Economic damages: the documented, countable losses
Economic damages are the straightforward, receipt-backed part of a claim. In an Illinois personal injury case, this generally includes medical expenses already incurred, lost wages from time away from work, property damage, and reasonably anticipated future medical care or lost earning capacity tied directly to the injury.
Non-economic damages: the subjective losses
Non-economic damages cover the losses that don't come with a receipt: pain and suffering, disfigurement, loss of a normal life, and emotional distress. These are inherently harder to quantify, which is exactly why the multiplier method exists — to translate a documented economic figure into a reasoned estimate of the non-economic side.
Neither compensatory category is capped
Illinois's legislature tried twice to cap non-economic damages — once across all common-law actions, once specifically for medical malpractice — and the Illinois Supreme Court struck both attempts down as violations of the separation of powers clause (Best, 1997; Lebron, 2010). Today, neither economic nor non-economic compensatory damages are capped in any Illinois personal injury case.
A genuinely different third category: punitive damages
It's worth keeping punitive damages entirely separate from this split. Punitive damages don't compensate the plaintiff's loss at all — they punish the defendant's conduct. In Illinois, they're treated very differently depending on the type of case: flatly prohibited in medical and legal malpractice under 735 ILCS 5/2-1115, but available, capped at 3 times economic damages, in ordinary negligence and product liability cases under 735 ILCS 5/2-1115.05. That's a meaningfully different rulebook than the one that governs your economic and non-economic damages.
Fault treats the compensatory categories the same way
Illinois's 51% fault bar doesn't distinguish between economic and non-economic damages. If your fault bars the claim, it bars recovery of both categories together — there's no partial exception letting one category through while the other is barred.