By Dan Davis, 7/7/2026
If you’re receiving weekly workers’ compensation checks in Louisiana, those payments are based on what you earned before your injury. But what if your employer wasn’t paying you what the law required — less than minimum wage, or no overtime for your long weeks? Many injured workers assume their benefit amount is set in stone. It often isn’t. Under a Louisiana Supreme Court decision, your benefits can be calculated on the wages you should have been paid — not the illegally low wages you actually received — and that can mean a bigger weekly check.
When a job injury keeps you from working, Louisiana pays temporary total disability (TTD) benefits worth exactly two-thirds of your average weekly wage (AWW), up to a state maximum. Your AWW is the heart of the calculation — it drives the size of every check. So if your AWW is set too low, every payment is too low, for as long as your benefits last.
Here’s the catch: the AWW is usually built from your actual pay records. If your employer broke the law and underpaid you, a straight reading of those records bakes that underpayment right into your comp rate.
In Breaux v. Hoffpauir, 674 So. 2d 234 (La. 1996), the Louisiana Supreme Court took on exactly this problem. The injured worker had been paid less than the federal minimum wage, and the employer argued his comp benefits should be based on that actual, unlawfully low pay. The Court disagreed. It held that when an employer violates the federal Fair Labor Standards Act (FLSA), the worker’s average weekly wage must be based on what he should have legally been paid — not the illegal amount he actually received.
The Court’s reasoning was straightforward: a core purpose of the Workers’ Compensation Act is to keep an injured worker and his family out of poverty. Letting an employer’s wage violation lock the worker into artificially low benefits would do the opposite.
Breaux involved a minimum-wage violation, but its logic isn’t limited to minimum wage. The FLSA requires most employers to pay both at least minimum wage and overtime — one-and-a-half times your regular rate for hours over 40 in a week. If your employer failed to pay overtime you earned, the same principle applies: your average weekly wage should reflect the overtime you were legally owed, not just what landed in your paycheck. For workers who regularly put in long weeks without proper overtime, correcting the AWW this way can raise the weekly TTD check substantially — and because those checks add up over the life of a claim, it can raise the overall value of your case.
We see this often. An injured worker comes to us with a claim already underway — sometimes handled by another attorney — and the weekly checks are lower than they should be, because no one went back to look at whether the pre-injury wages were even legal. When we review a client’s pay history and find the employer was paying below minimum wage or skipping overtime, we raise Breaux v. Hoffpauir to have the average weekly wage — and the weekly check — recalculated the way the law requires.
Our firm has successfully used Breaux v. Hoffpauir in multiple cases to significantly increase clients’ weekly disability benefits, which in turn increased the overall value of their claims.
If you’re hurt on the job and drawing weekly benefits in Louisiana — especially if you were paid under the table, paid less than minimum wage, or worked overtime you were never properly paid for — it’s worth having your average weekly wage reviewed. You may be entitled to more than you’re getting. Call Estes Davis Law at (225) 336-3394 for a free, confidential review of your benefits. Se habla español.
This article is general information about Louisiana law and is not legal advice. Past results do not guarantee a similar outcome; every case depends on its own facts. For advice about your situation, please consult an attorney.
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