Wrongful Death Settlement Calculator

The Wrongful Death Settlement Calculator estimates the full economic and non-economic damages recoverable when a person dies as a result of another party's negligence, recklessness, or intentional misconduct. Wrongful death claims are brought by the deceased's estate or surviving family members — typically a spouse, children, or dependent parents — to recover the financial and emotional losses caused by the premature death.

Wrongful death litigation is among the most emotionally complex and financially significant areas of personal injury law. The stakes are enormous: juries and insurers must translate an irreplaceable human life into a dollar figure that can never fully compensate a grieving family. Yet the law requires this difficult calculation to provide survivors with the financial support they have lost and to deter negligent conduct by defendants.

The largest component of most wrongful death claims is the loss of financial support — the present value of the income the decedent would have earned and contributed to the household over the remainder of their working life. This calculation begins with the decedent's actual or projected annual earnings, subtracts personal consumption (what they would have spent on themselves), and discounts the resulting net support stream to present value using a reasonable discount rate reflecting conservative investment returns.

Work-life expectancy — how many additional years the decedent would have worked — is typically established through actuarial tables and expert testimony considering the decedent's age, health, education, and career trajectory. An economist serving as expert witness will calculate the present value of future lost earnings and also account for projected wage growth, fringe benefits, household services, and the replacement cost of services the decedent provided to the family, such as childcare, home maintenance, and tutoring.

Loss of consortium compensates surviving spouses and children for the loss of companionship, guidance, love, protection, and parental care that the death has caused. Courts across the country have recognized that these intangible losses — a child growing up without a parent's guidance, a spouse losing their life partner — are real and compensable even if impossible to measure precisely. Loss of consortium awards vary enormously by jurisdiction and jury composition.

Additional economic damages include pre-death medical expenses incurred between the negligent act and the death, funeral and burial costs, and the value of household services the decedent provided. In some states, the pain, suffering, and emotional distress experienced by the decedent in the period between injury and death (survival action damages) may be recovered separately by the estate.

This calculator provides an evidence-based estimate by computing the present value of lost support using the present-value annuity formula, then adding consortium, funeral costs, and pre-death medical expenses. Use these figures as a starting point for settlement negotiations, litigation strategy, and client counseling.