Damages
The categories of loss Minnesota law recognises, and how the arithmetic is ordered. No page here estimates what any claim is worth.
Nothing on this page is advice about your situation, and no article can be. If you want your own facts looked at, a Minnesota personal injury attorney can do that.
Who pays the bills
No-fault, health plans, liens, and the layers of coverage most people do not know they have.
- Who gets repaid out of your recovery: health plans, hospitals, and subrogation
Several parties have a claim on the money before you see it, and each one operates under a different statute with different limits. Minnesota caps some of them. Federal law removes the cap from others entirely.
Making the claim
Fault, thresholds, damages, and what the adjuster on the other end is actually doing.
- Comparative fault: being partly at fault is not the end of a claim
Minnesota bars a claim only when the claimant's fault is greater than the fault of the person they are suing. That comparison is made defendant by defendant, and the arithmetic runs in an order most people get backwards.
- The tort threshold: when a Minnesota crash claim can include pain and suffering
Minnesota closes off damages for noneconomic detriment in most motor vehicle cases unless one of five statutory gates opens. Four of them have nothing to do with a dollar figure, and the dollar figure is not the sum of the medical bills.
- Minnesota's dog bite statute: the two phrases that decide the case
Minn. Stat. § 347.22 makes a dog's owner liable without any showing of negligence, and the dog's history does not matter. Almost every contested Minnesota dog case turns instead on two phrases written into the statute itself.
- Nursing homes and vulnerable adults: what the statutes give a resident, and what they do not
Minnesota has a health care bill of rights, an assisted living bill of rights, and a Vulnerable Adults Act. Between them they create exactly four express civil damages remedies, and a claim for neglect by a facility is not one of them.
When it goes wrong
Denials, lowball offers, disputed fault, and the deadlines that end a claim quietly.
- Wrongful death in Minnesota: the family does not hold the claim, a court-appointed trustee does
Minnesota's death statute vests the action in a trustee the court appoints, and the Minnesota Supreme Court has called an action started without one a legal nullity. The measure of damages was also rewritten in 2023, and most descriptions of it are out of date.
- A child's injury claim: who holds it, who signs for it, and why a judge has to approve the settlement
Minnesota does not let a parent settle a child's injury claim. A rule of practice requires a written petition and a written order before any part of the proceeds is paid to anyone, and it applies to a claim that was never filed as much as to a case that went to verdict.
Background
The statutes and doctrines the rest of the site refers back to.
- What Minnesota law lets an injured person recover: the categories of damages
Minnesota has no single damages statute. The categories are assembled from the No-Fault Act's definitions, the punitive damages statute and its procedural gate, the interest statute, the death statute, and a body of case law about derivative claims.
- When more than one party is at fault: several liability, reallocation, and the settling defendant
Minnesota made several liability the general rule in 2003 and kept four exceptions. The Minnesota Supreme Court has since held that the rule applies even to a tortfeasor nobody sued, and that the statute's reallocation provision does not reach a severally liable defendant.