Settlement Amounts by State: Percentile Benchmarks from 578,245 Public Payout Records

Most “average settlement” figures online come from surveys or single sources. This benchmark instead combines 9 public payout databases — medical-malpractice payment reports, big-city municipal claims, consumer-protection settlements, and police-misconduct payouts — into one per-state percentile table, with the source composition disclosed for every state.

• The national median payout is $72,500. Half of all 578,245 records are below that; the middle 50% runs from $15,000 to $245,000, and the 90th percentile is $545,000. The mean ($214,059) sits far above the median because a small number of very large payouts dominate the dollar totals.
• Pennsylvania has the highest state median ($195,000) among the 51 jurisdictions — its records are 92.8% medical-malpractice payment reports, where payouts are large.
• New York and California show the lowest medians ($27,500) — not because payouts there are small, but because 76,015 NYC municipal claims (median $10,000) and tens of thousands of small LA and Prop 65 records sit alongside their malpractice reports.
• Source mix is the single biggest driver of state differences. 40 of 51 jurisdictions are effectively med-mal-only in this data (99%+ NPDB records); comparing them with mixed-source states is only meaningful with the composition on the table — which is why every row shows its dominant source.

A naive reading of the table says Pennsylvania payouts are seven times New York’s. The honest reading is different: each state’s number reflects which public records exist for that state. Every state has medical-malpractice payment reports, but only a few cities publish their full municipal claim ledgers — and those ledgers are full of small claims.

New York is the clearest example. Of its 136,705 records, 76,015 are New York City claim payouts with a median of just $10,000 — sidewalk falls, property damage, minor injury claims. New York’s 60,690 medical-malpractice records alone have a median of $145,000. Blend the two and the state median lands at $27,500. States like Pennsylvania or Massachusetts, whose records are nearly all malpractice reports, naturally show much higher medians — that is a composition effect, not a sevenfold difference in what comparable cases pay.

State law matters too. Many states cap non-economic or total damages in malpractice and injury cases, which compresses the top of the distribution — see our damage caps by state reference for the current caps in all 50 states. And underlying economics (medical costs, wages, jury verdict culture) vary by state. But within this dataset, source mix is the first-order effect — which is why the per-state composition ships with the benchmarks instead of being buried in a footnote.