Updated July 2, 2026
How much is a claim worth by injury type?
There is no verified public dataset of real settlement amounts by injury type, because most personal injury claims settle privately and are never reported anywhere; what changes by injury type is the multiplier band applied to your own medical bills, not a fixed dollar bracket. A minor soft-tissue injury typically uses a 1.5x-to-2x multiplier, a moderate injury like a fracture or herniated disc uses roughly 2x-to-3x, a serious injury with a long recovery uses 3x-to-4x, and a severe or permanent injury can reach the site's 5x ceiling. Two people with the identical diagnosis can have very different medical bills, so the same injury type can produce very different dollar totals.
Multiplier band by injury category
| Injury type | Typical multiplier band | What moves it within the band |
|---|---|---|
| Soft tissue (bruising, mild whiplash) | 1.5x to 2x | Treatment duration, clear liability |
| Whiplash with ongoing symptoms | 2x to 2.5x | Imaging, specialist visits, time off work |
| Broken bone (fracture) | 2x to 3.5x | Surgical hardware, complexity, recovery time |
| Herniated disc | 2.5x to 4x | Surgery vs. conservative care, permanent symptoms |
| Knee injury (ligament tear, surgery) | 3x to 4.5x | Surgery, ongoing limitations, age |
| Traumatic brain injury (TBI) | 4x to 5x | Cognitive impact, lost earning capacity |
| Spinal cord injury | 5x (site ceiling) | Permanent disability, lifetime care costs |
These bands describe how the multiplier method typically scales with severity; they are this site's own modeling convention, documented in full on the 2026 Injury Claim Calculation Reference, not a claim about what any specific court or insurer will pay.
Worked example
Take a herniated disc with $22,000 in medical bills and a 3x multiplier: pain and suffering is $22,000 × 3 = $66,000. Add $8,000 in lost wages and the pre-fee total is $96,000. The same diagnosis with $9,000 in medical bills, because treatment was shorter, produces a much smaller number even at the same multiplier. The injury label does not set the dollar figure; your documented bills do.
Why we do not publish "average settlement" dollar figures
Settlement values that circulate online as injury-type averages are almost always drawn from a single law firm's closed cases, a marketing survey, or an undated blog post, and we could not verify any of them against a named, dated primary source this session. No government agency publishes a comprehensive national dataset of actual personal injury settlements, because the great majority settle out of court under confidential terms. Rather than repeat an unsourced figure, this page shows the one thing that is verifiable without qualification: exactly how this site's own multiplier method treats each injury type.
The role of insurance limits
Policy limits cap most settlements in practice, regardless of what a multiplier produces. A claimant with a well-documented $200,000 claim against a driver carrying a $50,000 bodily injury limit will often recover $50,000, not $200,000, unless the driver has pursuable personal assets or the claimant holds underinsured motorist coverage. Knowing what coverage exists is as important as knowing the formula; the Insurance Information Institute has a plain-English rundown of how bodily-injury limits work state by state.
How to get your own estimate
The injury claim calculator takes your medical bills, lost wages, and injury severity and runs this site's disclosed formula live in your browser. The output is an educational estimate, not a prediction. For an assessment tied to your actual facts, talk to a licensed personal injury attorney; most offer a free initial conversation.
Estimate your claim value
Total your medical costs, missed income, and a pain and suffering figure in about sixty seconds.