Wrongful-death damages compensate surviving family members or an estate for the losses caused by a death, and they are built from several distinct categories that each require their own evidence and, often, their own expert. Loss of consortium is a related but separate claim, typically brought by a spouse (and in some jurisdictions, a parent or child) for the loss of companionship, support, and services caused by an injury or death to their family member. Confusing the two, or treating either as a single lump figure, tends to produce an unsupportable number.

Because these damages combine hard economic loss with genuinely subjective human loss, a realistic estimate has to separate what can be calculated from records and projections from what depends on jury judgment about intangible loss. This guide walks through the standard components and how they are typically assembled.

Wrongful-death damages generally fall into two buckets. Economic damages are calculable from records: lost future earnings and benefits the decedent would have contributed to the household, lost services (childcare, household labor, business contributions), medical and funeral expenses already incurred, and the value of lost inheritance in some jurisdictions. Non-economic damages compensate for loss of companionship, guidance, and consortium — inherently harder to quantify and driven more by jury perception, verdict history, and the strength of the factual narrative than by formula.

Lost future contribution to the household is typically calculated by an economist starting from the decedent's actual earning history and career trajectory, projected forward to a reasonable work-life expectancy, then adjusted for the decedent's own personal consumption (since that portion would not have been available to survivors) and discounted to present value.

Loss of consortium is a derivative but distinct claim, usually held by the surviving spouse, covering loss of companionship, affection, moral support, sexual relations where applicable, and household partnership. Some jurisdictions extend a version of this claim to parent-child relationships. It is not simply an emotional-distress claim for the surviving family member's own grief — it specifically compensates for the loss of the relationship itself.

Jurors do not calculate non-economic loss with a spreadsheet; they respond to a concrete, well-supported picture of the relationship that was lost. Photographs, testimony from family and friends, and specifics about daily routines and shared responsibilities tend to matter more than any multiplier applied to economic damages.

Many jurisdictions cap non-economic or punitive damages in wrongful-death cases, and the statute governing who may recover (and in what shares) varies significantly. Confirm the applicable wrongful-death statute early, since it determines both who the proper plaintiffs are and what categories of damages are even available before any calculation is built.