Home › Blog › How Is Pain and Suffering Actually Calculated?
Pain and suffering is real, but it has no receipt — so how does anyone put a dollar figure on it? Insurers and attorneys lean on two rough methods. Neither is law; both are starting points for a negotiation.
It is the non-economic side of a claim: physical pain, reduced quality of life, anxiety and emotional distress, sleep loss, and the things you can no longer do. It sits on top of your economic damages — the medical bills, lost wages, and property damage you can prove with paper.
Add up the economic damages, then multiply by a factor that reflects how badly you were hurt — commonly somewhere in the range of about 1.5 for minor, quick-healing injuries up to roughly 5 for severe, permanent ones. A claim with $20,000 in bills and lost wages and a moderate injury might be assigned, say, a 2x multiplier: roughly $40,000 attributed to pain and suffering, on top of the $20,000. The multiplier is argued, not fixed.
Assign a reasonable daily dollar amount to your suffering and multiply by the number of days from the crash until you reach maximum medical improvement. The daily figure is often anchored to something defensible, like your daily earnings. Works best for injuries with a clear recovery window.
Severity and permanence of injury, the length and consistency of treatment, objective findings (imaging, surgery), and how well your daily symptom journal documents real-life impact. Gaps in treatment and pre-existing conditions push it down. Because these methods are negotiation tools, documentation is what gives any number weight.