Personal Injury Settlement Calculator

It's an informal rule of thumb some personal injury attorneys use as a rough starting point in settlement discussions — not a formula required by any court, statute, or insurance regulation. Actual settlement values depend heavily on jurisdiction, the specific facts of the case, applicable case law, insurance policy limits, and negotiation, none of which a simple multiplier can capture. Treat this calculator's output as an illustrative estimate only.

This calculator follows the traditional multiplier method's convention of applying the Pain & Suffering Multiplier against Total Medical Bills specifically, on the reasoning that medical bill severity is often used as a rough proxy for how serious an injury was. It does not factor in Lost Wages or Future Lost Earnings when computing Pain & Suffering, even though those figures do count toward Economic Damages and the final Total Damages.

Estimated Settlement is Total Damages multiplied directly by Liability Strength as a percentage, so a weaker liability case (say, 40% instead of 100%) scales the settlement estimate down proportionally, reflecting the real-world pattern that cases with disputed or shared fault typically settle for less than cases with clear-cut liability, regardless of how large the underlying damages are. Liability Strength does not change Total Damages itself — only the final settlement figure.

Low Estimate and High Estimate are a fixed plus-or-minus 30% band around the Estimated Settlement figure, meant to illustrate that settlement negotiations produce a range of outcomes rather than one precise number. This range is not derived from any statistical model of real case outcomes — it's a simple illustrative spread, and actual negotiated settlements can fall well outside it in either direction.

Per Diem Alternative illustrates the other common informal settlement approach: a daily dollar rate (this calculator uses $200/day, the midpoint of the commonly-cited $100-$300/day range) multiplied by Recovery Period (Days) — your own estimate of how many days pass from the injury until maximum medical improvement. It's calculated independently of Medical Bills, Lost Wages, and Liability Strength, so it's meant as a separate point of comparison alongside the multiplier-method Estimated Settlement, not a more-precise version of it — real attorneys sometimes cite both methods when discussing settlement value with a client or opposing counsel.