How many physiotherapy visits WorkSafeBC actually covers.

Once WorkSafeBC accepts your claim, your physiotherapy treatment period begins at your first clinic visit after the initial assessment. As of the reference manual published in February 2026, that period includes up to 10 visits or five calendar weeks, whichever is reached earlier, unless a WorkSafeBC officer directs that fewer treatments are appropriate.

The two limits matter equally, and most people only think about the visit count. If you come twice a week, you reach 10 visits right around the five-week mark and the limits expire together. If you come once a week, the calendar runs out first: at week five you have used 5 visits, and the remaining 5 do not roll over into an extension. Booking frequency is a clinical decision, but it is worth understanding that a slow schedule can quietly cost you treatment you were entitled to.

The initial assessment itself sits outside this block. It is approved separately, and on a pending or accepted claim it needs no prior approval from your claim owner so long as it happens within 60 days of your date of injury. That deadline is important enough that it has its own page in this hub.

A standard extension gives a maximum of 8 treatment visits or up to a 4-week period. For five named compensable injuries, WorkSafeBC allows an extended extension of up to 16 visits or an 8-week period instead:

• post-surgical cases;
• fractures;
• non-surgical ligament or meniscal tears;
• adhesive capsulitis, commonly called frozen shoulder;
• disc herniation with radicular symptoms.

These are the injuries where recovery reliably takes longer than a few weeks of care, so the longer block reflects biology rather than generosity. If your accepted claim falls into one of these categories, it is worth asking your physiotherapist directly whether they are requesting the extended block. The eligibility sits with the injury recorded on your claim, so a mismatch between what you were actually diagnosed with and what the claim says can quietly cost you eight visits.

Two of these categories have deeper coverage elsewhere on this site: read about what post-surgical rehabilitation involves and how frozen shoulder progresses through its stages.

Some of your care may be delivered by a kinesiologist or a physical therapist support worker rather than by the physiotherapist directly. WorkSafeBC calls these support sessions, and they are appropriate when you need guided exercise or functional activity but not one-to-one clinical time with the physiotherapist.

They are useful, and they are not free extras. Support sessions count towards the same allocated visits as physiotherapy treatment. Ten combined visits in the treatment period means ten in total, in any mix. Your physiotherapist has to set out the need for them in the initial report or the treatment plan report, and no separate approval is required beyond that.

Each support session must be at least 45 minutes long, with at least 30 minutes of direct one-to-one time. The physiotherapist does not need to be in the room, but they remain responsible for your assessment, your plan, clinical oversight, and every WorkSafeBC report. If you want to understand what that active-exercise work involves, our kinesiology page covers it.

The visit block only exists once two conditions are met. The treatment period may only be provided on an accepted claim, not a pending one, and it has to start within 30 days of your initial assessment or within 60 days of your date of injury. Meet those and no prior approval from your claim owner is needed to begin.

The 30-day rule is the one that catches people out. It is common to be assessed quickly, then wait for the claim decision, then try to start treatment once the acceptance letter arrives. If that decision takes longer than a month, the automatic start window has closed and your physiotherapist has to seek approval rather than simply booking you in. Complex claims can take more than 60 days for an entitlement decision, so this is not a rare edge case.

This is why we book injured workers in while a claim is still pending rather than waiting for the letter. Who carries the cost during that gap, and what happens to money you have already paid, is set out in your claim is still pending: who pays for physio.

WorkSafeBC allows one visit per day per approved claim. That holds regardless of how many body areas are being treated under that claim, and regardless of whether the visit is physiotherapy treatment or a kinesiology support session. A clinic is not permitted to invoice for more than one visit per day on the same claim, and a kinesiology session cannot be billed on the same day as a physiotherapy visit for that claim.

In practice this means you cannot compress a treatment block by stacking appointments. If you hurt your shoulder and your lower back in the same incident and both are on one claim, they are treated within the same visit, not across two. Planning your schedule around this rule from the start is more comfortable than discovering it when an invoice is rejected.

Recovery is rarely a straight line, and people stop attending for ordinary reasons: a busy stretch at work, a holiday, symptoms that settle and then return. WorkSafeBC recognises that a gap greater than three months may mean a new initial assessment is clinically appropriate, rather than picking up a stale plan where it was left.

That is sensible clinically, because a body three months on is not the body that was assessed. It also matters administratively, because a new assessment reopens questions about timing and approval that a continuous course of treatment never raises. If you are thinking about pausing treatment, say so rather than simply not rebooking. There is almost always a way to hold your place in the block, and it is far easier to arrange before the gap than to unpick afterwards.

The single most useful thing to know is that your first block is finite and the paperwork for the next one has a deadline that arrives before it. An extension request has to reach your WorkSafeBC officer at least seven days before your current period ends, and no earlier than the third calendar week of the treatment period. That is a narrow window, and it is your physiotherapist’s job to hit it.

It is also worth keeping your own rough count. You do not need a spreadsheet, just an awareness of roughly how many visits you have used and what week you are in. Injured workers who know they are at visit seven of ten ask better questions at appointment eight, and that is usually when the decision about an extension is actually being formed.

At our clinic we track your visit count against both limits from the first appointment and file extension paperwork inside that window, so care does not stop mid-treatment while a decision is pending. The mechanics of that request, and what happens if the answer is no, are covered in extensions, denials, and what you can do next. The reports that carry the request are covered in the reports your physiotherapist writes.