Work-Induced Varicose Veins Claims in Argentina

If you spend your shift on your feet — in retail, security, a kitchen, a production line — and varicose veins have developed in both legs, Argentine law may treat that as an occupational disease. It has been on the official list since Decree 49/2014, and you bring the claim with your own lawyer, whose fees the insurer pays. Not you.

1. What Decree 49/2014 Says About Occupational Varicose Veins

Until January 2014, varicose veins did not appear on the List of Occupational Diseases approved as Annex I to Decree 658/96. A worker who spent a career standing and ended up with ruined legs had to litigate causation from scratch, case by case, against an insurer whose answer was almost always the same: a personal illness, unrelated to work.

That changed with Decree 49/2014, issued on 14 January 2014 and published in the Official Gazette on 20 January 2014. Its section 1 added to the List — provided for in section 6, subsection 2(a) of Law 24,557 — the risk agent "increased venous pressure in the lower limbs" and, as the associated disease, bilateral primary varicose veins (várices primitivas bilaterales).

Note the exact wording. The Spanish text says primitivas, not primarias. It is the same clinical picture, but it pays to quote the statute as written, because that is the entry the medical board looks up on the list.

The qualifying work is defined in the same instrument: "tasks whose ordinary performance requires prolonged standing, static and/or with reduced mobility".

Section 2 of the decree also replaced Annex I to Decree 659/96 — the Disability Rating Schedule used to set your percentage.

One timing limit matters from the outset. The Common Provisions of Annex I state that newly listed diseases apply only to contingencies whose triggering event occurred after the disease was added to the list. In plain terms, the door opened in January 2014.

Medically, the study that documents the condition is a venous duplex ultrasound (eco-doppler) of the lower limbs, showing reflux and valvular insufficiency in the superficial and deep systems. That report, together with proof of how long you stood, is what the medical board will read.

2. Requirements You Will Have to Prove

Not everyone with varicose veins is entitled to compensation. Decree 49/2014 sets objective conditions, and the medical board checks them before accepting the disease as occupational.

• Three years, minimum: the tasks must have been performed for at least three years, continuous or not, within the ordinary working day defined by statute or collective agreement. Reduced hours, part-time work or extended shifts adjust that period proportionally.
• Static standing: no walking at all for at least two consecutive hours of the ordinary shift.
• Standing with restricted walking: you cover less than 100 metres per hour for at least three consecutive hours.
• Standing while handling loads: prolonged standing while lifting, carrying, moving or pushing heavy objects.
• Standing under thermal load: standing in environments where air temperature and humidity exceed the legally admissible limits and the task demands physical effort.

The often-quoted benchmark of "more than two consecutive hours on your feet" is written into the decree for the last two categories — loads and thermal load — not as a general rule for the whole risk agent. It is a small precision that carries weight at a hearing.

The decree also builds in an escape valve: medical boards must consider special cases where, even with a shorter period of standing, the concrete working conditions were capable of causing the condition.

Proving causation is where the case is won or lost

The Common Provisions of Annex I are demanding. In each specific case, the body determining disability must establish scientifically whether the injury was caused directly and immediately by the performance of the work, excluding factors attributable to the worker or unrelated to the job. Only work-attributable causal factors are compensated. And clinical history alone is not enough: the rule requires the technical studies of the workstation and the actual working conditions and environment to be taken into account.

One point deserves to be stated bluntly, because it circulates in a distorted form. For inguinal and crural hernias, the same Annex I contains an express presumption: where no pre-employment medical examination was carried out and exposure is proven, a causal link to work is presumed. That presumption is not written for the varicose vein agent. Anyone telling you that a missing pre-employment exam wins the case by itself is overselling. What is true in practice is that, without that exam, the insurer loses the instrument the law itself provides for proving a pre-existing impairment and has to find other evidence.

So the file is built out of what documents the job: payslips, job category and applicable collective agreement, personnel records, time sheets, task descriptions, health and safety surveys, and co-workers as witnesses. The posts that typically qualify are retail staff and cashiers, private security guards, waiters and cooks, hairdressers, assembly-line operators, nurses and teachers.

3. The SRT Medical Board Procedure

Since Law 27,348 there is one route, and it is mandatory. Its section 1 provides that the jurisdictional medical boards are the prior administrative stage — compulsory and exclusive of any other intervention — for claiming that a disease is occupational, having the degree of disability determined and obtaining the statutory cash benefits. It also makes one thing clear: you attend with legal counsel.

1. You choose the venue: the medical board for your home address, for the place where you actually work, or for the address where you normally report. The choice is yours, not the insurer's.
2. You file the claim with documents: ID, the venous duplex ultrasound and any complementary studies, your clinical history, and all the exposure evidence described above.
3. Medical hearing: a board physician examines you and determines whether there is disability and at what percentage, under the rating schedule in force.
4. Decision deadline: sixty administrative business days from the first properly completed filing (section 3 of Law 27,348). It may only be extended for factual issues connected to proving the occupational disease, with express reasons. All deadlines are peremptory: once they expire, the appeal route in section 2 opens automatically.
5. Approval and payment: if there is agreement, the Approval Service created by section 3 of Law 27,348 steps in. Annex I to that law requires the cash benefits to be made available within five days of notice of the approval decision, and section 17 requires them to be deposited into your payroll account.

What it costs you: nothing. The final paragraph of section 1 of Law 27,348 places your lawyer's fees and any other expense you incur before the medical boards on the insurer. Section 2 adds that every item of evidence produced at any stage is free of charge for the worker. If someone asks you for money up front, that is not how the system works.

If you disagree with the board's decision, you may seek review before the Central Medical Board or appeal to the ordinary labour courts of the jurisdiction where the intervening board sits. The Supreme Court has upheld the validity of the medical board procedure (Fallos 344:2307), so the useful strategy today is not to attack the system but to work well inside it. You can read the step-by-step of the board hearing and, if the insurer denies coverage, how to challenge a workers' comp claim rejection.

A recent change: Law 27,802 (Official Gazette 6 March 2026) added section 4 bis to Law 27,348, requiring adhering jurisdictions to apply the Disability Rating Schedule of Decree 659/96 and its amendments strictly, and to set up forensic medical bodies for court disputes.

Unregistered workers whose employer falls under subsection 1 of section 28 of Law 24,557 — an employer that failed to take out workers' comp insurance — are not required to go through this stage: the court route is open to them directly.

4. How Compensation Is Calculated

The benefit for permanent partial disability — the ordinary scenario with varicose veins — comes from section 14, subsection 2(a) of Law 24,557, as worded by section 6 of Decree 1278/2000. It applies where the percentage is 50% or less.

The disability percentage is not a fixed number for "varicose veins". It depends on the clinical stage found and on the weighting factors. And here a recent change affects every case still open.

Inside its cardiovascular chapter, the new schedule has a dedicated Venous Disease section rated by stages. Its criteria matter a great deal in this kind of claim:

• The clinical finding is what defines the stage.
• Where each leg falls into a different stage, the one producing the higher disability is used.
• The percentage already includes the loss from functional repercussion; it is not added separately.
• If you have had surgery, the venous disease stage is added on a residual-capacity basis where clinical findings persist. Surgery does not wipe out the claim.

The weighting factors of section 8, subsection 3 of Law 24,557 are then applied to that percentage: age, type of activity and prospects of redeployment. Under the Decree 549/2025 schedule those factors are added into a single value that increases the schedule percentage; and if weighting takes the result to 66% or above, a partial disability is capped at 65.99%.

One warning worth hearing before the hearing: the new schedule expressly excludes pain from the weighting tables because it is subjective. What scores is the documented clinical finding. Turning up to describe the pain without the study that backs it is turning up to lose points. The full mechanics of the calculation are set out in the base income formula and in what workers' comp pays for varicose veins.

5. Mistakes That Shrink Your Award

6. Your Filing Deadline

Section 44, subsection 1 of Law 24,557 sets a two-year limitation period, and it does so with two locks: claims lapse two years from the date the benefit should have been paid or provided and, in any event, two years from the end of the employment relationship.

That second lock is the one people overlook and the one that costs rights. However you argue about when the benefit became payable, if the job ended more than two years ago your claim is in the danger zone. Add to that section 9, subsection 2 of Law 24,557, under which a permanent disability giving rise to a lump sum becomes definitive when temporary disability ends, and section 4 of Law 26,773, which counts the limitation period from the day after formal notice of the amounts payable to you.

The practical conclusion is simple: consult as soon as you have a diagnosis. Do not wait for the veins to get worse in the hope of a higher percentage. The deadline is set out in detail in how long you have to report to the insurer, and the whole claim route in medical board claims.

Frequently Asked Questions