index finger and the law rounds up to the full 35 weeks.
• The hand cap: where multiple fingers are lost in one injury, the combined award cannot exceed the value of the hand itself — the schedule refuses to price four fingers and a thumb above the 175 weeks the whole hand commands.

Two practical consequences follow. First, in fingertip amputations the precise level of amputation — documented in the operative report, sometimes in millimeters — determines whether the award doubles, so the surgical records deserve close reading rather than summary acceptance. Second, in multi-finger injuries it is frequently worth examining whether the injury is better analyzed as an injury to the hand — grip, dexterity and function often suffer beyond the arithmetic sum of the digits, and the framing question is exactly the kind of judgment an adjuster will resolve in the carrier’s favor if nobody argues otherwise.

Amputation Levels: Where the Cut Falls Decides Which Row Applies

For amputations above the hand and foot, the statute assigns the member by level:

• Amputation between the elbow and the wrist is compensated as loss of the hand (175 weeks);
• Amputation at or above the elbow is compensated as loss of the arm (225 weeks);
• Amputation between the knee and the ankle is compensated as loss of the foot (150 weeks);
• Amputation at or above the knee is compensated as loss of the leg (215 weeks).

The joint itself is the boundary, and fifty weeks of benefits can turn on which side of it the surgical line falls — another reason the operative report is a legal document as much as a medical one.

Just as important: amputation is not required. The statute provides that permanent total loss of use of a finger, hand, arm, foot, leg or eye is the equivalent of losing it. A hand that remains attached but can no longer grip, an eye that remains in place but cannot see, a leg that bears no weight — each commands the full scheduled value. Insurers sometimes talk about loss-of-use injuries as though intact anatomy discounts the claim; the statute says otherwise, in one sentence, and it is a sentence worth quoting back.

Eyes, Ears, Hearing and the Nose — the Schedule’s Odd Corners

A few entries carry distinctions that are easy to misread and expensive to miss.

The ear versus the hearing. The schedule prices the loss of an ear — the structure itself, as in a degloving or burn injury — at 25 weeks, but the loss of hearing in one ear at 50. They are different injuries with different rows, and a worker who suffers both has two entries to discuss, not one.

Hearing in both ears leaves the schedule entirely. Complete loss of hearing in both ears sits in the statute’s most serious company: alongside the loss of both hands, both arms, both feet, both legs or both eyes, it constitutes total and permanent disability — open-ended benefits, not a fixed run of weeks. Occupational hearing loss rarely reaches that threshold, but partial bilateral loss is common, ratable and almost never claimed; the repetitive trauma page explains why those claims arrive substantially pre-proven.

The eye at 125 weeks applies to loss of vision as well as loss of the organ, per the loss-of-use rule — and vision cases repay careful measurement, since corrected versus uncorrected acuity and field loss all bear on the percentage.

The nose at 50 weeks surprises everyone who finds it, and it stands as a reminder that the schedule is a statute, not a summary: when an unusual injury arrives, the answer is to read the list, because the Legislature may already have priced it.

Several Members at Once: Consecutive Weeks and the Total-Disability Door

Serious industrial accidents rarely respect the schedule’s one-member-at-a-time architecture, and the statute has rules for when they do not.

Consecutive, not concurrent. Where one accident injures multiple scheduled members, the compensation periods run consecutively — the weeks stack end to end rather than overlapping. A hand and a foot injured in the same fall are 175 weeks followed by 150, at the applicable percentages, not a blended single period.

The two-member presumption. Total and permanent loss — or permanent total loss of use — of both hands, both arms, both feet, both legs, both eyes, or hearing in both ears is total and permanent disability by statute. The claim stops being a chart exercise and becomes lifetime-scale.

The door the presumption does not close. For combinations short of the statutory pairs — a hand and an eye, a leg and an arm at partial percentages — the court determines from the facts whether the worker is totally disabled. This is where the schedule’s certainty gives way to the same earning-power reality that governs whole-body injuries: a worker whose combined losses make employment unrealistic should be evaluated as a total-disability candidate, not invoiced member by member. Carriers price these files as stacked schedules; the difference between that and a permanent total finding is the largest valuation gap in the system, and it is never volunteered.

You Can Go Back to Work and Still Be Owed Every Week

Here is the feature of scheduled awards that surprises injured workers most, and that quietly forfeits money when nobody explains it: the schedule compensates the functional loss itself, not lost wages.

Look again at how the statute is built. It assigns weeks to the member — sixty for a thumb, one hundred seventy-five for a hand — without asking what the loss did to your paycheck. That is the same indifference to occupation noted at the top of this page, and it cuts in the worker’s favor here: a machinist who loses part of a finger, heals, and returns to the same job at the same wage is still owed the scheduled award for the permanent loss. Going back to work does not repay the finger.

The practical failure mode is easy to picture, because it happens constantly. A worker is hurt, treated and back on the line in eight weeks; the temporary benefits stop, the file goes quiet, and everyone treats quiet as closed. What never happened in that sequence is the permanency step: no maximum medical improvement determination, no impairment rating, no computation against the chart. The award did not disappear — it was simply never claimed, and carriers are under no obligation to chase workers down and offer it. If you carry a permanent work injury to a scheduled member and were never rated for it, that is unfinished business, not ancient history — though the deadlines discussed elsewhere on this site make it business to finish promptly.

Two related notes on how the money actually moves. Scheduled benefits accrue as weekly payments, and files are often resolved instead through negotiated lump sums — which is legitimate, but a lump sum offered for a scheduled injury should be tested against the full weeks-times-percentage-times-rate arithmetic before anyone signs, because a round number that sounds generous is frequently a discount wearing a bow. And where an injury produces both a healing period and a permanent loss, the temporary benefits paid during recovery and the scheduled award for permanency are distinct components — one does not swallow the other, and a settlement accounting should show both.

What the Chart Cannot Tell You

Three limits keep this page honest, and each one points somewhere.

The chart does not cover the spine, and its coverage of the body’s connecting structures has edges. Back, neck, hip and head injuries are body-as-a-whole injuries valued on loss of earning power — a framework that can dwarf a scheduled award for the same impairment percentage, explained with worked examples on the disability ratings page. Where an injury sits near the schedule’s boundary — and shoulder injuries are the perennial example, functionally more torso than arm — which framework applies is a genuinely contested question worth real money, not a box an adjuster checks.

The chart does not decide your percentage. The weeks are fixed; the impairment rating is an opinion, and opinions are challenged — through the treating physician and, where findings are disputed, the § 48-134.01 examiner.

The chart does not decide your rate. The average weekly wage multiplies every row on the page and is computed from your actual earnings, which deserve documentation and audit rather than trust.

Used properly, this chart is a floor of certainty under a claim — the insurer cannot pay a hand as if it were a finger. Used lazily, it becomes a ceiling — a schedule invoked to close a file that deserved the harder, richer analysis. Which one it becomes in your case is largely a function of who is reading it on your behalf.

Frequently Asked Questions

How many weeks is a hand worth in Nebraska workers’ comp?

175 weeks at 66⅔ percent of your average weekly wage for total loss — and the matching percentage of 175 weeks for partial permanent loss of use. An arm is 225, a foot 150, a leg 215, an eye 125.

What are the finger values?

Thumb 60 weeks, index finger 35, middle finger 30, ring finger 20, little finger 15. Losing the tip segment (first phalange) pays half the finger’s value; losing more than one segment counts as the whole finger; multiple fingers in one accident are capped at the value of the hand.

I lost part of my finger, not the whole thing. What applies?

The fraction rules: the first phalange is half the member, half of the first phalange is one-fourth, and more than one phalange rounds up to the entire finger. The amputation level in your operative report decides which fraction applies, so that document deserves close reading.

My arm was amputated below the elbow. Which entry applies?

Between the elbow and wrist is compensated as loss of the hand (175 weeks); at or above the elbow, as loss of the arm (225). The joint is the boundary — fifty weeks turn on which side of it the surgical line falls.

My hand is still attached but I can’t use it. Do I get less than an amputation?

No. The statute treats permanent total loss of use of a finger, hand, arm, foot, leg or eye as the equivalent of losing it — the full scheduled value applies.

What if I injured two body parts in one accident?

The compensation periods run consecutively — they stack rather than overlap. And if the combination leaves you unable to work, the court can find total disability from the facts even where the statutory two-member presumption (both hands, both arms, both feet, both legs, both eyes, or hearing in both ears) is not met.

Is hearing loss really on the schedule?

Yes — 50 weeks for loss of hearing in one ear (and 25 for loss of the outer ear itself, a separate entry). Complete loss of hearing in both ears is total and permanent disability by statute. Partial occupational hearing loss is ratable and chronically under-claimed.

Why isn’t my back injury on this chart?

Because spines are not scheduled members. Back, neck, hip and head injuries are valued on loss of earning power under the body-as-a-whole framework — which for many workers is worth far more than a scheduled award at the same impairment percentage.