Six-minute units under MARFS Chapter 25, 0810V at $11.05 a unit, against a per-referral cap you are expected to burn down yourself — billed to L&I on State Fund claims and to the employer or TPA on self-insured ones. Here is the whole chain.
Washington is a monopolistic state: employers buy workers’ compensation from the Department of Labor & Industries, or they self-insure. That split is the first thing to establish on any referral, because it decides who you invoice.
Washington’s fund makes on the order of 9,900 vocational referrals a year, which is why a solo VRC here is usually running more concurrent referrals than a counsellor in a private-carrier state — and why a burn-down you cannot see at a glance turns into unbilled work.
Vocational provider registration is governed by WAC 296-19A, and the application is form F252-088-000. The registration is the thing L&I pays against; the firm is the thing referrals are routed to.
L&I’s own starting point for the whole relationship — registration, expectations, and what a referral involves — is Working with L&I as a vocational provider.
What our research does not confirm: whether Washington publishes a public roster of registered vocational providers, and where. We are not going to point you at a list we have not verified. Ask L&I directly.
Washington prices vocational work through the Medical Aid Rules and Fee Schedules — Chapter 25 is the vocational chapter. The headline code for counsellor time is 0810V.
| Code | What it covers | Per 6-minute unit | Per hour |
|---|---|---|---|
| 0810V | VRC time | $11.05 | ≈$110.50 |
2026 figures. Intern and forensic rates differ and are published in the same chapter. Current as of July 2026 — verify with Washington L&I.
Note the difference from Ohio, if you have ever worked both: in Ohio the schedule figure is the hour and the form counts tenths of it. In Washington the schedule figure is the unit. Ten units is an hour, and an hour of VRC time is about $110.50. Same six-minute increment, opposite arithmetic — see unit for why this catches people who bill in two states.
The caps are the real Washington skill. Referrals carry per-referral maximums — an Ability-to-Work Assessment referral caps near $7,776. Nobody stops you at the cap. You track the burn-down yourself, and work performed past it is work you performed for nothing. A running “authorised, used, remaining” figure per referral is not a nicety here; it is the difference between a profitable referral and a donated one.
Ability-to-Work Assessments, job analyses, employer contacts, plan development under Option 2 timelines. Every one of them is a timed, coded entry — and every one of them is also a piece of the report that has to leave with the bill.
The practical rhythm is: log the activity with its minutes and its code as it happens; keep the referral’s remaining authorisation visible while you do it; and let the report and the invoice be built from the same entries rather than reconstructed from memory on Sunday night.
The reason to log at the moment rather than at the end of the week is not tidiness. It is that a 4-minute call you reconstruct three days later becomes a 5-minute call, or disappears — and across 9,900 statewide referrals, the profession loses a great deal of real, performed, authorised work that way.
State Fund and self-insured money behaves differently, and the mistake is to keep one undifferentiated pile of “outstanding.” Age them separately: L&I on one side, each self-insured employer and its TPA on the other. Then a slow payer looks like a slow payer instead of like a bad month.
When a remittance comes back light, the question to answer before you call anybody is whether the gap is a rate difference, a unit difference, or a cap. Those three have three different conversations attached. Comparing paid line to billed line — not paid total to billed total — is what tells you which one you are in. See short-pay, and the calculator if you want the arithmetic done for a single remittance.
What our research does not confirm: a published payment-timeliness clock or interest rule for Washington vocational billing. Where a state publishes one — Minnesota’s 30 days, Ohio’s one-year filing window — we say so; here we have not verified one, so treat L&I’s own guidance as the authority.
Everything above is transcribed from Washington State Department of Labor & Industries (L&I) and the rules it publishes, checked in July 2026. Before you bill from a figure on any website — ours included — check it at the source.
Note what this guide does not link: a public roster of registered vocational providers, and any portal integration. We have not verified the first and we have not built the second.
The governing rules: WAC 296-19A (vocational provider registration; application F252-088-000).
Current as of July 2026 — verify with Washington State Department of Labor & Industries (L&I).
Not because you are disorganised. Because nobody ever built software for this job, so the job got done in Excel and Word — and those four files do not talk to each other.
Four places, one activity — and the fourth one, the burn-down, is arithmetic you are doing in your head against a cap that nobody will remind you about.
Med Claims Pro is configured to your formats, folders, payers and codes during onboarding — included in every plan. See how Washington billing maps onto it, or book fifteen minutes and watch a week like yours run itself.
$11.05 per six-minute unit — about $110.50 an hour — for VRC time on the 2026 MARFS Chapter 25 schedule. Intern and forensic rates are different and live in the same chapter. Current as of July 2026; verify with Washington L&I.
No. Self-insured employers and their TPAs administer and pay their own claims. Establish which kind of claim a referral is before you do any work on it, because it decides who you invoice and how the money behaves afterwards.
You have worked for free. The caps are per-referral maximums — an Ability-to-Work Assessment referral caps near $7,776 — and nothing in the process stops you at the line. Tracking the remaining authorisation as you log time is the only reliable defence.
Through VocLink Connect, with provider billing through My L&I. Med Claims Pro does not integrate with either system — it produces your bill and your report and keeps your proof; you submit through L&I’s own channels.
Our July 2026 research did not confirm one, or where it would live, so we are not going to name a URL. L&I is the authority on its own registration list.
Fifteen minutes, your state’s codes on screen — or start the trial and poke around on your own.