The federal heat standard slips to 2027, while the injuries heat actually causes keep arriving under other names.
Every summer the workers' compensation system tells itself a comforting statistic: heat illness is a rounding error. Heat stroke and heat exhaustion together account for a fraction of one percent of compensable claims. That number is accurate, and it is deeply misleading. It measures only the claims where heat is written on the form. It does not measure the roofer who lost his footing at two in the afternoon, the machinist whose hand slipped on the guard, or the warehouse selector whose heart stopped in a building with no climate control. Those claims are coded as a fall, a laceration, and a cardiac event. Heat caused them, and heat appears nowhere in the file.
Two developments this month make that gap worth revisiting. The first is regulatory. The second is doctrinal, and it belongs to New Jersey.
A Standard Deferred, Again
On July 3, 2026, the Department of Labor issued a new Agency Rule List. It reports that OSHA now plans a Supplemental Notice of Proposed Rulemaking for Heat Injury and Illness Prevention in Outdoor and Indoor Work Settings, RIN 1218-AD39, by December 2026, with a final standard projected for October 2027.
That timeline should be read against the history. OSHA published the original Notice of Proposed Rulemaking on August 30, 2024. The comment period closed January 14, 2025. An informal public hearing ran from June 16 to July 2, 2025, and the post-hearing comment period closed on October 30, 2025. The rule has sat since. A supplemental notice restarts a comment cycle rather than closing one, so October 2027 is a projection, not a commitment, and it arrives more than three years after the original proposal.
In the meantime OSHA has fallen back on enforcement policy. The national emphasis program on heat, first issued April 8, 2022, and extended in January 2025, was set to lapse on April 8, 2026. OSHA issued a revised heat national emphasis program on April 10, 2026, directing inspection and outreach resources toward roughly 55 industries identified from recent injury, illness, and enforcement data. An emphasis program tells inspectors where to look. It does not create a duty.
The General Duty Clause Cannot Carry This Weight
Absent a standard, the only federal hook is Section 5(a)(1) of the Occupational Safety and Health Act, which requires an employer to furnish a workplace free from recognized hazards likely to cause death or serious physical harm. The Occupational Safety and Health Review Commission has twice found that hook inadequate for heat. In Secretary of Labor v. A.H. Sturgill Roofing, Inc., OSHRC Docket No. 13-0224 (Feb. 28, 2019), a divided Commission vacated both a general duty clause citation and a training citation under 29 C.F.R. § 1926.21(b)(2) after a temporary worker collapsed and died on his first day on a commercial roof. The majority held that the Secretary had not established the existence of a hazard or a feasible and effective means of abatement. Defining the hazard as excessive heat, without a threshold, gave the employer no notice of what compliance required.
The Commission reached a similar result in Secretary of Labor v. United States Postal Service in 2023, vacating heat citations on the ground that the Secretary had not proven feasible and effective abatement. The pattern is now established. Where a specific standard would supply a heat index trigger, a written plan requirement, and acclimatization protocols, the general duty clause supplies argument. Employers win those arguments.
The practical consequence is not abstract. Weak enforcement leverage produces thin prevention, and thin prevention produces claims. Those claims land in a system not built to recognize their origins.
What the Claims Data Does Not Show
The National Council on Compensation Insurance, drawing on Bureau of Labor Statistics data, reports approximately 34,000 heat-related injuries and 479 worker fatalities between 2011 and 2022. Forty-eight workers died from environmental heat exposure in 2024. NCCI's own analyses show heat-related claims rising in every sector, with the sharpest effects in construction, natural resources, and landscaping and maintenance work.
Against that backdrop, the Workers' Compensation Research Institute examined claims from 31 states covering 2013 to 2022 and found that heat-related illness accounted for roughly 0.21 percent of all compensation claims. The same research found evidence that heat contributes materially to other injuries, including falls and lacerations. That is the whole problem stated in two sentences. Heat as a named diagnosis is negligible. Heat as a cause is not.
The mechanism is well understood in occupational medicine and largely invisible in claims administration. Elevated core temperature degrades reaction time, grip strength, balance, and judgment before it produces any recognizable heat illness. A worker does not need to reach heat exhaustion to become measurably more likely to fall from a ladder. By the time the injury occurs, the causal contribution has already done its work and left no diagnostic trace.
Because the claim is coded by outcome rather than by condition, heat exits the record at intake. It does not appear in experience rating. It does not inform medical management. It does not surface in loss control recommendations to the employer. And it does not appear in the aggregate data that regulators and legislators consult when deciding whether a heat standard is justified. The undercount weakens the case for the very rule that would reduce the injuries.
Where New Jersey Doctrine Strains
For the most serious heat-contributed claims, the cardiac and cerebrovascular events, New Jersey law imposes a demanding and, in this context, poorly fitted test. N.J.S.A. 34:15-7.2, enacted as part of the 1979 reforms, requires the claimant to prove by a preponderance of the credible evidence that the injury or death was produced by work effort or strain involving a substantial condition, event or happening in excess of the wear and tear of the claimant's daily living, and that it caused the injury in a material degree. Material degree means an appreciable degree, or a degree substantially greater than de minimis.
The Supreme Court construed that language in Hellwig v. J.F. Rast & Co., Inc., 110 N.J. 37 (1988), overruling the more permissive approach of Dwyer v. Ford Motor Co., 36 N.J. 487 (1962). Hellwig held that the comparison runs against the claimant's daily activities outside of work, not against his ordinary job duties, and directed attention to the intensity and duration of the precipitating work effort. The Court applied that framework restrictively in Renner v. AT&T, 218 N.J. 435 (2014), denying dependency benefits and reviewing the causation question de novo, without deference to the judge of compensation.
The mismatch should be obvious. Section 7.2 is written around exertion. It asks how hard the worker was working. Environmental heat is not exertion. It is an ambient condition that raises the physiological cost of whatever work is being done, including work that is, in isolation, unremarkable. A selector moving cases in a 105-degree warehouse may be doing nothing his statute would call strain, while his cardiovascular system is under load his weekend never imposes. The statutory comparator asks the wrong question, and the claimant carries the burden of answering it.
The Legislature plainly knows how to build a different structure when it chooses to. N.J.S.A. 34:15-7.3 creates a rebuttable presumption of compensability for cardiovascular and cerebrovascular injury to police, fire, and emergency personnel responding to an emergency. The January 16, 2024 overhaul extended that coverage to career and private sector emergency medical technicians and paramedics, added remediation within twenty-four hours of an emergency, and required the employer to rebut by clear and convincing evidence, the first use of that standard in New Jersey compensation law. No comparable presumption exists for heat.
The Consequences for Injured Workers
Four consequences follow, and each of them costs benefits.
First, denials. Where heat was a genuine contributing cause of a cardiac event, section 7.2 as construed in Hellwig and Renner will often defeat the claim, because the work effort standing alone was ordinary. Second, undertreatment. A claim coded as a laceration receives laceration care. Nothing in the authorization pathway prompts evaluation for heat strain, dehydration, or renal involvement, and repeat heat injury carries cumulative risk. Third, the acclimatization blind spot. The decedent in Sturgill was a temporary worker on his first day. Risk in the first days of heat exposure is the single most consistent finding in the literature, and it is exactly the population, temporary and newly assigned workers, that comp data tracks least well. Fourth, premium signal. Employers whose heat exposure never registers in loss experience receive no economic prompt to fix it.
What the Legislature Should Do
New Jersey does not need to wait for OSHA, and on this timetable it should not. Four measures would close the gap.
Amend section 7.2 to state expressly that sustained exposure to elevated environmental heat qualifies as a substantial condition, event or happening within the meaning of the statute. This is a clarifying amendment, not an expansion. It removes an exertion comparator that was never drafted with ambient heat in mind.
Enact a rebuttable presumption of compensability, on the section 7.3 model, for injury occurring during outdoor work or in non-climate-controlled indoor work when the heat index exceeded a defined threshold for a defined period. The proposed federal rule's initial trigger of an 80 degree heat index offers a ready benchmark that employers and carriers can administer.
Require capture of environmental conditions as a discrete data field in first and subsequent report of injury filings, so that heat is recorded even when the injury is coded as a fall or a laceration. The reporting architecture is already being rebuilt; Colorado moved to EDI version 3.1 on July 9, 2026. Adding an environmental-condition field during a transition is cheap. Adding it afterward is not.
Direct the Division of Workers' Compensation to publish annual data on heat-associated claims. If the undercount is the reason the rulemaking record looks thin, the remedy is to count.
The federal standard may arrive in October 2027. The workers will arrive this August.
Sources
1. Secretary of Labor v. A.H. Sturgill Roofing, Inc., OSHRC Docket No. 13-0224 (Feb. 28, 2019).
2. Hellwig v. J.F. Rast & Co., Inc., 110 N.J. 37 (1988).
3. Renner v. AT&T, 218 N.J. 435 (2014) (Supreme Court of New Jersey slip opinion, A-71-11).
4. New Jersey Workers' Compensation Law, N.J.S.A. 34:15-1 et seq. (official text, N.J. Dept. of Labor).
6. U.S. Dept. of Labor Agency Rule List (July 3, 2026), reporting Supplemental NPRM projected December 2026 and final rule projected October 2027, RIN 1218-AD39.
7. NCCI, 2026 Emerging Legislative and Regulatory Issues.
11. Colorado Division of Workers' Compensation, EDI 3.1 transition effective July 9, 2026.
About the Author
Jon L. Gelman of Wayne, NJ, is the author of NJ Workers’ Compensation Law (West-Thomson-Reuters) and co-author of the national treatise Modern Workers’ Compensation Law (West-Thomson-Reuters).
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© 2026 Jon L Gelman. All rights reserved. | Attorney Advertising | Prior results do not guarantee a similar outcome.
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