Iowa Wrongful Death Settlement Calculator
Estimate a wrongful death settlement under Iowa 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 Iowa law does to your claim
Four things in state law shape a wrongful death claim: how long you have to file, who the state's wrongful death statute says brings the action, the state's comparative fault rule, and whether the state puts a ceiling on what a jury can award. Here is what we hold for this one.
Iowa bars recovery if plaintiff is 51% or more at fault.
Iowa Code § 668.3(1)·Source retrieved 2026-07-27
Iowa does limit non-economic damages in a medical malpractice case, so this is not a state without a cap. The limit turns on which defendants are in the case, and the statute carries its own definitions, aggregation rules and exceptions that our research did not establish in full. Rather than pick one of the two figures and present it as yours, we publish none. Ask an Iowa attorney which limit applies to your claim.
Wrongful death damages are disposed of as property of the estate, except that damages for loss of the services and support of a spouse, parent or child are divided by the court among the surviving spouse, children and parents. Iowa Code § 633.336 reads: “When a wrongful act produces death, damages recovered as a result of the wrongful act shall be disposed of as personal property belonging to the estate of the deceased; however, if the damages include damages for loss of services and support of a deceased spouse, parent, or child, the damages shall be apportioned by the court among the surviving spouse, children, and parents of the decedent in a manner as the court may deem equitable consistent with the loss of services and support sustained by the surviving spouse, children, and parents respectively.” We read this statute only, so it is not a complete account of Iowa wrongful death law, and how courts have applied it or divided a recovery is not stated here.
Iowa Code § 633.336·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 Iowa
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 Iowa 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 Iowa deadline we hold
A claim can be more than one kind of case, and the clock is different for each. These are the Iowa 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.
Iowa Code § 614.1(2)·Source retrieved 2026-07-27
Open the personal injury calculatorIowa Code § 614.1(9)·Source retrieved 2026-07-27
Open the medical malpractice calculatorIowa Code § 614.1(2)·Source retrieved 2026-07-27
Open the wrongful death calculatorIowa Code § 85.26·Source retrieved 2026-07-27
Open the workers compensation calculatorIowa Code § 614.1(2)·Source retrieved 2026-07-27
Open the slip and fall calculatorIowa 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.
- 24 of the 51 jurisdictions we track apply modified comparative negligence with a 51% bar, and Iowa is one of them.
- Its 2 years to file is the same as the most common deadline in the country, which 32 jurisdictions use. Across the 51 jurisdictions the deadline for this case type runs from 1 year to 3 years.
- We have read the official text of 37 jurisdictions' wrongful death statutes. In 20 the personal representative brings the action, in 7 family members or the personal representative may, and the other 10 name a family member, a trustee or a representative, or name who benefits rather than who sues. Iowa's is one of the other 10.
- 23 of the 51 jurisdictions limit medical malpractice non-economic damages in our data. Iowa is one of them and we publish no figure for its limit, so nothing on this page reduces an estimate to one.
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
Iowa calculators
Iowa Wrongful Death questions
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.