KEY TAKEAWAYS
Maintenance and cure is owed to any seaman who becomes injured or ill while in the service of a vessel, and it is owed regardless of who caused the injury. Maintenance covers reasonable food and lodging ashore, while cure covers reasonable and necessary medical treatment until the seaman reaches maximum medical improvement. Courts resolve genuine doubts about eligibility in the seaman's favor, and an employer that willfully withholds these benefits can face punitive damages on top of the unpaid amount.
A seaman qualifies for maintenance and cure by satisfying two conditions: being a member of the crew of a vessel in navigation, and becoming injured or falling ill while in the service of that vessel. Nothing else is required. Fault is irrelevant, the injury does not have to happen on deck, and it does not even have to be work related in the ordinary sense.
That makes maintenance and cure the oldest and most reliable protection in maritime law, and the one employers most often shortchange. The maritime injury lawyers at Hofmann & Schweitzer expound on what this means below.
Who Qualifies for Maintenance and Cure?
You Must Be a Seaman
The benefits belong to seamen, meaning crew members whose duties contribute to the function of a vessel or the accomplishment of its mission and whose connection to that vessel is substantial in duration and nature. Deckhands, mates, engineers, cooks, and fishing crews all satisfy the seaman test in the ordinary case. Longshore workers, harbor workers, and shipbuilders generally do not, because a different federal system covers them.
You Must Be in the Service of the Vessel
This phrase is broader than most crews realize. A seaman is in the service of the vessel while working, while off watch aboard, while ashore on shore leave in a foreign port, and while traveling to or from the vessel at the employer's direction. Illnesses that surface during a hitch, including heart conditions and infections, can qualify alongside traumatic injuries.
Fault Does Not Matter
A seaman who slipped because of their own inattention, or who was hurt doing something the captain had warned against, is still owed maintenance and cure. The narrow exceptions involve willful misconduct and, in some circuits, the deliberate concealment of a material pre-existing medical condition on a pre-hire questionnaire that the employer relied on.
What Do Maintenance and Cure Cover?
The two components pay for different things, and both are frequently underpaid.
Maintenance
Maintenance is a daily stipend replacing the food and lodging a seaman would have received aboard. It is meant to cover actual reasonable costs, which can include rent or mortgage, property taxes, homeowner's insurance, utilities, and groceries. Courts have increasingly recognized cellphone and internet service as necessary utilities. Many collective bargaining agreements set a fixed daily rate, and some of those rates have not been revisited in years, which is why the amount a seaman is actually owed is worth checking rather than accepting.
Cure
Cure covers reasonable and necessary medical care connected to the injury or illness: physician visits, diagnostic imaging, surgery, prescriptions, physical therapy, prosthetics, and travel to appointments. The seaman chooses the treating physician. An employer may request an examination by its own doctor, but that opinion does not automatically override the treating physician's judgment.
When Do the Benefits End?
Maintenance and cure continue until the seaman reaches maximum medical improvement, the point at which the condition has stabilized and further treatment will not improve it. Maximum medical improvement is not the same as recovery. A seaman with a fused spine and permanent lifting restrictions can be at maximum medical improvement while still being unable to work a deck.
Once benefits terminate, palliative care that only manages symptoms generally falls outside cure. Treatment that could still improve the condition does not, and employers sometimes cut off payments on a paper review before that line has actually been reached. Ambiguities about whether a seaman has reached that point are resolved in the seaman's favor.
What Current Case Law Says About Denied Benefits
Two Supreme Court decisions frame this area today, and they point in different directions.
In 2009, the Court held in Atlantic Sounding Co. v. Townsend that a seaman may recover punitive damages from an employer that willfully and wantonly refuses to pay maintenance and cure. Long-standing precedent also allows attorney's fees where the refusal was callous. That remedy remains good law and is the main deterrent against employers who delay, lowball, or terminate benefits without a reasonable basis.
In 2019, however, the Court held in The Dutra Group v. Batterton that punitive damages are not available on a claim that the vessel was unseaworthy at the time of the injury. The practical result is a split that matters when a claim is being valued: punitive exposure attaches to the willful denial of maintenance and cure, but not to the unseaworthy condition that caused the injury in the first place.
Where Fishing Crews Run Into Trouble
Commercial fishing raises recurring maintenance and cure disputes that rarely come up on deep-sea vessels.
- Share and lay pay. Crews paid a percentage of the catch have no weekly wage figure on file, so employers sometimes propose a maintenance rate untethered from actual living costs.
- Delayed reporting. Injuries on dredge and trawl gear are often worked through until the trip ends, and the gap is later used to argue the injury happened ashore.
- Pre-hire questionnaires. Prior back or shoulder complaints disclosed imprecisely on a hiring form can trigger a concealment defense.
- Quick releases. A modest lump sum offered dockside, in exchange for a signed release, can end every claim a crew member has.
Maintenance and cure also sits alongside, rather than replacing, other remedies. A seaman who has been receiving these benefits may still bring a Jones Act negligence claim and an unseaworthiness claim for the losses that maintenance and cure does not touch, including lost earning capacity and pain and suffering. The broader framework is set out in the general maritime liability provisions of Title 46, and the separate federal system covering shoreside maritime workers is described in the Department of Labor's Longshore Act guidance.
