Texas Injury Settlement Data by County: What the 2026 Numbers Actually Show
By Fernando J. Lopez, Texas Personal Injury Attorney
Short Answer
No Texas state agency collects or publishes personal injury settlement amounts by county. Settlements are private agreements and they are almost never filed with a court. Any site showing county settlement averages for Texas cannot trace those figures to an official dataset. What Texas law does control is verifiable: fault rules, damage caps, insurance minimums, and lien limits.
Table of Contents
Texas Injury Settlement Data by County: What the 2026 Numbers Actually Show 4
What Texas Law Actually Says
Texas follows modified comparative fault with a 51 percent bar under Texas Civil Practice and Remedies Code Section 33.001. At 51 percent responsibility or higher you recover nothing.
Texas caps noneconomic damages in medical malpractice cases at $250,000 against physicians and providers, with a separate $250,000 per facility and a $500,000 facility total, for a $750,000 ceiling under Section 74.301. Those figures have not moved since 2003.
Exemplary damages are capped at the greater of $200,000, or two times economic damages plus noneconomic damages up to $750,000, under Section 41.008.
A Texas hospital lien cannot exceed the lesser of the charges of the hospital for your first 100 days of care or 50 percent of your total recovery, under Texas Property Code Section 55.004.
Texas minimum auto liability limits are $30,000 per injured person, $60,000 per crash, and $25,000 for property damage, under Texas Transportation Code Section 601.072.
Where These Numbers Come From
You came here for a number. I want to be straight with you about what I can prove and what I cannot.
This page is not a study. It is a legal reference with a stated method. Every statutory figure below points to a section of Texas code you can pull up yourself. Every agency figure carries the year it covers and the office that published it. When a number circulates online with no traceable source, I say so and I do not repeat it as fact.
Texas statutes and agency rules come first here, and you will see the section number sitting next to the claim it supports. Published state and federal statistics come next, always carrying the period they cover. Research on the old Texas closed claim files gets used only to describe how payouts are distributed, never as a current dollar figure. Our own case results are labeled as ours and never dressed up as statewide numbers. Figures that float around the internet with no dataset behind them get named as exactly that.
One more distinction before the numbers. A settlement is a private agreement between you and an insurance carrier. A verdict is what a jury awards after trial. These come from different populations of cases and mixing them produces a meaningless number. Over 90 percent of the claims we handle settle without a trial, so verdict databases describe the rare cases, not the typical ones.
Is There an Average Personal Injury Settlement in Texas?
No, and here is why that answer holds up better than a fake number.
Texas does not run a settlement registry. When your claim settles before a lawsuit, nothing gets filed anywhere. When a filed case settles, the court record shows a dismissal or an agreed judgment and the dollar figure normally stays out of the file. Settlement terms are routinely confidential by agreement of the parties.
So where do the published averages come from? Private datasets with different denominators. You will see roughly $23,000 quoted on some sites and roughly $95,000 on others. Both can be internally accurate and still describe completely different groups of people.
Reported figure
Likely population it describes
Why it looks low or high
Around $23,000
All reported auto claims, including minor claims with no attorney and short treatment
Thousands of small claims pull the average down
Around $95,000
Represented claims that went through negotiation or litigation
Small claims are filtered out before the count begins
Six and seven figure “averages”
Marketing pages built from selected results
Losses and small recoveries are left out entirely
That breakdown is our own reading of where those numbers come from. You can confirm the underlying point yourself. The Annual Statistical Report for the Texas Judiciary tracks Texas civil cases in detail and reports no settlement dollars at all.
There is a second problem with averages here. Settlement values are skewed to the right. A handful of catastrophic cases sit far above everything else and one of them drags a mean upward by tens of thousands of dollars. The median tells you far more about a typical case than the mean does, and almost nobody publishing Texas settlement averages tells you which one they used.
Why you will not find per injury dollar tables here
People search for a soft tissue settlement amount in Texas. They search for what a broken bone settles for. They search for back injury settlement value. I get why. When your neck has been hurting for four months and the adjuster has offered you $4,200, you want to know if that is insulting or reasonable.
A table that says soft tissue equals $8,000 to $45,000 answers nothing. It has no severity definition behind it, no case count, and no source. Two people with the same MRI finding can have claims worth wildly different amounts because one had a $60,000 lumbar fusion recommendation and the other finished six weeks of physical therapy and went back to work. If you want a real answer for your own situation, the method matters more than the table, and how insurance companies calculate injury claims explains that method in plain terms.
Texas Injury Settlement Data by County: What the 2026 Numbers Actually Show 5
What Texas Law Caps and What It Does Not
This part is verifiable down to the section number, and it is where the real answers live.
Type of claim
Cap
Statute
Car, truck, premises, and product claims
No general cap on compensatory damages
Texas Civil Practice and Remedies Code Chapter 41 definitions
Medical malpractice noneconomic damages
$250,000 against physicians and health care providers. $250,000 per facility with a $500,000 facility total. $750,000 overall
Section 74.301
Exemplary damages
Greater of $200,000, or two times economic damages plus noneconomic damages up to $750,000. Exceptions apply for listed felony conduct
Section 41.008, including Section 41.008(c)
Claims against the State of Texas
$250,000 per person and $500,000 per occurrence for bodily injury or death. $100,000 per occurrence for property damage
Section 101.023(a)
Claims against a unit of local government, such as a county or a district
$100,000 per person and $300,000 per occurrence for bodily injury or death. $100,000 per occurrence for property damage
Section 101.023(b)
Claims against a Texas municipality
$250,000 per person and $500,000 per occurrence for bodily injury or death. $100,000 per occurrence for property damage
Section 101.023(c)
Those figures come straight from the statute text. Chapter 41 governs exemplary damages, Chapter 74 governs health care liability claims, and Chapter 101 is the Texas Tort Claims Act.
Notice what the first row says. If you were hit by a commercial truck on IH-69 or rear ended on US-83, Texas law does not put a ceiling on your medical bills, your lost wages, or your pain and suffering. That surprises people who have read about tort reform.
The practical ceiling is usually insurance. Texas requires only $30,000 per injured person. If the driver who hit you carried nothing more than that and owns nothing worth pursuing, then the injury you suffered stops mattering to the math at $30,000. This is the single most common reason a serious claim resolves for far less than it is worth, and it is why we look hard for additional coverage. Your own uninsured and underinsured motorist coverage, a commercial policy behind the driver, or a third party who shares fault can each add a layer.
The malpractice numbers deserve one more sentence. Those caps took effect in 2003 and Texas has never indexed them to inflation. The $250,000 that a jury could award for a lifetime of pain in 2003 buys far less in 2026, and the statute has not changed a word.
What Changed in Texas Injury Law in 2025 and 2026
Nothing changed. That is a real answer and almost no page states it plainly.
Senate Bill 30 moved through the 89th Texas Legislature in the 2025 regular session. It would have restricted how medical expenses are presented to juries and how attorneys can argue noneconomic damages. Business groups pushed for it. Trial lawyers fought it. The bill did not pass.
So the rules that governed your claim in 2024 govern it in 2026. Comparative fault, the damage caps above, and the two year filing deadline all stand where they were. If you read a page claiming that new Texas legislation changed what your case is worth this year, check the bill number and check whether it passed.
How the Value of a Texas Injury Claim Gets Calculated
Value gets built from parts. It does not get pulled off a chart.
We start with economic damages. Past medical bills, future medical care that a doctor will actually support, lost wages, and lost earning capacity. All of it carries paper behind it. Bills, records, pay stubs, tax returns, and in the serious cases a life care plan prepared by a professional.
Then come the noneconomic damages. Physical pain, mental anguish, physical impairment, and disfigurement. Texas law gives no formula for any of it. Adjusters run software and internal ranges. Juries use judgment.
Next the carrier tries to put a share of the blame on you, because every percentage point it wins comes off your recovery under Section 33.012. Twenty percent fault on a $100,000 case costs you $20,000. Cross 51 percent and you recover nothing at all. These fights show up constantly in intersection crashes and lane change collisions, and who is at fault in a car accident in Texas covers how those percentages get assigned.
Then we look at coverage, because every number above collapses to the policy limit when the limit is smaller.
“In our experience the biggest gap between what a case is worth and what it pays has nothing to do with the injury. It is available coverage and documentation. We have seen a client with a legitimate six figure injury capped by a minimum limits policy, and we have seen a modest injury pay well because the treatment records were clean and the fault was undisputed.” Fernando J. Lopez, The Lopez Law Group.
Texas Injury Settlement Data by County: What the 2026 Numbers Actually Show 6
From Gross Settlement to Money in Your Pocket
This is the section nobody publishes and every client needs.
The number on the settlement check is not the number that reaches you. Here is an illustrative calculation on a $100,000 gross settlement. These percentages are examples for explanation only and your own case will differ.
Line item
Example amount
Basis
Gross settlement
$100,000
Agreement with the insurance carrier
Attorney contingency fee
$33,000
Percentage set in your written fee agreement
Case expenses
$2,500
Records, filing fees, experts
Hospital lien
$18,000
Capped by Property Code Section 55.004
Health plan or Medicare interest
$6,000
Varies by plan type and federal law
Net to client
$40,500
What actually reaches you
Every figure above is an example for explanation and none of it predicts your outcome. Your fee and expenses come from your own written agreement. The lien ceiling comes from Texas Property Code Section 55.004.
Two things about that lien line. Texas caps hospital liens hard. A hospital can claim the lesser of its charges for your first 100 days of care or 50 percent of everything you recover, and not a dollar more. Many injured people never learn this and pay a lien that was never enforceable at the amount claimed. Reducing liens is a real part of the work, and if bills are piling up while your claim is open, read what happens when you cannot pay medical bills after an accident in Texas.
Health insurance plans, Medicare, and Medicaid operate under different rules than hospital liens do. Those interests are negotiated separately and the rules for a federal ERISA plan are not the rules for a hospital.
On taxes, Texas has no state income tax, so this is a federal question. According to IRS Publication 4345, revised September 2023, and Internal Revenue Code Section 104(a)(2), compensatory damages for personal physical injury or physical sickness are generally excluded from federal gross income. Interest on your settlement is generally taxable. Punitive damages are generally taxable. If you previously deducted medical expenses related to the injury, you have to report that portion as income.
Does County Affect Settlement Value in Texas?
Yes, but not the way the county average tables suggest. Let me separate what is real from what is invented.
Start with what does not exist. No published dataset holds Texas injury settlement amounts by county. The Texas Office of Court Administration puts out an Annual Statistical Report for the Texas Judiciary covering county civil filings, dispositions, and how each case ended. No dollar amounts anywhere in it. The Texas Department of Insurance collected liability closed claim data for years, and those old files, which run to roughly 2005 and lean heavily toward medical malpractice, are the only claim level Texas payout data ever made public. Nothing current has replaced them.
Now the part that is real. Venue changes how a case moves and how hard a carrier fights, and these are the things you can check county by county.
What to look at
Where it comes from
What it tells you
Injury and damage case filings for the latest fiscal year
Texas Office of Court Administration
How busy the docket is
Manner of disposition, reported as jury trial, bench trial, agreed judgment, default judgment, or dismissed by plaintiff
Texas Office of Court Administration
How cases in that court actually end
Share of civil cases disposed within 12 months
Texas Office of Court Administration
How long a carrier can make you wait
Civil clearance rate, meaning dispositions measured against new filings
In the Rio Grande Valley I have tried and settled cases in Hidalgo County and Cameron County for years. Jury pools differ across Texas. Docket speed differs. Local rules differ. A defense carrier evaluating a case set for trial in a county with a fast docket and an active trial bench behaves differently from one facing a four year wait. That is a genuine venue effect and it belongs in your case strategy. It is not the same thing as a published county average, and I will not hand you a fabricated one.
Building real county figures would take case level records tied to a court and cause number, a defined period, zero recovery outcomes counted in the denominator, at least several dozen cases per county, medians reported with a range, and a stated rule for excluding outliers. Our firm can build that from closed files over time. Until it exists and is labeled as law firm reported data rather than a state statistic, nobody should be publishing it.
Workplace Injuries Are Three Different Claims
Search results treat workplace injury settlements as one category. Texas law treats them as three, and the differences change everything about what you can recover.
Texas workers compensation. Benefits follow a statutory formula, not a negotiation. For the benefit year running October 1, 2025 through September 30, 2026, the Texas Department of Insurance Division of Workers Compensation set the state average weekly wage at $1,271.05. The maximum weekly temporary income benefit is $1,271. The maximum weekly impairment and supplemental income benefit is $890. The weekly minimum is $191.
This next part undoes most of what you have read about Texas workers comp settlements. Under the settlement guidance of the Division of Workers Compensation, a settlement may not limit or terminate your right to medical benefits, and it cannot be finalized before you reach maximum medical improvement with a valid impairment rating. There is no lump sum buyout of your future medical care in the Texas system. Anyone quoting you a Texas workers comp settlement range is describing something the law does not allow. If your employer carries coverage, workers compensation in Texas sets out what benefits you can claim.
Non subscriber claims. Texas is unusual. Employers can opt out of the workers compensation system entirely. Based on 2022 estimates published by the Division of Workers Compensation with the Public Policy Research Institute at Texas A&M University, drawn from interviews with 1,619 employers, about 25 percent of Texas private sector employers carried no workers compensation coverage, while about 83 percent of employees worked for employers that did. When your employer is a non subscriber, you can sue for negligence and the employer loses several defenses it would otherwise have. Those claims look nothing like a comp claim.
Third party claims. If a contractor, an equipment manufacturer, or another driver caused your injury on the job, that claim runs alongside your comp benefits and is valued like any other injury case.
Deadlines That Reduce or Erase Value
Deadline
Period
Statute
Most personal injury claims
Two years from the date of injury
Texas Civil Practice and Remedies Code Section 16.003
Claims involving a minor
Limitations generally tolled until age 18
Section 16.001
Claims against a governmental unit
Formal notice within six months, and some city charters require notice much sooner
Section 101.101
Limitations and tolling sit in Chapter 16 of the Civil Practice and Remedies Code. Government claim notice sits in Chapter 101.
Miss the two year deadline and the strength of your case stops mattering. Government claims are worse, because a city charter can cut your notice window to a matter of weeks. If a city bus, a county vehicle, or a public entity is involved, the clock is far shorter than you think. The Texas personal injury statute of limitations has exceptions worth checking against your own facts.
Large Reported Texas Outcomes Are Not Averages
You will find reported Texas industrial and workplace outcomes in the tens of millions of dollars. Those numbers are real in the cases that produced them. They are also catastrophic injuries, multiple defendants, and large commercial insurance towers.
Dropping one of those results into a pool of ordinary claims and calling the output an average is how a $40,000 typical case becomes a $400,000 published average. Any honest dataset reports outliers separately and says so. When you see a single enormous figure sitting next to the word average, the number has been engineered rather than measured.
Terms That Come Up in Settlement Talk
Mean. The arithmetic average. Pulled upward by a few very large cases.
Median. The middle value. A better description of a typical case.
Settlement. A private agreement resolving a claim. Not filed and normally confidential.
Verdict. A jury decision after trial. Texas jury verdict data describes a small and unrepresentative slice of all claims.
Gross recovery. The total settlement before any deduction.
Net recovery. What reaches you after fees, expenses, and liens.
Subrogation. The right of a health plan to be repaid from your recovery.
Lien. A legal claim against your recovery, such as a hospital lien under Property Code Section 55.004.
Maximum medical improvement. The point at which your condition has stabilized. Central to Texas workers compensation timing.
Impairment rating. A percentage assigned by a doctor that drives Texas workers compensation impairment income benefits.
What This Page Does Not Tell You
I would rather say what I do not know than pretend otherwise. You will find no county settlement averages here, because no defensible source exists for them, and no per injury dollar ranges for the same reason. The workers compensation numbers apply to the benefit year ending September 30, 2026 and change every October 1. The statutory figures are current as of the date at the top. And none of it predicts what your claim will pay.
When to Call a Lawyer
Call before you give a recorded statement. Call before you sign a medical authorization for the other carrier. Call before you accept an offer while you are still treating.
You do not need a lawyer for every fender bender. You do need one when the injury is more than a few weeks of soreness, when fault is disputed, when a commercial vehicle or a government entity is involved, or when the offer on the table does not cover the bills you already have. A free case evaluation costs you nothing and takes one phone call to (956) 968-7800.
Frequently Asked Questions
What is the average personal injury settlement in Texas?
There is no verifiable statewide average. No Texas agency collects settlement amounts, because settlements are private agreements that are generally never filed with a court. Figures published online come from different private datasets covering different groups of claims. The legal framework that drives value can be verified. A single statewide number cannot.
Does the county where my case is filed affect what I recover?
Venue affects your case through jury pool, docket speed, trial frequency, and appellate precedent, and those factors change how hard an insurance carrier fights. Venue does not produce published county settlement averages in Texas, because no state agency collects the dollar figures needed to calculate them.
Which injury type settles for the most in Texas?
Value tracks documented economic loss and available insurance rather than the injury label. Catastrophic injuries with permanent impairment carry the largest medical and lost earning components. A catastrophic injury against a $30,000 minimum limits policy with no other coverage still recovers $30,000.
How much of my settlement goes to medical liens?
It varies by case, but Texas caps hospital liens. Under Texas Property Code Section 55.004, a hospital lien cannot exceed the lesser of the charges of the hospital for your first 100 days of care or 50 percent of your total recovery. Health plans, Medicare, and Medicaid assert separate interests under different rules.
Why do published Texas settlement ranges vary so widely?
Different datasets count different claims. A dataset of all reported auto claims including minor ones produces a low average. A dataset of only litigated cases produces a high one. Means are also pulled upward by rare catastrophic results, which is why medians describe typical cases better.
Is a personal injury settlement taxable in Texas?
Texas has no state income tax, so this is a federal question. According to IRS Publication 4345, compensatory damages for personal physical injury or physical sickness are generally excluded from federal gross income. Interest and punitive damages are generally taxable, and previously deducted medical expenses must be reported.
Is there a cap on personal injury settlements in Texas?
There is no general cap on compensatory damages in car, truck, premises, or product cases. Caps apply to medical malpractice noneconomic damages under Section 74.301, to exemplary damages under Section 41.008, and to claims against governmental units under Section 101.023.
What happens if I was partly at fault?
Texas uses modified comparative fault with a 51 percent bar. At 50 percent responsibility or less your recovery is reduced by your percentage of fault. At 51 percent or more you recover nothing. A carrier assigning you fault is often negotiating rather than stating a fact.
What if the driver who hit me only carried minimum insurance?
Texas minimum limits are $30,000 per person, $60,000 per crash, and $25,000 property damage under Transportation Code Section 601.072. When losses exceed those limits, recovery often depends on your own uninsured and underinsured motorist coverage or on another party who shares liability.
Can I settle my Texas workers compensation claim for a lump sum?
Not the way most people expect. A Texas workers compensation settlement cannot limit or terminate your right to medical benefits and cannot be finalized before you reach maximum medical improvement with a valid impairment rating. Income benefits follow a statutory formula rather than a negotiated range.
Did Texas change its injury damages laws in 2025 or 2026?
No. Senate Bill 30 in the 2025 regular session of the 89th Texas Legislature would have restricted how medical expenses and noneconomic damages are presented to juries. It did not pass. Texas damages rules remain as they were before that session.
How much is a back or neck injury claim worth in Texas?
It depends on imaging findings, treatment, whether surgery is recommended, how fault is assigned, and available coverage. Cases with the same diagnosis resolve very differently. Our discussion of the average settlement for car accident back and neck injury walks through what actually moves those numbers.
Sources
Every figure on this page traces to one of these. Check them yourself.
Writers and reporters are welcome to quote this page with credit to Fernando J. Lopez of The Lopez Law Group. Please carry the update date with any figure, since the workers compensation numbers change annually and the statutes can change every session.
Talk to a Texas Injury Attorney
If you want a real answer about your own claim rather than a chart, we will look at your records, your coverage, and your liens and tell you what we see. Our page on how much your personal injury claim is worth walks through the multiplier method that adjusters and claim software use, and any dollar figures shown there are illustrations of that method rather than measured Texas averages. Read it that way, then call (956) 968-7800 for a free case evaluation. We answer 24 hours a day, we work on a contingency fee so you owe nothing unless we recover for you, and hablamos espaรฑol.
The Lopez Law Group, 2611 Texas Boulevard North, Suite 1, Weslaco, TX 78596.
About the Author
Fernando J. Lopez is the founder of The Lopez Law Group and a bilingual Texas personal injury attorney. He earned his J.D. from Texas Southern University Thurgood Marshall School of Law and has been licensed in Texas since November 2, 2007, Bar Card Number 24060186. Over more than 15 years he has handled thousands of injury cases and reports recovering more than $25 million for clients. He practices from Weslaco and serves clients across Texas, including Hidalgo County, Cameron County, Houston, Dallas, Austin, and San Antonio. Clients work directly with Attorney Lopez rather than a case manager.
