Every substantive change to this site's content, formulas, or legal data gets an entry here, what changed, and when. Laws and rates change; a site that quotes them should show its maintenance in public.
New: impairment rating payout calculator, twenty states, one rating
The question people actually type is "I have a 15% impairment rating, what does that pay", and the honest answer is that it depends on which state signed the paperwork. The new calculator at /impairment-rating-payout-calculator/ runs a whole-person rating through each state's own statutory route: weeks per rating point in most states, a tiered weeks scale in Florida, the §4658(e) table in California, dollars per degree in Indiana, a percentage of a fixed dollar baseline in Washington, and rating × age factor × 400 weeks in Colorado.
Four of the twenty states pay nothing on a rating by itself, and the page says so rather than inventing a number. Pennsylvania uses the rating to move you between total and partial disability under Act 111, New York pays non-schedule cases on lost wage-earning capacity, Michigan has no permanent partial rating schedule at all, and Arizona compensates unscheduled injuries on lost earning capacity. Feeding a rating into a weeks formula in any of those four produces a figure with no basis in the statute.
The comparison table on the page is generated by the same engine the calculator runs, so the two cannot drift apart. Priced at each state's own maximum weekly rate, a 15% rating produces awards from $167,775 in Iowa down to $12,810 in Ohio across the states that do pay on a rating, a 13.1-fold spread.
Two conversions that change the answer before any formula runs are now documented with their sources. California's Division of Workers' Compensation states the upper-extremity conversion outright, multiply by .6, and Texas DWC material weights the lower extremity at 40% of the whole person. Separate ratings also combine rather than add, a + b(1 − a), so 20% and 10% make 28%.
Correction to our own page: the Colorado comp example used an age factor of about 1.00 for a 40-year-old worker. The statutory factor at that age is 1.40, so our worked example understated the award by 40%. It now reads 84 weeks at $804.46, about $67,575, and the same fix is applied to the Colorado row of the 20-state comp chart. C.R.S. §8-42-107(8)(d) carries the full age table.
Four corrections to figures published elsewhere are listed on the page: Missouri estimates built on the temporary maximum rather than the $678.18 permanent cap, Pennsylvania ratings presented as lump-sum payouts, California raw impairment used in place of the adjusted disability rating, and Wisconsin still quoted at the outdated $430 weekly rate.
Editing pass finished: the injury, scenario, process and tool pages
The same punctuation pass that cleaned the state pages now covers the rest of the site. Across all 103 pages the median is zero em dashes per thousand words, down from 24.2, and the dash-wrapped aside inside a single sentence is gone entirely: 233 of them, now none. Sentence length averages 15.0 words with a third of sentences under ten.
Nothing about the content changed. Every dollar figure, statute reference, multiplier band, week count, percentage, case name, date and source link was extracted from 101 built pages before and after the rewrite and compared token by token. Zero losses on the 60 injury, scenario, process and tool pages.
Being straight about the method: the bulk of this was applied by a classifier that picks punctuation from what follows the dash, and it got roughly one in twenty wrong. Those mistakes were real damage, not cosmetic, so they were hunted down rather than left: a dash-wrapped list flattened into comma soup on the medical-liens page, four sentence fragments that began with a verb because both halves of an appositive became full stops, and several comma splices where the following clause began with a proper noun. A detector for verb-initial fragments and for comma-plus-clause splices now reports zero across the site.
It also surfaced a bug we had shipped ourselves. A parenthesis opened in the workers-comp template a day earlier was never closed, so twenty state pages carried a malformed question. Fixed.
Deliberately left as they were: the severity dropdown labels, which the calculator splits on internally; the demand-letter template, where a dash is genuine letterhead formatting; page-title separators; and statute citation strings where a semicolon separates authorities.
Editing pass across all 40 state pages and the shared calculator components
A texture pass, not a facts pass. Our state pages had drifted into a punctuation habit, em dashes used as a general-purpose connector at nine times the rate human editors use them, including 184 cases of a dash-wrapped aside inside a single sentence. The prose now uses the punctuation the sentence actually calls for: a full stop where a new clause begins, a comma for an aside, parentheses for a citation.
Measured result across the 40 state pages: em dashes went from 36.1 per thousand words to 0.12, dash-wrapped asides from 184 to zero, and average sentence length to 14.1 words with 36% of sentences under ten. The variation you get from someone writing rather than generating.
Statute citations now render in parentheses, which is the convention legal writing already uses: “3 years from the injury (Wis. Stat. §893.54)” rather than the same text joined by a dash.
Zero facts changed, and we checked rather than assumed. Every dollar figure, statute reference, percentage, week count, date and source link was extracted from all 41 built pages before and after the rewrite and compared token by token. One difference, explained below, and nothing else moved.
The one difference exposed a real bug. The states index built its “minimum auto liability” column by splitting each state’s text at the em dash, which quietly made punctuation a data delimiter. Removing the dash dumped the full gloss into a narrow table cell. The column now derives its short form from the content itself, so New York shows “25/50” rather than a sentence. New York’s full text, including the $50/100 wrongful-death minimum, is unchanged on its own page.
Also fixed in the same pass: the shared calculator disclaimer, offer-check and report components carried the same habit, so the change reaches every tool page, not only the state pages. Deliberately left alone: the severity dropdown labels, which the calculator splits on internally, and the demand-letter template, where a dash is genuine letterhead formatting.
Still outstanding, and recorded here so it isn’t forgotten: the process, scenario and injury clusters sit at 18 to 23 em dashes per thousand words and have not had this pass yet.
The three hub pages get the comparison tables they were missing
Our own pre-launch audit flagged /injuries/, /scenarios/ and /insurers/ as the thinnest pages on the site. They routed traffic and little else. Each now carries the cross-cluster comparison its topic needs: injuries went 429 → 797 words, scenarios 427 → 834, insurers 297 → 980.
/injuries/, all 15 injuries in one table with their multiplier band and, for each, the single piece of objective evidence that decides which tier it lands in: the EMG for nerve claims, repeat imaging for the scaphoid, the neuropsychological battery for brain injuries, before-and-after function evidence for shoulders.
/scenarios/, a crash-type table showing who is presumed at fault, what actually decides it, and which policy pays, across rear-end, T-bone, hit-and-run, pedestrian, motorcycle, passenger and uninsured-motorist claims.
/insurers/, nine carriers with their NAIC private-passenger auto rank and share (2025 direct premiums written), precise corporate structure, and what the public record actually shows about each one’s claim-evaluation software.
The insurer table exists to correct something we think the rest of the internet gets wrong, so we verified it against primary sources before publishing. Vehicle total-loss valuation software is not injury claim-scoring software, and the two are constantly merged. The documented record for State Farm (Audatex), Progressive (Mitchell, a $48m settlement) and GEICO (CCC, a flat $1,006 per-comparable reduction) is entirely about what your car was worth, not about scoring general damages.
Only Allstate has a documented injury-scoring record, and the usual retelling of it is wrong in both directions. A 2010 multi-state regulatory agreement does describe Colossus as a rule-based program with roughly 600 injury profiles and about 10,000 rules, and records that over 90% of Colossus-scored claims resolved inside the evaluation range. The same agreement states that regulators did not identify institutional underpayment and found no rule requiring adjusters to settle within the range: a part routinely dropped. Colossus was also built and licensed by Computer Sciences Corporation, so it was never Allstate’s software.
Where there is no record, the table says so rather than inventing one. For Farmers, Nationwide and USAA the only citable source is a 2012 Consumer Federation report that lists them without sourcing the individual entries, which we label as that report’s assertion. For Liberty Mutual, Travelers, State Farm, Progressive and GEICO we found no injury-scoring record at all. Everything else asserting otherwise that we could find was law-firm marketing copy.
Two ranking corrections while we were in the NAIC data: State Farm and Progressive are effectively tied for first (18.64% against 18.60%, about $158m apart on roughly $69bn), so “Progressive is now the largest” overstates the source. And the NAIC report ranks groups, not brands. GEICO is not named in it at all, so the third-place 11.56% belongs to Berkshire Hathaway Group, not to the GEICO brand.
A new build-time test (npm run test:hub-tables, 185 assertions) fails if an injury, scenario or carrier page is added without its comparison row, so nothing can quietly disappear from a table.
Workers’ comp rates re-verified across all 20 states, and a new cross-state comparison chart
Seven states reset their comp maximums on 1 July 2026 and we were still publishing the 2025–26 figures. Every rate on every state page has now been re-checked against that state’s own agency bulletin, and a RATES_VERIFIED date is shown on the chart so you can see how current the figures are rather than guessing.
Rate changes now live: New York $1,222.42 → $1,281.50 (two-thirds of the $1,922.25 state average wage). Iowa PPD $2,162 → $2,237, TTD $2,350 → $2,431. Colorado moved on all five figures, +4.82% across the board: TTD max $1,464.12, scheduled rate $459.45, whole-person cap $804.46, combined caps $202,297.46 and $328,049.94. Indiana’s per-degree values rose about 3% to $1,970 / $2,197 / $3,585 / $4,569, and we added its $878 weekly maximum. Washington’s time-loss maximum went $9,516 → $9,981.00 a month.
Corrections to our own labelling, found during the re-check: Washington’s PPD dollar figures were right but dated a year early, $270,966.87 is the 7/2026–6/2027 schedule, not 2025–26. Oklahoma’s TTD maximum runs on a calendar year (1/1/2026–12/31/2026), not July to June as we implied, and its $375 PPD cap is a flat statutory figure that did not change. Iowa’s attorney-fee statute was renumbered from Iowa Code §86.39 to §10A.327 by the 2023 Acts, so our citation was obsolete.
Illinois: we are not publishing a 2026–27 permanent-partial maximum, because the Commission has not published one. It posts the figure on or about 15 January, so $1,084.66 from 2025–26 is the newest that exists and is now labelled as such. We also did not interpolate a value from the state average wage, which is not how Illinois derives it. Our long-standing internal note asking to confirm $1,084.66 against the IWCC table is now resolved: the figure was correct.
Texas: the FY2027 rates are published and take effect for injuries on or after 1 October 2026, impairment income benefits rise $890 → $920 and temporary income benefits $1,271 → $1,314. Both are noted on the page ahead of the changeover rather than after it.
New page: /workers-comp-settlement-chart/, all 20 states in one table (permanent rate, temporary maximum, scheduled weeks, effective dates, fee caps), with two things we could not find published anywhere else. First, the same 15% whole-body impairment priced through each state’s own formula: about $167,800 in Iowa against about $20,300 in Oklahoma, an 8.3-fold spread, with the arithmetic printed. Second, the gap between permanent and temporary rates within a state. California pays permanent disability at 16% of its temporary maximum, and Colorado, Wisconsin, Oklahoma and Ohio all sit near a third. If you have valued a claim against a state’s headline comp maximum, it was probably the wrong one of the two.
The chart keeps cross-state comparison only and links each row to that state’s own page, which keeps the schedules, statutes and calculator. A build-time test (npm run test:wc-chart) now fails if a rate is changed on a state page without updating the chart, so the two cannot drift apart silently.
New: average settlement amounts, every published figure sourced, publishing Sep 28
We used to answer “what’s the average settlement?” by explaining why we wouldn’t answer it. That was half right. No agency publishes an average settlement, the word appears once in the NAIC’s 230-page auto report, attached to no number, and never on the Insurance Information Institute’s auto statistics page, but real average claim payments and verdict medians do exist, and refusing to report them was a gap rather than rigour. The new page lists all seven that clear our verification bar, each with its study, year, sample definition, source link, and the specific thing it cannot tell you.
Correction we found in the primary source: the bodily-injury figure most sites quote from NAIC is inflated about 11.6% by a reporting gap. Texas reports incurred losses but no claim counts, so Texas money sits in the numerator with no Texas claims in the denominator. NAIC prints a second countrywide line precisely so readers can avoid the first. We show the arithmetic and use the corrected $25,915.56 (2022) rather than the headline $28,918.86.
Correction: the Insurance Information Institute restates its own loss table each year. Bodily-injury severity for data year 2020 was published as $20,235 and now reads $20,769; 2021 has moved from $22,734 to $23,592. We cite the table vintage every time, because a figure quoted without it is a number III no longer publishes.
Citation that does not hold up: the widely quoted “$77,600 with a lawyer against $17,600 without” is credited to an Insurance Research Council study called “Paid in Full.” It is not in IRC’s publications index across all nine pages, and we could not find it anywhere else. Those two numbers are, to the dollar, the 2017 Martindale-Nolo reader-survey figures on Nolo’s own site, a self-selected survey of one website’s visitors, re-badged as insurance-industry research. Relatedly, IRC’s own data runs the other way: represented auto bodily-injury claimants received $1.40 per dollar of medical expense after fees, against $1.80 for unrepresented claimants, which is a caution about the 3.5× claim rather than about hiring a lawyer.
Citation that does not hold up: “95% of cases settle, according to the Bureau of Justice Statistics.” BJS never published it. BJS published that trials were about 4% of tort dispositions in 2005, and separately that 73% of large-county tort cases settled in 1991–92 with 3% reaching a verdict and 10% dismissed. Those do not sum to 100%.
Figures we deliberately left out, by name: the $52,900 and $23,900 “averages” (real, dated Martindale-Nolo surveys whose respondent count has never been disclosed by anyone, including their publisher), per-injury tables credited to paywalled Jury Verdict Research handbooks with no edition or year, “soft tissue settles for $15,000–30,000” (no source exists at the end of that citation chain), and median malpractice settlements attributed to the National Practitioner Data Bank, which publishes no median.
Corrections to pages already live: the homepage and /process/average-settlement-truth/ both said published average figures were “marketing, not data” and that the circulating numbers trace to nothing verifiable. Both statements were too strong, and the second is now known to be wrong, the $23,900 figure traces to a real, named, dated survey. Both pages have been rewritten to say what is actually true: the figures exist, they are claim payments rather than settlements, and the problem is the label.
Corrections now reach search results faster: IndexNow submissions on every deploy
When a page is published or corrected, its URL is now pushed directly to the search engines that accept such notifications (Bing, Yandex, Seznam, Naver) instead of waiting for them to re-crawl the sitemap on their own schedule. Google does not accept these notifications, so nothing changes there.
This matters most for our correction policy: when we fix a rate or a statute, the updated page gets queued for re-crawl the same day rather than weeks later.
Only pages whose visible content actually changed are submitted. Each build is compared against the live page before anything is sent. Unchanged pages are left alone.
Interleave set: motorcycle & passenger calculators, four more insurer guides, publishing Sep 16–26
Motorcycle accident settlement calculator, the bias-discount problem named and countered, helmet-law comparative-fault effects, and why the bike settlement shouldn't touch the injury claim.
Passenger injury calculator, the cleanest liability position on the road, the shared per-accident-limits trap, and the claim against a friend's insurance most passengers never file.
Negotiation guides with embedded calculators for Liberty Mutual, Farmers, Nationwide, and Travelers claims. Every carrier fact cited to NAIC market-share data, company filings, or documented reporting. Where the public record shows nothing (no verifiable claim-software tie for Liberty Mutual), we say so instead of inventing one; the dated 2012 CFA report and 2003 Farmers litigation are labeled as exactly that.
State batch 3: Washington, Arizona, Tennessee, Missouri, Wisconsin, rolling out through mid-September
Ten new pages (injury + workers' comp per state), publishing on a schedule from August 27 to September 14. Every rule verified against primary sources before writing.
Corrections over commonly published figures: Wisconsin's PPD rate is $454/week for injuries on or after April 1, 2026 (2025 Act 145), not the $430 most sites still quote; Tennessee PPD uses the permanent weekly maximum ($1,353, FY2027), not the higher temporary max; Missouri's PPD rate is 66⅔% of wages capped at 55% of the state average ($678.18 FY2027), not '55% of your wages.'
Verification highlights: Washington's dollar-scheduled PPD system (no weekly formula. We show the real schedule math instead of forcing a calculator), its monopolistic L&I state fund, and the Sofie no-caps rule; Arizona's constitutional prohibition on damage caps and months-based comp schedule with the 2026 $6,131 wage cap; Tennessee's 1-year filing deadline and the McClay-upheld caps with their drunk-driving exception; Missouri's 5-year deadline, 2026 med-mal cap values, and the 1% seat-belt rule; Wisconsin's direct-action statute and 2-year motor-vehicle wrongful-death trap.
Homepage expansion: six new sections
The settlement formula written out in full, the multiplier method disclosed right on the homepage, linked to the methodology.
An honest 'average settlement amounts' section: the multiplier bands applied to a worked example across all five severity levels, with the truth about why no verifiable average exists.
A rules-by-state section linking every published state page with its fault rule and filing deadline.
Three cited settlement examples (Liciaga, Werner, Johnson) with links to the court opinions.
A gross-vs-net breakdown showing what a $48,000 settlement actually pays after fees, costs, and liens.
Four new FAQ answers matching the questions people actually search, amounts, timing, taxes, and what makes a good offer.
New homepage title and description targeting 'personal injury settlement calculator' with the year kept current automatically.
Social share images for every page
Every page now ships a custom Open Graph image in the Range-band style, four variants: calculators, state law pages (showing that state's actual fault rule and filing deadline, read from the same verified data the page uses), guides, and hub pages.
Share previews on messaging and social platforms now show the page's headline and the range motif instead of a bare link.
New brand mark: the Range
Adopted the site's logo, a range selected between two handles, the low and the high of an honest estimate. It replaces the placeholder glyph in the header, the printed reports, and the browser icon.
Shipped the full icon set: favicon (16/32/48), SVG favicon, Apple touch icon, and PWA icons.
Ran a full-site audit (word counts, titles, descriptions, canonicals, schema, internal links, orphans, sitemap parity) before deployment, zero broken links and zero orphaned pages found.
Expanded the five original guides (car accidents, workplace injuries, motorcycle, dog bites, medical malpractice) from ~380 to ~700+ words each: a fourth substantive section apiece, three FAQs each with FAQ schema, breadcrumbs, and cross-links into the newer cluster pages.
Strengthened the injuries/scenarios/insurers hub pages with substantive guidance intros.
Trimmed over-length titles and meta descriptions on the state templates and the six worst standalone pages.
State batch 2: California, New York, Illinois, Michigan, New Jersey, all statute-cited
Ten new pages (injury + workers' comp per state), every rule verified against primary sources before publication.
Verification highlights: California's MICRA caps at their 2026 values ($470k/$650k) and Prop 213's uninsured-driver bar; New York's serious-injury threshold and current $1,222.42 comp maximum; Illinois's no-caps case law (Best, Lebron) and the 25% joint-liability rule; Michigan's post-2019 no-fault system and wage-loss comp model; New Jersey's new 35/70/25 minimums (effective 2026), the post-2020 hand/foot schedules, and the comp fee cap's 2024 rise to 25%.
Corrections over commonly published figures are noted on the pages themselves (e.g., NJ's outdated 245/230-week schedules, California's $290 PD rate vs. its $1,764 TTD maximum).
Week 4: wrist, ankle, emotional distress, drunk-driver, and pedestrian pages
Wrist injuries, the scaphoid trap (the ER's most-missed fracture) and CRPS awareness, honestly banded.
Ankle injuries, why 'just a sprain' undersells ligament damage, and the weight-bearing joint's arthritis pricing rule.
Emotional distress, the two-track analysis (riding a physical injury vs. standalone claims) and the IRC §104 tax line most pages skip.
Hit by a drunk driver, punitive damages with the state cap exceptions cited (Georgia's and North Carolina's DUI carve-outs), dram shop, and the collectability check.
Pedestrian accidents, the jaywalking myth, and the most-missed money: your own auto policy's UM/PIP coverage follows you on foot.
Week 3: five more injury calculators, hand, fractures, shoulder, spinal cord, TBI
Hand injuries, function-based banding, the dominance/occupation premium, and the comp-schedule crossover (244 federal weeks).
Broken bones, the 'cleanest claim' analysis: objectivity dividend, hardware tiers, and why joint fractures must price post-traumatic arthritis before release.
Shoulder, the degenerative-tear counterargument, the overhead-work premium, and Iowa's 400-week schedule signal.
Spinal cord. Catastrophic-tier framework where the life-care plan drives value, anchored to the cited Liciaga v. NYCTA outcome.
Concussion & TBI, the invisible-injury playbook: neuropsych testing as the proof, collateral witnesses, and the work record as economic evidence.
Medicare & your settlement, the 42 CFR §411.37 repayment calculator (Medicare's fee-sharing reduction computed line by line), with the CMS options verified against current documents: the $750 threshold (2026) and the 25% fixed option, whose cap CMS raised to $10,000 in 2023, a correction to what most sites still publish.
Medical liens, the five claimant types with controlling authority cited (Texas & California lien statutes, US Airways v. McCutchen, Arkansas DHS v. Ahlborn) and a worked negotiation example.
Lawyer fees, worked, contingency tiers, the gross-vs-net clause arithmetic, and the statutory caps we've verified, cross-linked to the state comp pages.
Recorded statements, the own-insurer vs. other-insurer decision rules with word-for-word declines.
Demand letter builder, the full letter generated on-device with bracketed placeholders for personal details; no email gate, nothing transmitted.
Week 1 complete: million-dollar anatomy, demand anchoring, and the 'average settlement' truth
What makes a million-dollar case, the four ingredients (permanence, economic base, liability, collectable defendant), shown with the verified case bank and a worked seven-figure valuation.
How much to ask for, a demand-anchor calculator that computes your band, walk-away target, and a 1.4–1.75× opening anchor with the reasoning printed.
The truth about 'average settlements', why no verifiable average exists, a labeled illustration of mean-vs-median skew, and the input-based math to use instead.
Process cluster launched: timeline estimator + real cited case examples
Published /process/, the hub for how settlements actually work.
Settlement timeline page with an interactive stage-model estimator (disclosed planning ranges, summed for the stages your claim has, presented as a model, not a statistic).
Real settlement & verdict examples page: ten publicly documented cases, every amount linked to the court opinion or primary report (all sources fetched and verified today). Includes the honest caveats most sites omit: verdicts get reversed (Werner: $89.7M → $0) and reduced (Johnson: $289M → $20.5M), all public figures are gross, and ordinary five-figure settlements are confidential. So we say so instead of inventing them.
E-E-A-T infrastructure: citations in footers, breadcrumbs, editorial policy
Every page's cited sources now render in its footer, linked to the primary source.
Visible breadcrumbs added across all tool, state, injury, scenario, and insurer pages.
Published our editorial & verification policy and correction policy (/about/).
Added cluster hub pages for injuries, scenarios, and insurer guides.
This changelog created. Every substantive content or data change is logged here from now on.
Insurer negotiation pages + the car accident settlement calculator
Published negotiation guides with embedded calculators for State Farm, Progressive, GEICO, Allstate, and USAA claims.
Published the full car accident settlement calculator page (instant, guided, and offer-check modes).
Configured static-export hosting.
Injury and scenario calculators
Published injury pages, neck, back, whiplash, soft tissue, knee, nerve damage, scarring, eye, each mapping the injury onto our disclosed multiplier bands with a preset calculator.
Published scenario pages: hit-and-run (UM mechanics), T-bone (fault evidence), and uninsured/underinsured motorist claims (consent-to-settle, stacking).
Upgraded the slip-and-fall guide to a full calculator page.
State pages: 10 states, every rule cited to its statute
Published injury-settlement and workers'-comp pages for Texas, Florida, Ohio, Georgia, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, Indiana, Oklahoma, Iowa, and Colorado.
All fault rules, filing deadlines, damage caps, insurance minimums, and comp rates verified against primary sources (state statutes and agency rate bulletins). Citations linked on every page.
Notable verifications: Ohio's general non-economic cap (ORC §2315.18); North Carolina's 50/100/50 minimums effective July 1, 2025; Florida's post-HB 837 rules; Colorado's HB24-1472 caps; Oklahoma's Beason decision.
Core calculators launched
Launched with the settlement estimator (instant, guided, and offer-check modes), pain & suffering (multiplier + per-diem), take-home, settlement tax (IRC §104), diminished value (17c), and workers' comp calculators.
Every calculator prints its arithmetic line by line, runs entirely in the browser, and stores nothing.
Published the full methodology with every formula disclosed and sourced.
Found an error?Corrections are part of the product. If any figure, statute, or rate on this site is wrong or out of date, tell us via the contact on the about page. Verified corrections are fixed and logged here.