Medical malpractice noneconomic damages caps by state

How much can a patient recover for pain and suffering in a medical malpractice case? The cap on noneconomic damages in 48 states and the District of Columbia: the dollar limit where one is in force, and where there is none, whether that is because no statute was passed, a court struck the cap down, or the state constitution forbids caps. New Jersey and Rhode Island are not covered yet. Seventeen states quote their own legislature or constitution directly — Arizona, California, Colorado, Hawaii, Idaho, Iowa, Maine, Massachusetts, Michigan, Montana, Nebraska, Nevada, North Dakota, Ohio, South Carolina, West Virginia and Wyoming. The rest quote the American Medical Association's 50-state damage-cap chart, which summarises the statutes rather than being them; the chart names the statute or case that settles each state, so those records are waiting to be moved to it. A state appears more than once where its law caps different things separately: wrongful-death awards, catastrophic injuries, emergency care in a trauma centre, a per-provider ceiling under a compensation-fund scheme, or total damages rather than noneconomic damages alone. Several caps climb on a schedule (California to $750,000 over ten years, Colorado's noneconomic cap to $875,000 by 2029 and then biennially for inflation, Nevada's to $750,000 by 2028 and then 2.1% a year, Iowa by 2.1% each January from 2028) or are re-set annually for inflation (Michigan, by the state treasurer against the CPI), so a figure is only as good as the date printed beside it — each record gives the source's own as-of date rather than a present-day amount worked out by arithmetic. Whether a cap is still enforceable is reported only where the cited source itself says so. A cap a court has voided stays printed in the code — Illinois' $500,000 cap is still in the compiled statutes and has been void since LeBron v. Gottlieb in 2010 — so a record resting on a statute page says the cap was enacted and that the source does not address its validity, rather than claiming it is in force. Answers 'medical malpractice damages cap in Ohio', 'does Florida have a cap on pain and suffering', 'California MICRA cap', 'noneconomic damages limit by state'. A reference lookup, not legal advice: per-defendant versus per-occurrence application, catastrophic-injury exceptions and wrongful-death distinctions all change the answer, and the record says so where the source does.

The data

Where this came from

Every record above links the page it was taken from and quotes the sentence that states it. These are the 30 sources this dataset was assembled from.

• legislature.mi.govhttps://www.legislature.mi.gov/Laws/MCL?objectName=mcl-600-1483
• michigan.govhttps://www.michigan.gov/treasury/-/media/Project/Websites/treasury/ORTA/Economic-Reports-Notices/FY-2026/Notice_01302026_NonEconomicLimitation_Signed.pdf
• insurance.mo.govhttps://insurance.mo.gov/industry-limits-and-caps/medical-malpractice-limits
• revisor.mo.govhttps://revisor.mo.gov/main/OneSection.aspx?section=538.210
• sos.mo.govhttps://www.sos.mo.gov/CMSImages/AdRules/moreg/2026/v51n4Feb17/v51n4.pdf
• codes.ohio.govhttps://codes.ohio.gov/ohio-revised-code/section-2323.43
• ama-assn.orghttps://www.ama-assn.org/system/files/mlr-state-laws-chart-I.pdf
• code.wvlegislature.govhttps://code.wvlegislature.gov/55-7B-9c/
• azleg.govhttps://www.azleg.gov/const/2/31.htm
• leginfo.legislature.ca.govhttps://leginfo.legislature.ca.gov/faces/codes_displaySection.xhtml?lawCode=CIV&sectionNum=3333.2
• leg.colorado.govhttps://leg.colorado.gov/sites/default/files/images/olls/crs2024-title-13.pdf
• capitol.hawaii.govhttps://www.capitol.hawaii.gov/hrscurrent/Vol13_Ch0601-0676/HRS0663/HRS_0663-0008_0007.htm
• legislature.idaho.govhttps://legislature.idaho.gov/statutesrules/idstat/Title6/T6CH16/SECT6-1603/
• legis.iowa.govhttps://www.legis.iowa.gov/docs/code/147.136A.pdf
• mgaleg.maryland.govhttps://mgaleg.maryland.gov/mgawebsite/Laws/StatuteText?article=gcj&section=3-2A-09&enactments=false
• malegislature.govhttps://malegislature.gov/Laws/GeneralLaws/PartIII/TitleII/Chapter231/Section60H
• archive.legmt.govhttps://archive.legmt.gov/bills/mca/title_0250/chapter_0090/part_0040/section_0110/0250-0090-0040-0110.html
• leg.state.nv.ushttps://www.leg.state.nv.us/NRS/NRS-041A.html
• nvcourts.govhttps://web.archive.org/web/20260416082815/https://nvcourts.gov/supreme/court_information/limitations_of_noneconomic_damages_against_health_care_providers_nrs_41a.035
• nvcourts.govhttps://nvcourts.gov/supreme/court_information/limitations_of_noneconomic_damages_against_health_care_providers_nrs_41a.035
• osbm.nc.govhttps://www.osbm.nc.gov/facts-figures/economy/liability-limit-noneconomic-damages-medical-malpractice
• ndlegis.govhttps://ndlegis.gov/cencode/t32c42.pdf
• legis.state.pa.ushttps://www.legis.state.pa.us/WU01/LI/LI/CT/HTM/00/00.003.018.000..HTM
• scstatehouse.govhttps://www.scstatehouse.gov/code/t15c032.php
• scstatehouse.govhttps://www.scstatehouse.gov/state_register.php?first=FILE&pdf=1&file=Sr50-2.pdf
• le.utah.govhttps://le.utah.gov/xcode/Title78B/Chapter3/C78B-3-S410_2025050720250507.html
• wyoleg.govhttps://www.wyoleg.gov/statutes/compress/title97.pdf
• nebraskalegislature.govhttps://nebraskalegislature.gov/laws/statutes.php?statute=44-2825
• law.lis.virginia.govhttps://law.lis.virginia.gov/vacode/title8.01/chapter21.1/section8.01-581.15/
• legislature.maine.govhttps://legislature.maine.gov/statutes/18-C/title18-Csec2-807.html

Machine-readable

• data.jsonThe whole dataset — every record with its source URL and source quote.
• Open Knowledge Format bundleOne JSON object per line — every record's frontmatter and quoted span exactly as it is held here, in one fetch.
• data.csvThe same records as one flat table, for a spreadsheet or a dataframe. The last four columns are the source URL, the quoted sentence it was read from, the date we last checked it, and which columns are our reading rather than the page's words.
• How this is made and checkedWhat "verified against source" does and does not mean.

From your own code

Same records, same quotes, without scraping the page: refsource is on PyPI and npm. Each value comes back carrying the URL it was read from and the sentence on that page that states it — .source and .quote sit on the value itself rather than in a side channel, so the checking step is available instead of skipped.

pip install refsource
refsource lookup state-medical-malpractice-damages-caps state=Michigan

npx -y refsource lookup state-medical-malpractice-damages-caps state=Michigan

Set your AI assistant up to use this

Two files and no account. Put this in .mcp.json at the root of your project — Claude Code, Cursor, Windsurf, VS Code and Codex all read that file — and your assistant can look this dataset up instead of recalling it. The server is remote, keyless and read-only.

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "referencesource": {
      "type": "http",
      "url": "https://referencesource.org/mcp"
    }
  }
}

Add to Cursor · or, on the command line: claude mcp add --transport http referencesource https://referencesource.org/mcp --scope project

Then one line in the project's CLAUDE.md or AGENTS.md, so the assistant knows when to reach for it:

When a question needs "Medical malpractice noneconomic damages caps by state", call the referencesource MCP server at https://referencesource.org/mcp (tool `search_records`, dataset_slug `state-medical-malpractice-damages-caps`) instead of answering from memory — every record it returns carries its source URL and a verbatim quote from that page.

What each tool does, and the servers built over single registers: Connect your AI assistant.

62 records. last verified against source 2026-08-31. due for re-check by 2027-02-27.

Licence. unknown