States With Caps on Wrongful Death Damages

By the FigureMyTax Editorial Team · How we calculate

Arizona doesn't cap wrongful death damages at all — a constitutional protection that puts it in a small group of states nationally.

A constitutional ban, not a legislative gap

Under Arizona Constitution Article 2, Section 31, no law can limit damages for causing death — this applies to wrongful death claims exactly as it does to ordinary personal injury. Arizona is commonly counted among roughly five states with this kind of constitutional protection, a meaningfully stronger guarantee than simply not having gotten around to passing a cap.

How other states handle it differently

Nationally, states take genuinely different structural approaches. Some fold wrongful death into the same noneconomic damages cap that applies to severe personal injury generally. Others set an entirely separate wrongful-death-specific cap, sometimes lower, sometimes higher than their ordinary injury cap. A handful of states, Arizona among them, prohibit capping either category by constitutional provision rather than relying on ordinary statute.

What predictability actually comes from in Arizona

Without a dollar ceiling, outcomes in Arizona wrongful death cases are shaped by the facts — the strength of liability evidence, the decedent's economic contribution, the closeness of family relationships — and by Arizona's pure comparative fault rule, which reduces recovery in proportion to the decedent's own share of fault rather than eliminating it. The absence of a cap doesn't mean outcomes are random; it means the usual tort-law factors, not a statutory limit, do the work of shaping the final number.

This is general information, not legal advice, and the state comparisons above are illustrative, not an exhaustive survey. Confirm the current rule in any state with a licensed attorney there.