Medical malpractice · United States · state-level data
Where malpractice dollars are paid, how large the average award is, and how each state's damage-cap law reshapes the picture. Hover or tap any state.
Total payouts and report counts mostly track population — New York, Florida, and California lead because they are large, which tells you little. The revealing layer is average payment per report next to cap law. States that cap non-economic (“pain and suffering”) damages tend to sit lower on average award; states where caps were struck down or never existed sit higher. Indiana — long the most heavily cap-structured state — posts the lowest average in the country ($0.21M), while several no-cap and high-cap states cluster near the top. The map lets you see that relationship rather than assert it.
It is not a clean law of nature — North Dakota's tiny caseload produces a volatile average, and case mix (a few catastrophic birth-injury cases) can lift a small state — but the pattern is visible, and it is the honest version of the story.
A fair objection to everything above: where are the nuclear verdicts? They are not here, and the reason is not that they did not happen — it is that NPDB is structurally incapable of recording most of them.
Utah is the cleanest demonstration. On this map Utah looks unremarkable and cheap: 66 payment reports, $22.89M paid all year, a $0.35M average, a $450,000 cap. In August 2025 a Utah court entered a $951 million judgment against Steward Health Care over a 2019 birth injury — the largest medical malpractice award in the state's history, roughly 41× Utah's entire reported annual payments. It appears nowhere in the data above, for both reasons at once: it is a judgment rather than a payment, the defendant is a health system rather than a named practitioner, and Steward is in bankruptcy owing billions, so counsel are hoping to recover the punitive portion alone.
Below are documented $10M+ medical malpractice awards from 2025 and early 2026. The thirteen from 2025 alone total $1.29B — against $4.56B in all NPDB practitioner payments nationwide that same year — and this is a sample, not a census. TransRe counted 57 medical malpractice verdicts of $10M or more in 2023 alone, and the average of the top fifty rose from $32M in 2022 to $48M in 2023 to $56M in 2024. Philadelphia and Pennsylvania have ranked first on ATRA’s Judicial Hellholes list, and produce more $10M+ verdicts than any table this size can hold.
The Pennsylvania entry is worth reading closely, because it cuts against the usual framing of these awards. $106.1M of that $108.6M verdict is future medical care — a life-care plan for a child with a 68-year life expectancy — not pain and suffering, and not punitive damages. Large is not the same as arbitrary, and the composition of an award tells you which one you are looking at.
| State | Award | When | Case | Defendant |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| UT | $951M | Aug 2025 | Birth injury; two nurses still in orientation, on-call physician asleep. Default judgment after Steward's counsel withdrew. | health system |
| PA | $108.6M | Mar 2026 | Birth injury after forceps delivery; brain damage. $106.1M of the total is future medical care over a 68-year life expectancy. Defendant is appealing. | health system |
| GA | $70M | Apr 2025 | Medication overdose and sepsis mismanagement; bilateral amputations. | practitioner |
| NY | $60M | May 2025 | Improper epidural steroid injection; spinal cord infarction and paralysis. | practitioner |
| FL | $45M | Apr 2025 | Cardiac patient admitted without urgent cath capability, then transferred with delay; died on arrival. | health system |
| WI | $29M | Mar 2025 | Nurse midwife did not act on fetal heart-rate decelerations; cerebral palsy. | practitioner |
| GA | $25M | Mar 2025 | Preeclampsia mismanaged and patient improperly discharged; unborn child died. | practitioner |
| OR | $20.6M | Mar 2025 | Unsterilized implants caused infection; ended a professional athletic career. | practitioner |
| MA | $17M | Jan 2025 | Bowel perforation not identified after elective hernia surgery; patient died. | practitioner |
| NM | $16.75M | Jan 2025 | 13-inch metal retractor left in the abdomen for 58 days. | health system |
| SC | $16M | Mar 2025 | C-section delayed despite fetal distress; newborn died. | both |
| GA | $15.5M | Apr 2025 | Teleradiologist misread a CT; quadriplegia, then death. | practitioner |
| GA | $13.75M | Feb 2025 | Excessive anesthesia dose; respiratory failure not recognized. | both |
| WI | $10.2M | Feb 2025 | Excessive Pitocin during labor; brain damage. | practitioner |
Awards as returned by the court, before remittitur, appeal, caps or settlement — several will be reduced substantially, and some will never be collected. That is precisely the point: the verdict number and the payment number are different quantities, and only the second one is mapped above. States carrying one of these awards are marked with a on the map; select the state to read them.