California Medical Malpractice Settlement Calculator
Estimate a medical malpractice settlement under California 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 California law does to your claim
Four things in state law shape a malpractice claim: how long you have to file, what must happen before you 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.
Cal. Civ. Proc. Code 340.5 requires filing by the earlier of 1 year after the claimant discovers the injury or 3 years after the injury itself. We publish the 1-year discovery period. A 90-day notice of intent is also required.
Cal. Civ. Proc. Code 340.5·Last reviewed 2026-07-28
California uses pure comparative fault. Recovery is reduced by the claimant's share of fault with no threshold that bars a claim.
Li v. Yellow Cab Co., 13 Cal. 3d 804 (1975)·Source retrieved 2026-07-27
At least 90 days' notice to the provider before the action is commenced; notice served within the last 90 days of the limitations period extends the time to sue by 90 days from service. Cal. Civ. Proc. Code § 364(a), (d) reads: “No action based upon the health care provider’s professional negligence may be commenced unless the defendant has been given at least 90 days’ prior notice of the intention to commence the action.” and “If the notice is served within 90 days of the expiration of the applicable statute of limitations, the time for the commencement of the action shall be extended 90 days from the service of the notice.” We read this section only, so it is not a complete list of what California requires before a suit. Read from the Internet Archive's capture of the official page as it stood on 2026-09-24; an amendment after that date would not show in it.
Cal. Civ. Proc. Code § 364(a), (d)·Last reviewed 2026-10-16
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 California
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 California 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 California deadline we hold
A claim can be more than one kind of case, and the clock is different for each. These are the California 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.
Cal. Civ. Proc. Code § 335.1·Source retrieved 2026-07-27
Open the personal injury calculatorCal. Civ. Proc. Code 340.5 requires filing by the earlier of 1 year after the claimant discovers the injury or 3 years after the injury itself. We publish the 1-year discovery period. A 90-day notice of intent is also required.
Cal. Civ. Proc. Code 340.5·Last reviewed 2026-07-28
Open the medical malpractice calculatorCal. Civ. Proc. Code § 335.1·Source retrieved 2026-07-27
Open the wrongful death calculatorCal. Lab. Code § 5405·Source retrieved 2026-07-27
Open the workers compensation calculatorCal. Civ. Proc. Code § 335.1·Source retrieved 2026-07-27
Open the slip and fall calculatorCal. Civ. Proc. Code § 335.1; Cal. Civ. Code § 3342·Source retrieved 2026-07-27
Open the dog bite calculatorCalifornia 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.
- 11 of the 51 jurisdictions we track apply the pure comparative negligence rule, and California is one of them.
- Its 1 year to file is shorter than the 2 years that 31 jurisdictions use, so there is less time than a reader comparing states might expect. Across the 51 jurisdictions the deadline for this case type runs from 1 year to 4 years.
- We have read the official text of 26 jurisdictions' rules on what must come before a malpractice suit, and 25 of them require something: a notice to the provider, an expert's affidavit, certificate or opinion, or a review panel. California is one of them.
- 23 of the 51 jurisdictions limit medical malpractice non-economic damages in our data, and California is one of them at $470,000, so a large non-economic award can be reduced to it.
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
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Every document behind our state injury law figures, each linked with the date we last read it, is listed on our State Injury Law research sources page.