Here is the short answer. If you worked overseas for a United States government contractor and you are sick from burn pit smoke, your claim runs through the Defense Base Act (DBA), not the PACT Act. The PACT Act is a veterans law, and it only reaches people who served in uniform. The Defense Base Act is the federal workers' compensation law written for civilian contractors, and it can pay your medical care and part of your lost wages. What it will not do is assume the smoke made you sick. That part you have to show.
I am Mark Hirsch. I handle Defense Base Act claims for civilian contractors hurt overseas, plus Longshore Act claims around the country. Most people who call me about burn pits are years past the deployment. They came home fine. Then a cough would not clear up, or a scan found something, and a doctor asked where they had been working. Now there are bills and there is time off work. By the end you will know why the PACT Act stops short of contractors and which law does reach you. You will also know what a Defense Base Act claim pays, how you prove one, and how much time you really have.
Key takeaways
- The PACT Act's own wording limits it to people with active military service, so a civilian contractor never qualifies.
- Contractors go through the Defense Base Act instead. It pays medical care and wage benefits, and the employer's insurance carrier pays them.
- Once you show the illness and the working conditions, the law presumes the claim is covered unless the carrier proves otherwise.
- A bill in Congress would add a list of illnesses like the veterans one, but only for people on a federal agency payroll. Contractors are left out of that bill too.
- On a slow illness, both deadlines start the day you learned it was tied to your work. Not the day you came home.
Does the PACT Act Cover Civilian Contractors?
No. The PACT Act does not reach contractors at all. The reason is written into the law itself, not buried in some VA policy.
The full name is the Honoring our PACT Act of 2022. It became Public Law 117-168 on August 10, 2022. It changed title 38 of the United States Code, which is the part of federal law that deals with veterans. Section 406 added a new 38 U.S.C. section 1120, and that is where the famous list of illnesses lives. It covers asthma diagnosed after service, chronic bronchitis, emphysema, chronic sinusitis and several other lung and sinus conditions, plus a long run of cancers.
Now read who the list applies to. Section 1120(a) says one of those illnesses counts as service connected when it shows up in a "covered veteran." And 38 U.S.C. section 1119(c)(1) defines a covered veteran as a veteran who "performed active military, naval, air, or space service" at a duty station in a listed country. Iraq, Kuwait, Qatar, Saudi Arabia and four others count from August 2, 1990, and Afghanistan, Syria, Djibouti and five more count from September 11, 2001.
You could have slept fifty yards from the same pit, for the same number of months, breathing the same smoke, and still fail that test on the first four words. You were a civilian. You did not perform active military service. No version of the PACT Act bends around that.
So which law does reach you? Three are in play, and only one was written with your job in mind.
Three Laws, Three Different Groups of People
People talk about burn pit benefits as if it were one program. It is three, and the one that applies to you depends on whose payroll you were on over there.
| Who it covers | The law | Is there a list of illnesses treated as work related? | Who pays |
|---|---|---|---|
| People who served in uniform | PACT Act, in title 38 | Yes, the list in section 1120(b) | Department of Veterans Affairs |
| Civilians on a federal agency payroll | Federal Employees' Compensation Act, in title 5 | No. A bill would add one | The federal government, through the Department of Labor |
| Contractors on a United States government contract | Defense Base Act, in title 42, using the Longshore Act rules | No | Your employer's insurance carrier |
Read the bottom row twice. 42 U.S.C. section 1651 does not write its own benefit rules. It takes the Longshore and Harbor Workers' Compensation Act, a 1927 dock workers law, and applies it to people working overseas under a United States government contract. So a support worker at a base camp in Iraq gets paid out of the same rulebook as a crane operator in a Florida port. That is not a quirk. It decides your deadlines, your doctor and the size of your weekly check, and the rest of this post works through each one.
The Bill in Congress Right Now Still Leaves Contractors Out
There is a live effort in Washington to close part of this, and it is worth knowing how far it goes, because it does not reach you either.
Kenya Merritt was an FBI special agent. He deployed to Iraq in 2009 and worked at Balad Air Base, next to one of the largest burn pits of the war. He was later diagnosed with lung cancer and died on October 30, 2024. NPR reported in July 2026 that his family and other federal civilians have been pushing for a law of their own, since the 2022 PACT Act passed them by.
That effort is now a bill. In the Senate it is S. 4554, the Kenya Merritt Renewing our PACT Act of 2026, introduced by Senator Kirsten Gillibrand on May 18, 2026. The House version is H.R. 8524, introduced by Representative Nellie Pou on April 27, 2026. As of August 2026 both are still in committee. Neither is law, and neither changes what you can file today.
Here is the part almost nobody has written down. The bill adds a new section 8143c to title 5, the federal employees law, and it names exactly who qualifies. An eligible employee has to work for one of seven named departments: Justice, State, Defense, Homeland Security, the Treasury, Commerce or Agriculture. Employees of an intelligence agency count, and so do federal law enforcement officers. On top of that, the person has to have spent at least 30 days in a country while the United States was running an operation there. The illnesses the bill would treat as work related are the same ones the veterans list already carries.
Read that list of employers again. Every single entry is a federal agency. If your badge carried a contractor name, you are not an employee of the Department of Defense, and the bill does not describe you. The veterans law skipped contractors in 2022. The bill written to fix that skips them again in 2026. So the Defense Base Act is not a fallback for you. It is the whole thing.
What the Defense Base Act Pays for a Burn Pit Illness
A Defense Base Act claim is not a lawsuit, and there is no jury. It pays two main things, medical care and money to replace wages, and it pays them whether or not anyone was careless.
Medical care. Under 33 U.S.C. section 907, the employer has to pay for treatment for as long as "the nature of the injury or the process of recovery may require." No dollar cap appears in that sentence. Section 907(b) also lets you pick your own treating doctor. That matters more on a lung claim than on almost anything else, because the doctor who follows you for years is the one whose records carry the case.
Weekly money. Section 908 pays two thirds of your average weekly wage while you cannot work. There is a ceiling on it. Section 906(b)(1) caps weekly payments at 200 percent of the national average weekly wage, and section 906(b)(3) makes the Department of Labor reset that figure every October 1. For the year ending September 30, 2026, the Department of Labor set the national average weekly wage at $1,041.35. That puts the weekly maximum at $2,082.70.
Now the sentence that decides more money than any other here. Your average weekly wage is built from what you were really paid overseas, and that is almost never just a base wage. It is base pay plus hazard pay, a danger or post differential, uplift, per diem and completion bonuses. Carriers often work off the base figure alone, and once that number is set it follows the claim for its whole life.
There is a clock on the carrier too. Under 33 U.S.C. section 914(b), the first payment is due on the fourteenth day after the employer is notified. If the carrier fights the claim instead, section 914(d) makes it file a written notice saying so, and that notice tells you which defense is coming. If a contractor dies from the illness, surviving dependents have a benefit of their own, covered in what surviving families get under the Defense Base Act.
Want a rough sense of the numbers? The calculator below runs the same arithmetic. Treat it as a starting point, not a promise, because a real claim value depends on facts an attorney has to review.
How You Prove a Burn Pit Claim Without a List of Illnesses
This is where contractors lose claims they should win, so read this part slowly.
A veteran with a listed condition does not argue about cause. You do. But you are not starting from nothing, and the reason is 33 U.S.C. section 920, which most contractors have never heard of. It says that on any claim, "it shall be presumed, in the absence of substantial evidence to the contrary," that the claim comes within the Act.
In plain terms it is a hand off. First you put two things on the table: a real physical harm, and working conditions that could have caused it. Once those are there, the presumption moves the job over to the carrier. Now the carrier has to come back with substantial evidence that your work did not cause the illness. Guessing out loud does not clear that bar.
Knowing that, you can guess what carriers do. They attack the first step and offer an innocent explanation for the illness. The arguments repeat in almost every burn pit file. You smoked. You have allergies. This runs in your family. You are simply older now. The camp you named is not the camp where the pit was.
None of those is automatically wrong, and all of them get answered the same way: a treating doctor who writes down what you were exposed to and why it points at your work. Lung and sinus cases follow the same pattern we see on post-traumatic stress disorder claims. The injury is real, and the fight is over whether anybody wrote it down at the time.
The Two Deadlines, and Why Yours May Not Have Run Out
Almost everyone who calls me about a burn pit illness opens the same way. This was fifteen years ago, so I am probably too late. Usually they are not, and here is why.
An illness that builds slowly is handled differently from a fall off a truck. The law calls it an occupational disease, and both deadlines start on a later day than you would expect.
Section 912(a) normally gives you 30 days to give your employer written notice of an injury. For an illness that does not disable you right away, that becomes one year. And the year does not begin when you got sick. It begins when you became aware, or reasonably should have been aware, that the illness was connected to your work.
Section 913(b)(2) then gives you two years to file the claim itself, counted from that same day. Section 913(a) puts the same idea in one line: the time "shall not begin to run until the employee ... is aware, or by the exercise of reasonable diligence should have been aware, of the relationship between the injury or death and the employment."
So take a contractor who rotated out of Balad in 2009 and first heard "this is probably from the smoke" at a lung appointment last spring. That is a live claim, not an expired one. The date that counts is the appointment, not the rotation. Our page on burn pit and toxic exposure claims covers the same timing question, and if a claim has already come back denied, the common reasons a Defense Base Act claim gets denied is the better next read.
5 Things I Look For in a Burn Pit File
When one of these lands on my desk, I read for five things before anything else. You can gather most of them yourself this week.
- Where you slept, not only where you worked. Housing was often closer to the pit than the job site. Write down every camp by name, with the months you were at each one. Old orders, letters of authorization, badges and even dated photos help fix the record.
- The diagnosis in writing. A name for the condition, from a doctor, on paper. "Breathing problems" is not a claim. Chronic bronchitis, constrictive bronchiolitis, sarcoidosis or a named cancer is.
- An opinion, not a quote from you. A chart note reading "patient reports burn pit exposure" is your words written down. The doctor has to say what you were exposed to and why it points at the work.
- Your real pay records. The full year before you got sick or stopped working, showing every line: base, hazard, differential, per diem, bonuses.
- Whatever the carrier already put in writing. A denial letter, a notice that it is fighting the claim, a request for a recorded statement. Those pages carry deadlines of their own.
Frequently Asked Questions
Q: Do I need to be in the VA burn pit registry to file a Defense Base Act claim?
A: No. The registry is a Department of Veterans Affairs health program, and a Defense Base Act claim is a Department of Labor workers' compensation claim. Neither is a condition of the other.
Q: I am a veteran, and I later worked overseas as a contractor. Can I do both?
A: They are separate systems covering separate parts of your life. VA benefits answer for your time in uniform. A Defense Base Act claim answers for your time on the contract. Tell whoever handles one about the other, because the medical records overlap and the two files should not contradict each other.
Q: I smoked. Does that end the claim?
A: Not by itself, and carriers raise it in nearly every lung file. Do not leave your smoking history out of what you tell your own doctor. A record corrected later is worth less than one that was right the first time.
Q: Does it matter which contractor I worked for?
A: Coverage follows the contract, not the company name on your badge. Section 1651 reaches employees of a contractor with the United States and employees of its subcontractors, so a job several layers down the chain can still be covered. Mergers, name changes and closures do not by themselves remove that coverage.
Q: What does it cost to have a lawyer look at a Defense Base Act claim?
A: Nothing up front, and the fee rules on these federal claims work differently from a normal injury case. In some situations the insurance carrier can be ordered to pay the fee on top of your benefits. I go through how that works in who pays attorney fees in a Defense Base Act claim.
Have Someone Read the File Before You Decide It Is Too Late
If you worked a United States government contract overseas and you are sick now, the worst outcome is deciding on your own that the window closed. Our team at Templer & Hirsch, Injury Lawyers handles Defense Base Act and Longshore claims nationwide, from any state, and there is no fee unless we recover. Call 305-937-2700 or request a free case evaluation.
This is general information, not legal advice; consult an attorney about your situation.