The Horseplay Rule Demystified
Most workers’ compensation claims begin with an employee doing their job. But some of the hardest claims to evaluate begin with an employee doing something else entirely: tossing a box at a coworker, wrestling over the last donut, or riding a hand truck down a ramp on a dare. In 2024, private industry employers reported 2.5 million nonfatal workplace injuries and illnesses, and while the vast majority arose from routine work, a persistent slice traces back to what the law calls “horseplay.”For employers, these incidents often feel like they shouldn’t be compensable, the employee wasn’t working, after all. For claims professionals, they land in a gray area that New York law has actually mapped more clearly than most people realize. Here’s how the horseplay rule really works, who it covers, and what both sides of a claim should be looking at.
Where the rule comes from
New York didn’t stumble into its horseplay doctrine, it wrote the playbook. In Leonbruno v. Champlain Silk Mills (1920), a factory worker lost the sight in one eye when a coworker threw an apple in a moment of shop-floor fooling around. The injured worker hadn’t been playing; he was simply there. Judge Benjamin Cardozo, writing for the Court of Appeals, held the injury compensable: when an employer gathers workers together, a certain amount of play, and the injuries that come with it, is a foreseeable risk of the workplace itself.More than a century later, that logic still anchors the analysis. The Workers’ Compensation Board asks the same two questions it asks of any claim: did the injury arise out of the employment, and did it occur in the course of the employment? Horseplay complicates the first question, but New York’s default answer has been consistent: it is reasonable and natural that employees will engage in occasional play during work, so injuries from that play generally remain connected to the employment.
The first question: participant or bystander?
The single most important fact in a horseplay claim is the injured worker’s role.Bystanders are covered. Full stop. An employee struck by a thrown object, knocked over by roughhousing coworkers, or otherwise injured by horseplay they weren’t part of stands in the same position as the worker in Leonbruno. These claims are compensable, and controverting them is rarely a defensible use of anyone’s time.Participants and instigators face a harder test. For an employee injured while joining in, and especially for the one who started it, New York asks whether the play had become part of the workplace or stood apart from it. The Court of Appeals drew this line in Matter of Ognibene v. Rochester Manufacturing Co. (1948), where a stockroom clerk injured himself ducking for cover after tossing rubber tubing at a coworker: an “isolated bit of horseplay,” the Court held, does not arise out of the employment but “it is continuity of practice, conduct which has gained acceptance, that transforms an extra-employment caper into an incident of employment.” In other words, the same prank can be compensable in a shop where pranks are routine and non-compensable where it came out of nowhere.
The employer’s narrow exception
Employers are not without a defense, but it runs through Ognibene’s distinction, not around it. The cases denying coverage share a shape: an instigator, an isolated act, and no connection between the prank and the ordinary life of that workplace. Another case, Matter of Frost v. Franklin Mfg. Co. (1923), denied recovery to a prankster on exactly those facts, and Ognibene reversed an award for the same reason, sending the case back to determine whether similar pranks were customary in that shop. To defeat coverage today, an employer generally must show the incident was that kind of isolated act, a departure from the workplace’s ordinary rhythms, rather than one more instance of play the workplace had come to expect.And that is why enforcement matters more than the policy itself. A handbook rule that managers ignore in practice, where pranks are tolerated, or supervisors join in, proves the opposite of what the employer intends: it establishes precisely the “continuity of practice” that Ognibene says transforms a caper into an incident of employment. The defense works best when the paper policy, the training record, and the day-to-day culture all tell the same story.
What claims professionals should examine
When a horseplay claim lands on your desk, the file you build in the first days will decide how much room you have later. The injured worker’s role (instigator, willing participant, or bystander), the duration and character of the deviation, whether work duties were still being performed when the injury occurred, the employer’s written policy and its actual enforcement history, and any record of prior incidents or discipline are all important aspects of the analysis. Witness statements taken early are valuable here, because horseplay cases turn on narrative details.A reflexive denial of a participant claim invites litigation the carrier is statistically likely to lose, and delays care that could have shortened the claim. The better play is often to accept the compensable claim, manage the medical side actively, and reserve the abandonment defense for the fact patterns that genuinely support it.
What employers can do
Prevention still beats litigation. Three approaches consistently help: educate employees with real injury stories from your industry or your own workplace so the risk feels concrete rather than theoretical; put a clear anti-horseplay rule in the handbook and communicate it beyond the handbook; and train managers to intervene the moment horseplay starts, every time, so enforcement is a habit rather than an exception. Consistent enforcement protects employees first. Should a claim arise, it is also what gives the employer’s position credibility.
When the gray area finds you
Horseplay claims reward early, informed handling: the compensability call, the documentation, and the medical management all happen in the first days. Viscardi’s injury management and nurse case management teams have spent more than two decades helping New York employers, carriers, and TPAs navigate these gray-area claims, coordinating care and keeping recovery on track regardless of how the injury began. If a claim like this is sitting on your desk, contact us — we’re glad to talk it through.