Can a Retired Employee be a ‘Qualified Individual’ Under ADA? SCOTUS Weighs In

Case File

When a retired firefighter realized that her health insurance benefits had run out due to her disability, she sued under the ADA but ran into a roadblock on the issue of whether she was "qualified" under the law, and the Supreme Court decided that she couldn't be. Simply Research readers have access to the full text of the case.

Case

Stanley v. City of Sanford, No. 23-997 (U.S. 06/20/25)

What Happened

A firefighter for a Florida city was forced into early retirement due to an unspecified disability and because of her retirement, under city policy, she was only entitled to 24 months of health insurance coverage. Had she been able to serve the entire 25 years she intended to work, she would have had coverage until age 65.

The firefighter sued under the Americans with Disabilities Act, claiming that providing different health insurance benefits to those who retire with 25 years of service and those who retire earlier due to disability amounted to impermissible discrimination.

The District Court granted the city's motion to dismiss, holding that the alleged discrimination -- reduced healthcare benefits -- did not take place until after she the firefighter retired, at which she was not a "qualified individual" under the ADA because she wasn't someone "who, with or without reasonable accommodation" could perform the essential functions of the position she held or desired.

The 11th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, which covers Florida, Georgia, and Alabama, affirmed. In so holding, the 11th Circuit noted a split in the Circuits:

+ The 11th, 6th (Michigan, Ohio, Kentucky, Tennessee), 7th (Wisconsin, Illinois, Indiana), and 9th (Washington, Oregon, Alaska, California, Arizona, Nevada, Idaho, Montana, Hawaii, Guam, Northern Mariana Islands) have said that the ADA's antidiscrimination provision "does not protect people who neither held nor desired a job with the defendant at the time of discrimination."

+ The 2d (Vermont, New York, Connecticut) and 3d (Pennsylvania, New Jersey, Delaware) have found the ADA's definition of "qualified individual" ambiguous and have resolved that ambiguity in favor of extended the statute to reach retirees like the firefighter.

The U.S. Supreme Court took on the case to resolve the Circuits' disagreement.

Rule of Law

Title I of the ADA makes it unlawful for a covered employer to discriminate against a qualified individual on the basis of disability in regard to compensation, among other things.

What the U.S. Supreme Court Said

In a portion of the decision commanding a majority (Justices Gorsuch, Roberts, Thomas, Alito, Kavanaugh, and Barrett), the Court ruled that the 11th, 6th, 7th, and 9th Circuits got it right.

According to the court, the ADA used present-tense verbs to make it unlawful to "discriminate against" someone who "can perform the essential functions of" the job she "holds or desires."

"Those present-tense verbs signal that [the ADA] protects individuals who, with or without reasonable accommodation, are able to do the job they hold or seek at the time they suffer discrimination," the majority wrote. "Conversely, those verbs tend to suggest that the statute does not reach retirees who neither hold nor desire a job at the time of an alleged act of discrimination."

The majority also contrasted the ADA with Title VII, a law that protects "employees" without "any temporal qualifier" per Robinson v. Shell Oil Co., 519 U.S. 337 (1997), and sometimes bars discrimination against former employees as well as current ones.

In contrast, the ADA's requirement that a plaintiff bear the burden of proving that she is a person who can perform the essential functions of her shows that Congress "anticipated the possibility that someone may fall outside the protections of [the ADA] if she can 'no longer do the job.'"

In a portion of the Court's decision that garnered only a plurality of justices (Gorsuch, Alito, Sotomayor, and Kagan), the Court reasoned that the firefighter was not subjected to disability discrimination at the time the city adopted its revised healthcare policy in 2003.

"To the contrary, her complaint suggests that, when the city first issued its policy, she was not disabled and still expected to complete 25 years of service," the Court wrote.

Likewise, when the firefighter's benefits ran out, she had been retired for two years already, and her complaint did not allege anything about the timing or nature of her diagnosis, nor did it state facts related to whether she worked for a period of time with a disability.

Essentially, in this portion of its decision, the plurality signaled to would-be ADA litigants facing a challenge like the firefighter's to connect their disability and an alleged discriminatory act to a timeframe in which they held or sought to hold a job with the employer.

Verdict: The Court affirmed the 11th Circuit's decision dismissing the firefighter's ADA Title I case.

Takeaway

To prevail under the ADA's employment provisions on a disability discrimination claim, an employee must plead and prove that she held or desired a job and could perform its essential functions with or without reasonable accommodation at the time of an employer's alleged act of disability-based discrimination.

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