Why two settlement calculators give you completely different numbers
Published
The common approach multiplies medical bills by a "pain and suffering multiplier". The multiplier is chosen, not derived, which is why two calculators can differ by a factor of three on identical inputs. A defensible estimate has to start from the rules that actually decide the claim.
Put the same facts into three settlement calculators and you will often get three answers that differ by more than they agree. The reason is structural rather than a bug: most of them use the same method, and the method has a free parameter.
That method is the damages multiplier. Total the medical bills, add lost wages, then multiply the medical portion by somewhere between 1.5 and 5 to account for pain and suffering. The output is entirely determined by which multiplier the calculator picked, and nothing in the method tells you which one is right. A calculator using 4 will produce roughly two and a half times the figure of one using 1.5, from identical inputs.
The multiplier is also doing work it cannot do. It is standing in for injury severity, treatment duration, permanence, the claimant’s own share of fault, the at-fault party’s available coverage, and the state’s own statutory limits. Compressing all of that into one number between 1.5 and 5 discards the parts that most often decide the outcome.
Two of those parts are not adjustments at all, they are thresholds. In a state with modified comparative negligence, a claimant over the fault bar recovers nothing regardless of their bills. In a state with a statutory cap on non-economic damages in malpractice claims, the cap applies no matter what a multiplier suggests. A multiplier-based calculator cannot represent either, because a multiplier can only scale a number, not zero it or ceiling it.
Our approach starts from the case type and documented injury to establish a base band, raises the floor to the claimant’s own documented economic losses, and then applies the specific rules of their state: the comparative fault rule and its bar, no-fault and PIP where applicable, and any statutory cap by its explicit scope. Every adjustment is reported as a named factor, so the number comes with its reasoning.
None of that makes it a prediction. We hold no settlement dataset, and we say so on the methodology page. It is an estimate derived from published rules and the claimant’s own figures, which is a different and more defensible claim than a number produced by a multiplier nobody chose on the record.
This is general information about how injury claims work, not legal advice about your situation. CaseValuation.com is not a law firm.