Riddle & Riddle Injury Lawyers | August 7, 2025 | Personal Injury
Personal injury lawsuits aim to secure payment to cover the damages suffered after an injury. These losses often include financial costs and unearned income. Many cases also involve pain and suffering and other quality-of-life losses. Injury lawyers cite these losses to support the compensation they seek through insurance claims and lawsuits.
Knowing the average personal injury settlement amount can be interesting, but it isn’t very helpful. That’s because the value of a case depends on unique factors, such as the severity of the victim’s injuries. Average personal injury settlement amounts can only give you a starting point for settlement discussions.
Factors that Affect Personal Injury Settlements
As you review your case with your lawyer, you’ll discuss several factors that affect its value. These are typically the most important factors in determining the settlement an injured person may receive:
Injury Severity
The purpose of your case is to compensate you for your costs and losses. You aren’t expected to bear the costs and income losses resulting from injuries stemming from someone else’s actions. Instead, those burdens should fall on the party that caused them.
The amount of compensation you receive will largely depend on how serious your injuries are. More severe injuries will require more expensive medical care and more extensive physical therapy. They could also cause long-term or permanent disabilities that have a bigger impact on your ability to work.
Minor injuries that will heal on their own or with minimal treatment will result in smaller bills for treatment and therapy. Moreover, you might miss less work or no work at all as you recover from minor injuries. The less severe the injury, the less your case may be worth.
Claim Type
The nature of your claim might affect the settlement you can seek in a few ways. First, some types of accidents are less likely to cause serious or life-threatening injuries than others. For example, a slip and fall accident may cause joint, bone, or soft tissue injuries. Although treatment may be expensive, it will likely be effective in helping you regain your health.
Conversely, getting hit while riding your motorcycle could cause head trauma or spinal injuries. Many spinal cord and brain injuries never fully heal, although the brain can rewire itself to recover some functions. In many cases, however, the victim may never regain their full physical and mental abilities. As a result, they would have much more significant losses.
The type of claim will also determine the number of claimants. If a landlord negligently wires an apartment building, many families may have claims when the building burns down. As a result, multiple plaintiffs may compete for the landlord’s limited resources in their premises liability claims.
Worse yet, a product manufacturer might injure millions of customers by releasing a defective product. These cases might spawn hundreds of thousands of claims, with each injured customer fighting for fair injury compensation.
Insurance Coverage
Most injury cases involve insurance. The following liability coverage could pay out in personal injury claims:
- Renters’ and homeowners’ insurance may pay for slip and fall accidents and dog bites
- Auto insurance covers car accidents, truck accidents, pedestrian accidents, and cyclist accidents
- Medical malpractice insurance extends to professional negligence
- Business liability insurance usually pays for business premises liability claims
The claimant’s lawyer will start the case by filing a claim with the at-fault party’s insurer, which will investigate to determine whether the insured party’s acts fall within the scope of the policy. If so, the insurer can offer a settlement up to the policy’s limits.
Under North Carolina law, the minimum policy limit for an auto insurance policy is $50,000 per victim in bodily injury liability. Other policies, like homeowners’ insurance, don’t have mandatory minimum coverage requirements. Your lawyer will need to review the at-fault party’s policy to determine how much the insurance company can pay.
Proof of Liability
Stronger cases often mean better settlement offers. Insurers settle claims to avoid juries that might force them to make larger payouts. When you have strong evidence of the insured party’s negligence, their insurer may offer an attractive payout to ensure the settlement of the case without a trial. However, if your case has less or weaker evidence, the insurer may make a low offer (or none at all) and wait for a judge or jury to decide.
How to Calculate Your Potential Settlement Amount
There’s no reliable resource showing the average personal injury settlement. Law firms that disclose their average outcomes might only publish the ones that make them look good. Insurers, meanwhile, don’t release any such information because lawyers and claimants could use it against them in settlement negotiations.
Even if such information were available, it wouldn’t be very useful. Instead, the evidence your lawyer gathers to assess your damages is far more useful in determining your potential payout.
A settlement could include compensation for:
Economic Damages
Economic damages include all the financial expenses arising from your injuries, such as:
- Past and future bills for medicine, therapy, and treatment
- Out-of-pocket expenses like health insurance copays and over-the-counter medication
- Lost wages because of medical appointments or activity restrictions
- Future diminished earnings from long-term or chronic disabilities
You can estimate your economic damages by reviewing your financial records and adding up all your injury-related costs and losses.
Non-Economic Damages
Non-economic damages describe the ways your injuries affect your life that are difficult to measure financially, such as:
- Pain
- Suffering
- Mental anguish
- Emotional distress
- Diminished quality of life
- Disability
- Dismemberment
- Disfigurement
Since these losses don’t have an inherent price tag, the insurer (or court) must infer their monetary worth based on the severity of your injuries. Your lawyer will use your medical records and personal testimony to establish your non-economic losses.
Settlement Amounts Are Highly Individual
No two personal injury settlements are exactly alike. The amount you might receive depends on the specific facts of your case — including how badly you were hurt, how clearly someone else was at fault, and whether there’s enough insurance coverage to pay for your losses.If you’re trying to understand what your claim might be worth, talk to a personal injury lawyer who can evaluate your case based on real-world experience. An attorney can help you gather evidence, estimate your damages, and negotiate with the insurance company so that you’re not left guessing—or settling for less than you deserve.
Contact a Personal Injury Lawyer from Riddle & Riddle Injury Lawyers for Help Today
For more information, please contact Riddle & Riddle Injury Lawyers to schedule a free consultation with a personal injury lawyer in North Carolina today. We have twelve convenient locations in North Carolina, including Greenville, Raleigh, Goldsboro, Jacksonville, Kinston, Charlotte, Greensboro, Durham, Fayetteville, Wilmington, Winston-Salem & Garner.
Riddle & Riddle Injury Lawyers – Raleigh Office
4600 Marriott Dr STE 500, Raleigh, NC 27612
(919) 876-3020
Riddle & Riddle Injury Lawyers – Durham Office
100 E Parrish St STE 200, Durham, NC 27701
(919) 728-1770
Riddle & Riddle Injury Lawyers – Goldsboro Office
601 N Spence Ave, Goldsboro, NC 27534
(919) 778-9700
Riddle & Riddle Injury Lawyers – Charlotte Office
1914 J N Pease Pl Suite 142, Charlotte, NC 28262
(704) 486-5824
Riddle & Riddle Injury Lawyers – Greenville Office
300 E Arlington Blvd Suite 2A #110, Greenville, NC 27858
(252) 397-8620
Riddle & Riddle Injury Lawyers – Fayetteville Office
2517 Raeford Rd, Fayetteville, NC 28305
(910) 387-9186
Riddle & Riddle Injury Lawyers – Greensboro Office
7B Corporate Center Ct Suite 15, Greensboro, NC 27408
(336) 516-9066
Riddle & Riddle Injury Lawyers – Jacksonville Office
3391 Henderson Dr, Jacksonville, NC 28546
(910) 455-5599
Riddle & Riddle Injury Lawyers – Garner Office
500 Benson Rd Suite 111, Garner, NC 27529
(800) 525-7111
Riddle & Riddle Injury Lawyers – Kinston Office
807 N Queen St, Kinston, NC 28501
(252) 397-8624
Riddle & Riddle Injury Lawyers – Wilmington Office
1608 Queen St Suite 12, Wilmington, NC 28401
(910) 889-4064
Riddle & Riddle Injury Lawyers – Winston-Salem Office
102 W 3rd St, Ste 1007, Winston-Salem, NC 27101
(336) 516-9042