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Paste your rating string above. The tool explains all six segments, checks the arithmetic, and converts the final percentage into weeks and dollars under Labor Code § 4658 — adding the life pension under § 4659 where the rating is 70% or above.
What a rating string is
Every rated California workers' compensation case produces a line that looks like this:
15.03.01.00 – 8 – [1.4]11 – 340G – 13 – 15
It is the single most important line of text in your file, because it is where a medical finding becomes a percentage and a percentage becomes money. It appears on the rating produced by the Disability Evaluation Unit, and often inside your doctor's report.
Almost nobody explains it to the person it belongs to. Here is what the six segments mean:
| Segment | Example | What it is |
|---|---|---|
| Impairment number | 15.03.01.00 |
The body part and method, from the AMA Guides, 5th Edition — here, lumbar spine by the DRE method |
| Whole person impairment | 8 |
The doctor's finding, as a percentage of the whole person |
| Future earning capacity adjustment | [1.4]11 |
The multiplier applied to the impairment, and the result |
| Occupational group and variant | 340G |
Your job's group number and the variant letter that adjusts for it |
| After occupational adjustment | 13 |
The percentage after your occupation is accounted for |
| Final permanent disability | 15 |
The percentage after the age adjustment — the number that pays |
Where a rating string can be argued
Three of the six segments are contestable, and two of them are contested routinely.
The impairment number and the whole person impairment. If the Guides produce an impairment that does not fairly reflect what happened to you, Almaraz/Guzman permits a physician to rate within the four corners of the Guides by an alternative method and explain why. A successfully repaired rotator cuff that rates zero is the classic example.
Apportionment. What is missing from a rating string is often more valuable than what is in it. Under § 4663 a physician must apportion between industrial and non-industrial causes, and an apportionment opinion that simply says "50% degenerative" without the reasoning Escobedo requires is not substantial medical evidence.
The occupational group. Group 340 and group 380 produce materially different money from the same impairment. Groups are assigned from job duties, not job titles.
How permanent disability works → · Apportionment →
Worked examples
These are the examples the decoder is checked against, including the Division of Workers' Compensation's own published one.
| Input | Final PD | Weeks | Value at $290 |
|---|---|---|---|
15.03.01.00 – 8 – [1.4]11 – 340G – 13 – 15 (DWC's own example) |
15% | 50.50 | $14,645.00 |
15.03.01.00 – 10 – [1.4]14 – 380H – 18 – 18 |
18% | 65.50 | $18,995.00 |
15.01.02.02 – 8 – [5]10 – 470H – 13 – 11 (2005 schedule, § 1) |
11% | 34.25 | $9,932.50 |
What the decoder does not do
It does not generate a rating from scratch. Producing a rating requires the proprietary tables in the Permanent Disability Rating Schedule, and a tool that guessed at them would be worse than no tool.
It reads your string, which already contains the outputs of those lookups — so it can tell you what you have, check that the six segments are consistent with each other, and tell you what the result is worth. Where it does not recognise an impairment code or an occupational group, it says so rather than inventing an answer.
If the arithmetic doesn't check out
The decoder will tell you when the segments don't reconcile. That is worth a phone call — not because arithmetic errors are common, but because when they happen nobody downstream catches them, and the number that comes out the end is the number that gets paid.
Bring us your rating string. (213) 380-9310 · 24/7 intake (213) 463-6469
Related
General information about California law, not legal advice about your case.
Impairment values described are from the AMA Guides, 5th Edition as applied under the California rating schedule; the Guides are a copyrighted medical text and figures here are summarized rather than reproduced. Your rating depends on your own examination findings.
Law Offices of Solov & Teitell, APC · (213) 380-9310 · 24/7 (213) 463-6469
Printed from https://www.solovteitell.com/resources/rating-string-decoder/ · Last reviewed 2026-08-23