You've seen the figures — "$23,900," "$37,248" — stated with total confidence and no source you can open. Here's what actually exists, why an average would mislead you even if it were real, and the arithmetic to use instead.
Reviewed August 24, 2026 · verification policy · changelogSettlements are confidential contracts. No court files them, no agency collects them, and carriers treat their claim data as competitive property. What leaks into public view is the unrepresentative sliver — verdicts, appeals, and government payouts, which our sourced examples page shows skew enormously large. Anyone quoting a precise national average is citing a paywalled decades-old survey at best, and usually citing nothing.
Injury payouts are among the most skewed distributions in finance. Watch what one big case does to an "average":
| Nine routine claims (illustration) | 9 × $12,000 | $108,000 |
| One catastrophic claim (illustration) | 1 × $2,000,000 | $2,000,000 |
| The 'average' of all ten | $2,108,000 ÷ 10 | $210,800 |
| What 9 of 10 claimants actually got | the median | $12,000 |
In a skewed distribution the mean describes almost nobody. Any site selling you an "average" is handing you a number dominated by catastrophic cases that don't resemble yours — in either direction.
A resolved sprain and a spinal fusion aren't the same claim at any price. Your number is a function of your documented damages, your severity band, and your state's fault rule — variables an average, by definition, throws away.
The framework both sides of the table already use: (medical bills + lost wages) × a severity multiplier of 1.5–5×, plus property damage, minus your fault share. It's computed from your claim, every line of it is checkable, and it's what an "average" was always pretending to approximate. Run it in the calculator — and when an offer arrives, grade it against your band, not against a stranger's statistic.
No publicly verifiable average exists — settlements are confidential, no agency collects them, and the numbers circulating on law-firm sites trace to paywalled decades-old surveys or to nothing at all. More importantly, an average would mislead even if it existed: settlement distributions are extremely skewed, so a handful of catastrophic cases drags the mean far above what a typical claim resolves for. Estimate your claim from its own inputs instead — the multiplier math on this site.
Because the query is popular and a confident number converts visitors into leads. Notice that the figures disagree with each other, rarely cite a source you can open, and never explain their distribution. A number nobody can verify isn't information — it's bait.
For a resolved soft-tissue claim, the honest frame is the band, not a point: roughly 1.5–2× your medical specials plus lost wages, minus your fault share. With $4,000 in treatment and $800 in lost wages that's about $8,000–$10,400 gross before fault adjustments — computed from your inputs, which is the only 'typical' that means anything.
Fragments: insurer-industry studies exist but are proprietary or paywalled and dated; jury-verdict reporters cover verdicts (not settlements) and skew large — see our sourced examples page for what the public record actually contains. When we can't verify a dataset to a primary source, we don't quote it — that's our editorial policy.