How WreckPilot estimates what your case is worth

A California crash case value is calculated from your own losses. WreckPilot starts with your medical bills, lost wages and vehicle damage, then adds pain and suffering by multiplying the medical bills by a severity multiplier between 1.5 and 5.5, capped at 3 for whiplash and soft-tissue injuries. That gross figure is reduced by your percentage of fault, because California uses pure comparative negligence, and capped at the at-fault driver's bodily-injury policy limit plus any underinsured-motorist coverage you carry, since an insurer never pays more than the policy. The result is a range, not a number, and the page shows what you would keep after a typical one-third contingency fee. For context we compare it with what insurers actually pay ($1.80 to $2.30 per dollar of medical bills across 7.4 million claims) and with 17,572 public verdicts and settlements. Everything below is the formula in full, with sources.

• Your number comes from your own losses. We start with your medical bills, lost wages and vehicle damage, then add a pain-and-suffering amount using the multiplier approach insurers and attorneys commonly use.
• Then we apply California reality. We reduce for any share of fault, cap at the at-fault driver's insurance limit, and show what you'd keep after a typical attorney fee.
• We check it against insurer data. Every result shows what insurers typically pay for your medical bills (IRC, 7.4M claims) and the national average paid injury claim (III), so you can see where your number sits.
• Public verdicts are context, not a promise. We show how your estimate compares with thousands of reported California outcomes. Reported cases skew large, so they don't set your headline number.
• It's an estimate, not legal advice. Only a lawyer who has reviewed your records can value your claim.

The SetCalc dataset compiles publicly reported personal-injury verdicts and settlements. Each record has a case title, state, county, year, practice area, injury type, result type (verdict or settlement), amount, description and source. Our copy was last refreshed on 2026-09-27 (SetCalc snapshot 2026-08-05). We import exact duplicates once.

Comparable case data: SetCalc (setcalc.com), licensed under CC BY 4.0. We filter and summarize it into percentiles. SetCalc does not endorse WreckPilot. We use only SetCalc's openly licensed data. Their calculator formula is proprietary, and we neither use nor reproduce it.

California outcomes in the dataset

These medians are high. That's the reporting bias explained in section 05, not a typical settlement.

1. 1.Economic damages (“specials”)

   Medical bills + lost wages + vehicle damage, at face value.

2. 2.Insurer-benchmark minimum (since v2.1)

   The low end of your injury range is never below 1.8× your medical bills. That is the lowest yearly average settlement-to-medical ratio in the IRC's study of 7.4 million paid claims. It lifts small claims the multiplier would undervalue and never lowers an estimate.

3. 3.Non-economic damages

   Medical bills × (multiplier − 1). The multiplier starts from your severity (1.5–2.0× for minor up to 4.5–5.5× for severe) and moves with your care: ER visit +0.3 to +0.5, ongoing treatment +0.5 to +0.8, ambulance +0.2 to +0.3, hospital admission +0.5 to +0.8, surgery done +1.0 to +1.5 (recommended +0.4 to +0.7), and your 1–10 pain rating adds up to +0.3 to +0.5. Waiting more than two weeks for first care subtracts 0.5, because insurers treat a gap as a sign of a minor injury. The total is capped at 3× for whiplash and soft-tissue injuries (4× after surgery) and 5× for everything else; earlier versions could stack boosts past 6×. Earlier versions also counted the medical bills twice. Version 2 fixed that.

4. 4.Catastrophic-injury adjustment

   Bill-based formulas undervalue catastrophic injuries whose bills are still accruing. For a brain or spinal injury rated 8+ with at least 30 comparable cases, we move the high end 25% of the way toward the 25th percentile of those cases. This only applies when that percentile is above your formula result. It never moves the low end.

5. 5.Shared fault

   California follows pure comparative negligence (Li v. Yellow Cab Co., 1975). Your recovery is reduced by your percentage of fault, even if that's above 50%. If you pick “not sure”, we assume 0% and say so.

6. 6.Insurance limits

   Injury damages are capped at the at-fault driver's per-person limit plus your own uninsured/underinsured motorist (UIM) coverage, if you know the limit. California's minimum is $30,000 per person / $60,000 per accident / $15,000 property damage for policies issued or renewed since Jan 1, 2025 (CA DMV). If you don't know the limit, we show what the minimum-policy scenario would be.

7. 7.Uninsured drivers (Prop 213)

   If you were driving or own the vehicle and it wasn't insured, California generally bars pain-and-suffering damages and your own UM/UIM claim (Civ. Code § 3333.4). Your estimate then covers only medical bills, lost wages and property damage. Passengers, pedestrians and cyclists aren't affected.

8. 8.What you keep

   We show an after-fee figure assuming a typical 33⅓% contingency fee. Medical liens and case costs vary and aren't deducted.

Deadlines. Most California injury lawsuits must be filed within two years (Code Civ. Proc. § 335.1). Claims against a public entity must first be presented within six months, or 12 months for a minor (Gov. Code § 911.2); that is a separate, earlier clock from the lawsuit deadline, and we show whichever comes first. For someone injured as a minor, the two-year clock generally starts at 18 (CCP § 352), except against a public entity. Exceptions exist (minors, delayed discovery), so treat our countdown as a warning, not a legal calculation.

To keep the estimate grounded, every result is compared against what insurers actually pay:

How we use them. Your results page shows “what insurers typically pay”: 1.8–2.3× your medical bills, adjusted for fault and policy limits. It sits next to your WreckPilot estimate and the national average. The 1.8× ratio is also the minimum for the low end of the range (step 2 above).

Read them carefully. These are averages across millions of claims, including many quick settlements for minor injuries, and III's figure includes claim-handling costs. They are national, not California-specific. The IRC is supported by insurers. On whether hiring a lawyer pays, IRC found represented claimants netted less per dollar of medical bills and waited more than twice as long. A Martindale-Nolo reader survey found the opposite. We show both.

Rear-end crash in Los Angeles, broken wrist: $10,000 in medical bills, $3,000 in lost wages, $5,000 in vehicle damage, severity 5/10, pain 5/10, ER visit, no ongoing treatment, 0% at fault, $100k policy.

At 20% fault, the range becomes $34,000 – $44,400. If the other driver carries only the $30k minimum, the injury portion is capped at $30,000. Add the $5,000 vehicle damage and the realistic figure is about $35,000, whatever the severity.

If the same crash had caused whiplash instead of a fracture, the soft-tissue cap limits the multiplier to 2× – 3×, for a range of $28,000 – $38,000.

The insurer benchmark is lower here because it averages many quick, unrepresented settlements, while this example includes an ER visit, lost wages and a moderate injury. A large gap between the two ranges is normal. It shows the room for negotiation.

Small claim, minimum applied: $4,000 in medical bills, severity 2/10, pain 2/10, no ER. The multiplier alone gives a low end of $6,000. The IRC minimum lifts it to $7,200 (1.8 × $4,000), for a range of $7,200 – $8,400.

For each estimate we find the most specific group of public outcomes with at least 30 cases. We try, in order: California + accident type + injury, then California + accident type, then U.S. + accident type + injury, then U.S. + accident type. We show where your estimate falls in that group.

Public verdict and settlement reports over-represent large, newsworthy results. Most routine claims settle privately with insurers and are never reported. In this dataset, the median California car-accident outcome is about $1 million, far above a typical soft-tissue claim. If we let that data drive the headline number, we'd systematically overpromise. So comparables appear as context, and they affect the estimate only through the capped catastrophic-injury adjustment above.

Confidence (5–95%) measures how much we know, not how strong your case is. It starts at 35 and rises when you give us more:

• Medical bills entered: +10
• ER visit or ongoing treatment: +5
• How soon you got care answered: +5
• Fault answered: +15. Policy limit answered: +15
• At least 30 comparable cases: +10 for California data, +5 for U.S. data
• Evidence uploaded: +3 per file, up to +10

Most settlements are private, which is why public data skews high. So we ask users to report how their case ended, if they want to.

• Opt-in with explicit consent. Nothing is collected automatically. The consent text and its version are stored with each report.
• No identity. No name, email, phone, address, claim number or free-text fields. County, not city or ZIP. Amounts are grouped into bands for public stats.
• Aggregate only. We publish a statistic only when at least 10 accepted reports share a group. Individual reports are never published or sold.
• Screened. Unusual amounts (e.g. above 3× the policy limit, or $1M+) are checked by a person before they count.
• Deletable. Every reporter gets a private deletion link. Deleting removes the report permanently.
• Accuracy loop. If a report is linked to a WreckPilot estimate, we measure how often real outcomes fall inside our range, and publish that hit rate once there are enough reports.

So far: 0 accepted reports. Statistics appear once a group reaches 10.

• Liability disputes, credibility, venue/county differences, or a specific insurer's negotiating behavior.
• Medical liens, health-insurance reimbursement, or case costs.
• Multiple defendants or umbrella policies, which can raise the ceiling. (Your own UIM coverage is included if you tell us about it.)
• Punitive damages, wrongful death, or future-care cost projections.
• Inflation adjustment of historical verdicts in the comparables.

WreckPilot is not a law firm and does not give legal advice. Estimates are educational and not a guarantee of any outcome. Talk to a licensed California attorney about your specific situation.

Every saved estimate records the model version that produced it (currently v2.3), so results stay reproducible after the formula changes. We refresh the SetCalc dataset monthly.

• v2.3: Prop 213 (uninsured owner/operator: economic damages only); filing deadline from the PICAE limitation gate, with minors' tolling and the separate government-claim clock.
• v2.2: medical care moves the multiplier (ambulance, hospital stay, surgery, delayed care); multiplier capped at 3× for soft-tissue injuries (4× after surgery) and 5× otherwise; pain folded into the multiplier; your UIM coverage raises the insurance cap.
• v2.1: insurer-benchmark minimum (1.8× medical bills, IRC); insurer-typical and national-average comparisons (IRC, III/ISO 2024); small-claim note on lawyer representation; community outcome reporting.
• v2.0: removed double-counted medical bills; added shared fault, insurance limits, after-fee amount, deadline, confidence score and SetCalc comparables; replaced the flat $5,000 minimum.
• v1: medical bills × severity multiplier + pain, with a $5,000 minimum.

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