Concussion and TBI Settlement Value: Mild, Moderate and Severe

Mild TBI settlements typically run 100,000 dollars to 850,000 dollars, while a simple concussion averages 20,000 dollars to 100,000 dollars and severe TBI runs 2 million dollars to 30 million dollars or more (sources: barzakaylaw.com and phillipslawoffices.com).

A mild TBI or concussion may have short-term symptoms, and the person can feel better within a couple of weeks or months (source: cdc.gov). Moderate to severe TBI can require months to years of rehabilitation and may cause permanent cognitive, personality, and physical changes, and severe TBI can reduce life expectancy by several years (source: barzakaylaw.com). Once the deficits are permanent, the file is priced off projected lifetime care, the same way spinal cord injuries are, rather than off the bills already paid. For a concussion that resolves, the personal injury calculator gives you the working range an adjuster starts from.

The central difficulty in a mild TBI claim is that the injury is real and the imaging is normal. A CT ordered in the emergency department is looking for bleeding and swelling, and it finds neither in most concussions. That normal result then sits at the front of the file, and insurers use it exactly as you would expect (source: barzakaylaw.com).

What fills the gap is neuropsychological testing, which measures processing speed, working memory, attention and executive function against population norms rather than looking for structural damage. It produces numbers, which is what an adjuster needs in order to move. Testing done after symptoms have stabilised is more useful than testing done in the first fortnight, when almost everyone scores badly.

The second source of evidence is the record kept by people other than you. A manager who documented reduced hours, a colleague who took over tasks, a partner who took over the driving. Contemporaneous accounts from people with nothing to gain are harder to characterise as exaggeration than your own description of the same facts.

A concussion that resolves in six weeks and a mild TBI that leaves permanent deficits look identical in the first month, yet they sit an order of magnitude apart in how adjusters value each injury type: $20,000 to $100,000 for the first, $100,000 to $850,000 for the second (sources: phillipslawoffices.com and barzakaylaw.com).

An early offer is priced as though the first outcome is certain. Accepting it transfers the entire risk of the second outcome to you, which is the wrong way round: the insurer is far better placed to carry that risk than an individual claimant is.

Concretely, $9,000 of economic damages at this tier's 2.5 multiplier produces about $31,500, which is a reasonable figure for a concussion that genuinely resolved. The same person a year later with documented cognitive deficits, $60,000 in treatment and lost income and a changed job might be looking at $210,000 on the same arithmetic. Nothing about the injury changed in that year. What changed is that the prognosis became knowable.

Run the numbers on the full calculator, which opens preset to severity tier 3. Adjust the bills, state, and fault to fit your case.