Maine Wrongful Death Settlement Calculator
Estimate a wrongful death settlement under Maine 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 Maine 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.
Maine bars recovery if plaintiff is 50% or more at fault.
14 M.R.S. § 156·Source retrieved 2026-07-27
18-C M.R.S. § 2-807(2)·Last reviewed 2026-07-30
The personal representative or special administrator brings the action, and the recovery, after funeral expenses and costs, goes to the heirs in the shares the intestacy laws set. Damages for loss of comfort, society and companionship may not exceed $1,000,000 adjusted for inflation, and punitive damages may not exceed $500,000. 18-C M.R.S. § 2-807(2) reads: “Every wrongful death action must be brought by and in the name of the personal representative or special administrator of the deceased person, and is distributable, after payment for funeral expenses and the costs of recovery including attorney's fees, directly to the decedent's heirs without becoming part of the probate estate,” and “The amount recovered in every wrongful death action, except as specifically provided in this subsection, is for the exclusive benefit of the deceased's heirs to be distributed to the individuals and in the proportions as provided under the intestacy laws of this State” and “In addition, the jury may give damages not exceeding $1,000,000 adjusted for inflation” and “The jury may also give punitive damages not exceeding $500,000.” We read this statute only, so it is not a complete account of Maine wrongful death law, and how courts have applied it or divided a recovery is not stated here.
18-C M.R.S. § 2-807(2)·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 Maine
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 Maine 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 Maine deadline we hold
A claim can be more than one kind of case, and the clock is different for each. These are the Maine 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.
14 M.R.S. § 752·Source retrieved 2026-07-27
Open the personal injury calculator24 M.R.S. § 2902·Source retrieved 2026-07-27
Open the medical malpractice calculator18-C M.R.S. § 2-807(2)·Last reviewed 2026-07-29
Open the wrongful death calculator39-A M.R.S. § 306·Source retrieved 2026-07-27
Open the workers compensation calculatorMaine 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.
- 10 of the 51 jurisdictions we track apply modified comparative negligence with a 50% bar, and Maine is one of them.
- Its 3 years to file is longer than the 2 years that 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. Maine's is one of the 20 where the personal representative brings it.
- 23 of the 51 jurisdictions limit medical malpractice non-economic damages in our data and Maine 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
Maine calculators
Maine 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.