"Can I reopen it?"

Which means the math is worse than it sounds

A worker injured in 2021 who settled in 2025 has until 2026 — one year, not five.

A worker injured in 2019 who settled in 2024 has already run out.

Check your date of injury and count from there, today. This is the most commonly miscounted deadline in California workers' compensation, and it is not extendable.

Related: the Appeals Board's continuing jurisdiction under §§ 5803 and 5804 to rescind, alter, or amend an award for good cause is likewise bounded at five years from the date of injury.

And it depends entirely on how you settled

Stipulations with Request for Award — permanent disability paid over time, future medical treatment stays open, and the case can be reopened for new and further disability within the five years.

Compromise and Release — a lump sum that closed future medical permanently, and generally forecloses reopening. That is the trade you made.

Which one you signed is on the document. Look at the title. The difference, and why it matters more than the dollar amount.

What "new and further disability" means

Not that you are still in pain. Not that you regret the settlement. That your condition has objectively worsened, or that a new disability has developed from the original injury, since the award.

What supports it:

• A new objective finding — imaging, a positive study, a new diagnosis
• Surgery that was not contemplated, or a failed surgery
• Documented progression of a degenerative or progressive condition
• A compensable consequence that developed later — the other side, the joint above or below, CRPS, a medication consequence. More.
• A new period of temporary disability

What does not: the same condition, unchanged, evaluated more favorably by a different doctor.

If the five years have run

It is not necessarily over.

Future medical treatment may still be open on a Stipulated Award, and the five-year limit on reopening for new disability does not close medical care. Treatment disputes are still contestable through UR and IMR. How.

A new injury is a new claim with its own date of injury — including a new cumulative trauma from work performed since. This is the most commonly missed route.

And a third-party claim may exist entirely outside the comp file.

If your case is already settled and things got worse.