Personal Injury Damages Caps by State
A damages cap is a statutory limit on how much can be awarded for a particular category of damages, regardless of what a jury decides. Caps are a legislative policy choice about liability, and they have been among the most contested questions in personal injury law for decades.
Whether one applies to your case changes what any settlement offer is worth, because the insurer on the other side already knows the ceiling. Every figure on this page is read from our state-law data rather than typed into it, so what you see here is the same data the calculator applies to your estimate.
What can and cannot be capped
Non-economic damages are the primary target: pain, suffering, emotional distress, loss of consortium, loss of enjoyment of life. Because these are not tied to a bill or a pay stub, they are the easiest category for a legislature to limit. Medical malpractice is where non-economic caps are most common; ordinary injury claims such as collisions and falls are far less often capped.
Economic damages, meaning documented medical expenses, lost wages, and reduced earning capacity, are essentially never capped on their own. The narrow exception is a handful of jurisdictions that cap TOTAL malpractice recovery, which reaches economic damages too and can be the harshest kind of limit in a case involving a young claimant with decades of future care ahead of them.
Punitive damages, awarded to punish conduct well beyond ordinary negligence, carry their own separate caps in many jurisdictions, usually as a multiple of the compensatory award or as a fixed ceiling.
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.
Medical malpractice non-economic caps
These are the jurisdictions our state-law data records as capping non-economic damages in a medical malpractice case, tightest first. Several of these figures are indexed and rise on a set schedule, which means the amount that applies to a claim is the one in force when the act or omission happened, not the one in force when the case is filed. Confirm the operative figure with an attorney before relying on it.
| State | Non-economic cap | Also capped |
|---|---|---|
| Montana | $250k | punitive damages (lesser of $10,000,000 or 3% of defendant net worth) |
| Texas | $250k | punitive damages (greater of $200,000 or 2x economic damages plus noneconomic damages up to $750,000) |
| West Virginia | $250k | punitive damages (greater of 4x compensatory or $500,000) |
| Ohio | $350k | punitive damages (generally 2x compensatory) |
| California | $470k | Nothing else in our data |
| Missouri | $481k | punitive damages (greater of 5x net judgment or $500,000) |
| Michigan | $500k | Nothing else in our data |
| Mississippi | $500k | non-economic damages in any injury case ($1,000,000); punitive damages (tiered by defendant net worth) |
| North Dakota | $500k | punitive damages (lesser of 2x compensatory or $250,000) |
| Oregon | $500k | Nothing else in our data |
| South Dakota | $500k | Nothing else in our data |
| Colorado | $530k | non-economic damages in any injury case ($1,500,000); punitive damages (1x compensatory; up to 3x compensatory) |
| Idaho | $538k | punitive damages (greater of 3x compensatory or $250,000) |
| North Carolina | $713k | punitive damages (greater of 3x compensatory or $250,000) |
| Tennessee | $750k | non-economic damages in any injury case ($750,000); punitive damages (greater of 2x compensatory or $500,000) |
| Wisconsin | $750k | punitive damages (greater of 2x compensatory or $200,000) |
| Maryland | $920k | non-economic damages in any injury case ($965,000) |
States with no medical malpractice cap
In these jurisdictions our data records no statutory cap on non-economic damages in a malpractice case. The jury has full discretion to award what the evidence supports, subject to the court's power to reduce an award it finds excessive.
Some of these are uncapped because a court struck the cap down rather than because the legislature never passed one. Florida's medical malpractice non-economic cap was held unconstitutional by the Florida Supreme Court in 2017, and Illinois has seen its caps struck down as well. That distinction matters, because a cap struck down in one form can return in another, and the constitutional question travels with the exact structure of the statute.
Wrongful death and the interaction between caps
Some jurisdictions apply a different cap to a wrongful death claim than to an injury claim, and the two can operate alongside each other rather than one replacing the other. Where a jurisdiction caps total recovery in a malpractice case, that ceiling generally reaches a death arising from malpractice as well.
We hold no separate wrongful-death cap field in our state-law data, so this guide states no per-state wrongful-death figure. If a death resulted from alleged negligence, how your state handles the intersection of its wrongful death act and its cap structure is a question to put to an attorney early, because it can determine whether the claim is worth bringing in the form you were planning to bring it.
Punitive damages caps
Punitive damages are awarded to punish egregious, intentional, or reckless conduct and to deter it, not to compensate. They are separate from compensatory damages and are unavailable in most personal injury cases, because they require conduct well beyond ordinary negligence.
The limits below are recorded exactly as our data holds them, because they are not all expressed the same way: some are a multiple of the compensatory award, some are a fixed dollar ceiling, and several are the greater or lesser of both.
How a cap changes your estimate
When a cap applies, our calculator shows both the uncapped figure and the capped one, so the ceiling on your non-economic recovery is visible rather than buried in the result.
The effect is blunt. In the tightest jurisdiction here, a jury award of $1,000,000 for pain and suffering becomes $250,000 by operation of law, and the judge has no discretion about it. The widest cap in the data is $920,000, so which side of a state line a case falls on can be worth more than the facts of it.