Personal Injury Calculator: How Much Compensation Could You Be Entitled To In Texas?

How to Use Our Personal Injury Settlement Calculator

To use our personal injury calculator, you’ll need to gather some information to help us work out how much compensation you could be entitled to.

This includes:

• Your medical bills: If your personal injury claim is successful, your settlement should cover any medical bills you’ve had to pay — or will have to pay — for treatment needed after your injury. Don’t forget to also include transportation expenses to and from the hospital.
• Your loss of earnings: This can usually be calculated by multiplying your hourly rate by the total number of hours you’ve been unable to work as a result of your injury. If you are given a salary, divide your annual earnings by 365 to work out your daily rate.
• Your future medical expenses and anticipated loss of earnings: This is getting into speculative territory, but you are entitled to compensation to cover your future expected medical expenses and time off work. If your doctor has told you that you will need additional treatment and recovery time, such as surgery or rehabilitation, you can recover the cost and future lost income as part of your claim.

Enter your medical expenses, lost earnings, and expected costs into the calculator to find out how much your claim could be worth. 

This will feed back your total economic damages. These are the verifiable monetary losses you’ve experienced due to your injury.

But economic damages aren’t all you’re entitled to when you successfully file a personal injury claim.

You may also be entitled to non-economic damages, which is compensation for subjective, non-monetary losses such as pain and suffering, emotional turmoil, and loss of enjoyment.

These damages are calculated by applying a multiplier to your total economic damages. Insurance adjusters will determine this multiplier on a case-by-case basis, and it will depend on the severity of your injuries and their impact on your life.

In short, the more your injury has affected your quality of life, the more you could be entitled to non-economic damages.

This multiplier typically ranges from one to five. If your injury has healed and left you with no long-term pain or any further complications, you can typically expect a multiplier of 1.5. However, several factors can increase this multiplier, such as:

• Having a traumatic brain injury
• Being left with a physical disfigurement or permanent scarring
• Facing paralysis or a life-long disability as a result of your injury
• Sustaining an injury that has made you dependent on others to perform daily tasks.

When you use our calculator, you’ll be asked whether these scenarios apply to you. If they do, your total settlement amount (your economic damages multiplied by any number between 1.5 and 5, based on your selection) will automatically update.

Using Our Personal Injury Claims Calculator for Your Car Accident Settlement

You can use our personal injury settlement calculator for all types of personal injury claims in Texas. This includes calculating car accident settlements, truck accident settlements, or other types of auto accident settlements.

The process is exactly the same. If you’re looking for a car accident settlement estimate, you’ll first need to add up the cost of your medical bills and lost wages.

Then, you’ll notice there is a dedicated question for calculating an auto accident settlement, asking what costs you’ve incurred for property damage. A quote from a repair shop will typically suffice.

Let’s illustrate this with an example. If a driver has crashed into the back of your car and you need a new rear bumper, and your repair shop quotes $500, that’s the figure you should add in that field. Don’t forget you can also recover additional costs, such as labor. If your car is totaled, you can recover the pre-crash market value of your car.

However, there is something you need to look out for when calculating your car accident settlement.

Texas, like many other states, has a total loss statute, which is designed to protect individuals who purchase used vehicles by declaring that the vehicle has previously sustained severe damage.

The Texas Transportation Code allows a vehicle to be declared as a “salvage motor vehicle” when the “cost of repairs… exceeds the actual cash value of the motor vehicle immediately before the damage”. This might sound fair, but insurers may declare a car a total loss even if it can be repaired, simply because the cost of doing so exceeds the value.

Let’s say you have an older car that is otherwise in good condition. Standard market rates put the car at around $5,000, but then, you’re in a car accident. Most of the damage is cosmetic, and once repaired, the car will still be drivable. The only problem? Repairs will cost around $7,000. Because the cost of repairs exceeds the value, your car is deemed a “total loss”.

Sadly, this happens all the time — the insurer takes possession of your car and nets a tidy profit for selling it, and then it can be sold for even more once fully repaired. If this applies to you, you may want to be conservative when using our car accident settlement calculator and input the market value of your car, but you very well may be entitled to more. Our personal injury lawyers in McAllen and San Antonio are skilled negotiators who will seek independent valuations and fight to get you the maximum possible settlement.

Once you’ve calculated your economic damages (property damage, lost wages, and medical bills), simply answer the final question and tick any options that apply to you to calculate your multiplier, which will determine your non-economic damages and the total estimated car accident settlement you might receive.