We Analyzed 3.8 Million Settlement Records: Here's What We Found

Using publicly available data from the National Practitioner Data Bank (NPDB), U.S. Treasury Judgment Fund, NYC Comptroller, and 11 other public sources, we compiled 3,824,813 settlement, claim, and enforcement records — representing $209.0B in tracked payouts and penalties.

A note on scale: record count is dominated by high-volume regulatory penalties (mine-safety citations alone make up roughly three-quarters of records, averaging ~$600 each), while dollar volume is concentrated in medical malpractice and federal payments. We exclude two sources’ dollar figures as unreliable (see methodology). Here are the most significant findings:

• Average medical malpractice payments have risen 114% since 2000 — from $213,801 in 2000 to $457,362 in 2025, even as case volume dropped 40%. Fewer cases are filed, but the ones that settle are worth dramatically more.
• New York City alone has paid out $5.3 billion in municipal claims, more than the next three largest cities combined. The NYPD accounts for $1.9 billion of that total — more than the entire city budgets of most U.S. municipalities spend on settlements.
• Settlement dollars peaked in 2020–2021 at roughly $12.7 billion per year across the sources we track — about three times the early-2000s level (~$4.2 billion in 2000). Federal payments from the Treasury Judgment Fund were a major driver (see our federal payments analysis below).
• Where you live determines what your case is worth. The average medical malpractice payment in Illinois ($403,557) is nearly 3x higher than in California ($140,946). Damage cap laws account for most of this gap — states without caps pay 34% more on average.
• Police misconduct settlements total $3.2 billion across the cities in our dataset. In Philadelphia, wrongful conviction payouts are the single largest settlement category, with individual payments reaching $9.8 million.
• The median settlement is far lower than most people expect. While the average medical malpractice payment is $257,531, the median is just $97,500. For federal claims, the gap is even more extreme: $525,149 average vs. $5,000 median — a 105:1 ratio.

This analysis combines data from 14 publicly available government databases. All data was downloaded directly from official government sources, imported into a normalized SQLite database, and analyzed programmatically. Record counts include every source; dollar totals exclude two sources (DOJ, Phoenix) whose amount fields are unreliable, as noted in the source table above.

Data sources

∗DOJ amounts (text-extracted from press-release headlines) and Phoenix claim values (placeholder/sentinel figures) are unreliable and excluded from all dollar totals; their record counts are still included. This is why the total reflects reliable-amount sources only.

Methodology notes

• NPDB payment amounts are range-coded in the public data file (e.g., $25,001–$50,000). We use the midpoint of each range for all calculations.
• The data includes payments only — cases dismissed without payment are not reported, so the dataset does not represent all claims filed.
• A payment or settlement does not necessarily indicate negligence or wrongdoing. Many cases are settled without any admission of fault.
• Municipal data varies in coverage period and reporting standards. Direct city-to-city comparisons should account for population size, time period, and what types of claims each city reports.
• All dollar amounts are nominal (not inflation-adjusted).