South Dakota Car Accident Settlement Calculator
Estimate a car accident settlement under South Dakota law. The calculator applies this jurisdiction's own comparative fault rule and damages ceilings, and every figure below is the one our verified data holds, with the statute behind it and the date we checked it.
What South Dakota law does to your claim
Four things decide most of the gap between two identical injuries in two different states: how long you have to file, what happens if you were partly at fault, and whether the state puts a ceiling on what a jury can award. Here is what we hold for this one.
South Dakota weighs whether the claimant's negligence was slight compared with the defendant's gross negligence under SDCL 20-9-2. There is no percentage threshold, so none of our four rule values describes it, and the rule is more restrictive than a 50% or 51% bar. We apply the most restrictive treatment available so the estimate is never overstated, which means it can understate what a claimant with slight fault recovers. A South Dakota attorney can tell you where your case falls.
None on record means our verified data holds no figure of this kind for this state. It is not a finding that no limit could apply to your claim.
What partial fault costs you in South Dakota
The same claim - fracture with surgery, several months of recovery - run through the calculator above four times, with nothing changed but the share of fault assigned to the claimant. The numbers are the engine's output, not an editorial claim about what these cases are worth.
One case, run through the calculator above four times with only the claimant's share of fault changed, under South Dakota law. No coverage ceiling is applied, because we would be inventing the at-fault party's policy. These shares illustrate the rule; they are not an estimate of your own fault.
Every South Dakota deadline we hold
A claim can be more than one kind of case, and the clock is different for each. These are the South Dakota periods in our verified data, with the statute behind each one. A deadline is the outside limit, never a target, and other rules can shorten it.
S.D. Codified Laws § 15-2-14(3)·Source retrieved 2026-07-27
Open the personal injury calculatorS.D. Codified Laws § 15-2-14.1·Source retrieved 2026-07-27
Open the medical malpractice calculatorS.D. Codified Laws § 21-5-3·Source retrieved 2026-07-27
Open the wrongful death calculatorSDCL 62-7-35 generally gives a worker 2 years to petition after a written denial of benefits. Separate notice and claim rules run on their own, much shorter clocks, so report your injury to your employer right away rather than relying on this figure.
S.D. Codified Laws 62-7-35·Last reviewed 2026-07-28
Open the workers compensation calculatorS.D. Codified Laws § 15-2-14(3)·Source retrieved 2026-07-27
Open the slip and fall calculatorS.D. Codified Laws § 15-2-14(3)·Source retrieved 2026-07-27
Open the dog bite calculatorSouth Dakota against the rest of the country
Every count below is read from our state-law data across all 51 jurisdictions, so it moves when the data does. What you will not find here is an average settlement figure: the only one we could compute is a model, and a model presented as a measurement is not a fact.
- 6 of the 51 jurisdictions we track apply the contributory negligence rule, and South Dakota is one of them.
- Its 3 years to file is longer than the 2 years that 25 jurisdictions use. Across the 51 jurisdictions the deadline for this case type runs from 1 year to 6 years.
- 5 of the 51 jurisdictions limit non-economic damages (pain and suffering) in our data and South Dakota is not among them, so an estimate here is not held down by a ceiling we hold.
Comparisons are drawn from the legal levers that actually move a case value, not from closed-case data, which we do not hold. See the full methodology