What Compensation Is Available in a Wrongful Death Claim?

*Collaborative Post

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention counted 197,449 unintentional injury deaths in 2024, the third leading cause of death in the country behind heart disease and cancer. Only a fraction of those ever become civil cases. 

Many people find it frustrating when someone else’s carelessness or intentional misbehavior causes a loved one’s death. This situation can lead to financial strains and various issues.

What can you be compensated for in a wrongful death claim? In some jurisdictions, laws may require that you prove certain elements before a court awards relief for wrongful death. Some states may permit the recovery of certain losses but may exclude the recovery of anything that is not itemized in very precise terms.

Let’s look at what compensation may be available in a wrongful death claim and which factors can affect the amount a surviving family may recover. 

Two claims, filed together

The survival action carries what the decedent lost between the injury and the death. This claim includes medical bills, lost wages, and physical pain. In many states, the fear of impending death is covered too. It belongs to the estate because it is the injured person’s own claim, continuing past the point where they could bring it themselves.

The wrongful death action carries what the death did to the people left behind. This claim concerns the income the household loses going forward, not the wages already lost before death. It also recovers damages for lost services, lost companionship, and lost guidance.

How these two claims are handled varies by state. Some run them as two separate lawsuits. Others, like North Carolina, fold both into a single statute.

The losses that happened before the death

The recoverable losses are dependent upon the duration of time in which death occurred. A person who died suddenly from an accident will produce very little in this category. One who had three years of medical attention before death will produce a lot.

North Carolina folds those losses into the wrongful death action rather than splitting them off. Its statute lists expenses for care, treatment, and hospitalization incident to the fatal injury. The state also includes compensation for the decedent’s pain and suffering and reasonable funeral expenses. The present monetary value of the decedent to the people is also recoverable. Punitive damages may be awarded if the conduct was malicious or wanton.

The end result is that the damage calculation of the case depends more on the medical calendar than on anything else that the jury learns from the family’s testimony.

Economic damages get calculated rather than argued

In most cases, lost earnings account for the majority of the total. An economist takes the decedent’s earnings history, projects it across a worklife expectancy, subtracts personal consumption, and discounts to present value. Funeral and burial costs are factored in. So do the medical bills from the final illness or injury.

Household services are counted too, and they are constantly overlooked. All household services have replacement costs. Even a stay-at-home parent who never worked outside of the house will generate an economic value.

According to a New Haven wrongful death lawyer, insurance caps or the responsible party’s limited means can limit claims.

The non-economic side, and whose it is

The aspect of non-economic damages is where most states differ and where families are most often blindsided.

Most states compensate survivors directly for grief, lost companionship, and lost parental guidance. Connecticut does not work that way. Its wrongful death statute lets the executor or administrator recover just damages together with medical, hospital, nursing, and funeral costs, and courts have read those damages as the losses of the decedent and the estate. 

A surviving spouse’s loss of consortium runs as an independent claim alongside the estate’s, not inside it. The filing window is two years from the date of death, with an outer limit of five years from the act or omission.

The deadlines quietly set the ceiling

Wrongful death filing windows run shorter than ordinary injury deadlines in several states. The clock often starts before anyone has standing to file a claim. The filing of a wrongful death claim warrants the need for an executor or administrator to be appointed. Probate proceedings will be initiated as needed. Only then does the person entitled to bring the claim exist at all. Families who wait for the criminal case to resolve or for a medical examiner’s report lose months they needed.

So what compensation is available depends on three things that have nothing to do with how much anyone is grieving. Which state’s statute applies? How long the person lived after the injury. Whether anyone opened the estate in time. None of that is what a family expects to hear following the death of a loved one, but it decides what gets settled.

*This is a collaborative post. For further information please refer to my disclosure page.