How our settlement estimates are calculated

Step 1: your economic losses

The first number is your economic damages (often called special damages): the documented, checkable losses the injury caused. Past medical bills, projected future treatment, wages you have already lost, and reduced earning capacity if the injury is permanent. On the case types that collect it, property damage is added here too.

Economic damages anchor every claim because they sit on paper: receipts, records, pay stubs, an employer letter. The defense can still argue the injury did not cause them, which is a different question from what the bill says.

Property damage is the one exception to what happens next. It is added to the gross but never multiplied, because pain and suffering does not scale with what happened to a vehicle.

Step 2: the multiplier

General damages cover pain and suffering, emotional distress, loss of enjoyment of life, and loss of consortium. Nothing documents them, so one approach is to multiply the economic damages by a factor reflecting how bad the injury was. That is what we do.

Across every case type, severity, treatment length, injury type and fault level the two calculators can be set to, the multiplier our formula returns runs from 1.0x to 5.0x. That band is our choice. It is not a legal rule, it is not a published benchmark, and no authority fixes either end of it. A different tool using a different band would return a different number from identical facts, which is exactly why we publish ours.

Four things move it, and every one is visible in the calculator: how severe the injury was, how long treatment ran, how clear fault is, and what kind of injury it was. Some case types also set a floor the multiplier cannot fall below when a specific aggravating fact applies, and those floors run from 2.5x to 3.5x. Every calculator page carries a worked table showing the multiplier the engine returned for each row, so you can check the scale against real inputs instead of taking our word for its shape.

This is the softest part of the formula and we would rather say so than dress it up. The multiplier is where an attorney's judgment counts, because an attorney who handles these cases has seen what a specific venue does with a specific injury and we have not.

Step 3: your share of the fault

If you were partly at fault, your recovery drops. How far it drops, and whether it drops to nothing, depends on which of four rules your state follows.

The rule differs by jurisdiction, and we apply yours. In the 11 pure comparative negligence jurisdictions (California, New York and Alaska among them) recovery is reduced in proportion to your share at any percentage: at 40% at fault you recover 60% of the gross. In the 34 modified comparative jurisdictions you recover nothing once your share reaches the local threshold, which is 50% in 10 of them and 51% in 24. Six jurisdictions (North Carolina, Virginia, Maryland, Alabama, District of Columbia and South Dakota) apply contributory negligence, where any share of fault at all can bar recovery outright.

Two of those labels are an approximation, and we flag them rather than hide them. Michigan and South Dakota follow rules our four-value taxonomy cannot express, so those records store the treatment that can only ever understate a recovery, never overstate one, and the calculator says so on screen when you pick either state.

Step 4: fees, costs and liens

Three things come out of a settlement before you see any of it. The attorney fee, the case costs (filing fees, expert witnesses, deposition transcripts, records retrieval), and any medical lien held by an insurer, a health plan, Medicare, Medicaid or a treating provider who was not paid at the time.

Our calculator applies all three at fixed rates rather than asking you for them: a 33.3% contingency fee on the adjusted gross, case costs at 5.5% of that same adjusted gross, and medical liens at 12% of your past medical bills. Those are stand-ins, not your numbers. Your fee comes from the retainer you signed, your costs depend on how far the case goes, and your lien depends on who paid for your treatment. Read this line as the shape of the deduction rather than its size, and bring your own three figures to the consultation.

A lien is the deduction that is easiest to overlook. If someone else paid for your treatment, such as a health insurer or Medicare, they can have a right to be reimbursed out of your settlement, and that right survives the fee. Ask your attorney early what your liens are and whether they can be negotiated down.

Step 5: what actually reaches you

Put the steps together and the net take-home is what is left. This is the number that matters, and it is the one a gross settlement figure hides:

A worked example, run through this calculator

Rather than illustrate that with numbers we chose, here is one of the case rows from our own calculator pages, put through the same engine that produces your estimate. Every figure below is engine output, so if the formula changes, this changes with it:

Step 6: damages caps

Of the 51 jurisdictions in our state-law data, 17 cap non-economic damages in a medical malpractice case, 4 cap the total malpractice recovery instead, and 4 cap non-economic damages in any injury case. Punitive damages carry a statutory limit of some kind in 26. In 16 we found no statutory punitive ceiling at all. For the last 9, our research did not establish one from a primary source, so read Connecticut, Delaware, District of Columbia, Hawaii, Iowa, Kentucky, Louisiana, Maryland and Massachusetts as unknown rather than uncapped. Economic damages, meaning the bills and the lost pay you can document, are not capped anywhere in this data.

When a cap governs your claim type in your state, the calculator applies it to the general damages before totalling the gross, and tells you on screen that it did, naming the ceiling. Caps reach non-economic damages, which is the part of a claim that a serious permanent injury makes large, so a cap can matter more to the outcome than the facts do.

Why we show a range

Settlements are not deterministic. Two claims with identical bills and identical injuries settle for different amounts depending on the adjuster, the venue, the quality of the documentation, and who is negotiating.

So we publish a band rather than one figure: 30% below the point estimate and 40% above it. Those two numbers are a modelling choice, not a measured confidence interval. We have not back-tested them against a settlement database, because we do not have one. They are set wide enough to carry the honest message, which is that the point estimate is an anchor for a conversation rather than a prediction, and your outcome can land outside the band.

Where our state-law figures come from

State-law figures reach this site through one path. A research brief goes to an external deep-research session, the returned report lands in our repository as a dated artefact, and every citation is checked to resolve and to actually support the value it is cited for before the figure is ingested. Primary sources only: state codes, legislatures, judicial branches, state agencies. Law-firm pages and legal directories are not acceptable here, including as corroboration for something we found elsewhere.

Two automated checks hold that in place, and they run on every build rather than on a schedule somebody has to remember. The first re-reads the figures out of the research reports and compares them against what the site publishes, in both directions: an unexplained difference fails the build, and so does an exemption for a difference that no longer exists. The second requires every published figure to be either covered by that comparison or backed by a written source record, and fails on any figure that is neither. What neither check can see is our research going stale, so figures that re-index on a schedule carry their next change date and fail the build once it passes.

Where the research could not establish a figure from a primary source, we publish no number and say so in its place. Across 51 jurisdictions that is currently 17 maximum weekly workers' compensation benefits, 4 filing deadlines, and 11 damages caps where a limit does apply but no single figure can express it. Each of those renders a marker instead of a value, and the calculator applies no ceiling it cannot defend.

What we will not tell you is that every value in our data has been through that process. The figures the calculator applies to your estimate have: filing deadlines, comparative-fault rules, damages caps, and workers' compensation benefit rates and wage bases. Some secondary fields have not. Whether a workers' compensation claim can be settled for a lump sum was read from the statute itself in 46 jurisdictions, and the calculator quotes it; in the other 5, no official copy of the statute could be read, and the calculator says so rather than answering.

Every document our source records were read from is listed on our research sources page, grouped by subject, each linked to the original with the date we last read it. You can also ask us for the source behind any figure you see at /contact. If a figure is wrong, tell us which state and which figure, and we will check it against the source.

What this formula does not capture

No formula captures everything, and the gaps are worth knowing. Ours cannot see which adjuster is assigned or how much authority they hold, your attorney's negotiating skill or their history with that insurer, how well your treatment is documented and how it reads to a stranger, what juries in your county tend to do, a fee agreement that is not a standard contingency, whether ERISA preempts your health plan's subrogation claim, your prior claims history, or whether the defendant is uninsured or carries far too little coverage.

The items above are answered by an attorney who knows your facts, in a consultation, not by a calculator.

This is an estimate, not a prediction. Use it as an informed starting point and not as a substitute for advice from a licensed attorney in your state.