ORS 31.710: $500,000 Noneconomic Damages Cap for Wrongful Death

In an Oregon wrongful death lawsuit against a private defendant, ORS 31.710 caps the total noneconomic damages at $500,000, no matter how many family members bring claims for the same death. Economic damages like lost income and medical bills are not capped. The cap no longer applies to ordinary personal injury cases; the Oregon Supreme Court struck down that broader version in 2020, and the legislature narrowed the statute in 2021 so it now reaches only wrongful death actions.

What the $500,000 Cap Covers

The limit is aggregate. If a surviving spouse, children, and other beneficiaries all seek noneconomic recovery for a single death, their combined awards cannot exceed $500,000.¹ The statute specifically includes claims for loss of companionship and loss of consortium inside that ceiling, so family members cannot stack those categories on top of other noneconomic awards to get around the cap.

Noneconomic damages, as defined by the companion statute ORS 31.705, are the subjective, nonmonetary losses: pain, mental suffering, emotional distress, humiliation, reputational harm, loss of companionship, loss of consortium, inconvenience, and interference with normal daily activities outside work.² In a wrongful death case, the family’s claim for loss of society, companionship, and services of the deceased falls into this category.³

What the Cap Does Not Touch

Three big categories sit outside ORS 31.710.

Economic damages. The cap applies only to the noneconomic side of the verdict. Economic damages have no statutory ceiling under these provisions. ORS 31.705 requires every Oregon verdict to list economic and noneconomic damages as separate line items, which keeps the two cleanly divided when the judge applies the cap after the fact.² In wrongful death cases, ORS 30.020 lists what the estate and family can recover as economic losses: doctors’ services, hospital costs, nursing care, burial and memorial expenses, the pecuniary loss to the estate, and the financial support the deceased would have provided to surviving family members.³ Lost future earning capacity, substitute domestic services, and economically verifiable damage to reputation also fall on the economic side under ORS 31.705.

Punitive damages. The cap addresses compensatory noneconomic damages only. Punitive awards are evaluated separately and are not folded into the $500,000 figure.

Government and workers’ comp claims. ORS 31.710 does not apply to claims governed by the Oregon Tort Claims Act (ORS 30.260 through 30.300), which covers claims against public bodies and carries its own separate damage limits.¹ It also does not apply to workers’ compensation claims under ORS chapter 656, which runs on an entirely different framework. A wrongful death claim against a state agency and the same claim against a private company therefore face different dollar ceilings, and the applicable cap depends on which defendant the damages are attributed to.⁴ Punitive damages are not available at all against public bodies under the Tort Claims Act.

The Jury Never Hears About the Cap

ORS 31.710(3) prohibits anyone from telling the jury about the $500,000 limit.¹ Jurors deliberate on what they think the family’s suffering is worth, and the judge applies the cap afterward. If the jury returns $2 million in noneconomic damages, the court quietly reduces it to $500,000 before judgment is entered. The cap operates as a post-verdict ceiling, not as a factor in the jury’s reasoning.

Both sides’ attorneys know the ceiling exists, which is why its real influence shows up in settlement negotiations rather than in the courtroom. A plaintiff pushing for $3 million in noneconomic value during trial is still bound by the $500,000 figure if the case goes to verdict, and that reality shapes what defendants are willing to pay and what plaintiffs are willing to accept before a jury is ever seated.

Why Only Wrongful Death?

The current version of ORS 31.710 is a much narrower statute than it used to be. From 1987 until 2020, the same $500,000 cap applied to essentially all civil actions involving bodily injury, emotional injury, death, or property damage.⁵ That broad version applied to car accident injuries, medical malpractice against private providers, and most other personal injury claims.

In Busch v. McInnis Waste Systems (2020), the Oregon Supreme Court held that the broad cap violated the remedy clause of the Oregon Constitution as applied to personal injury claims rooted in common-law duties. The plaintiff had been awarded $10.5 million in noneconomic damages for serious personal injuries; the trial court cut that to $500,000; the Supreme Court reversed. The court faulted the legislature for limiting recovery against private defendants without giving injured people any corresponding new right, and for setting a flat 1987 dollar figure with no inflation adjustment.⁶

The legislature responded in 2021 by amending ORS 31.710 to narrow the cap to wrongful death claims only (Oregon Laws 2021, chapter 478, section 1).¹ If you are injured by someone’s negligence in Oregon today and survive, there is no statutory limit on your noneconomic damages.

Wrongful death sits on different constitutional ground. The cause of action did not exist at common law when Oregon adopted its constitution in 1857. It was created by the legislature through ORS 30.020.³ Because the legislature created the right to sue in the first place, the argument goes, it can also set conditions on it, including a damages cap. Whether the narrowed cap would survive a direct remedy-clause challenge is still an open question; no Oregon Supreme Court decision has squarely ruled on it. For now, the $500,000 wrongful death cap is the law, and it still has no inflation adjustment.

What This Means for a Wrongful Death Case

Because the noneconomic side is capped at $500,000, the economic side carries most of the weight in valuing a wrongful death case against a private defendant. Lost future income, financial support the deceased would have provided, medical costs between injury and death, and burial expenses all need thorough documentation, because none of those categories face a statutory ceiling.³

The practical result is a two-track valuation. The economic track can run into the millions in a case involving a high-earning decedent with many years of work ahead; the noneconomic track tops out at $500,000 regardless of how devastating the loss is to the family. When a case includes both private and government defendants, the applicable cap turns on which defendant each dollar is attributed to, since the Tort Claims Act and ORS 31.710 operate on separate tracks with separate limits.

1
Oregon State Legislature. Oregon Revised Statutes 31.710 (2025) – Limitation on Award for Noneconomic Damages in Claim for Wrongful Death
2
Oregon State Legislature. Oregon Revised Statutes 31.705 (2025) – Economic and Noneconomic Damages Separately Set Forth in Verdict
3
Oregon Public Law. ORS 30.020 – Action for Wrongful Death; When Commenced; Damages
4
Oregon State Legislature. Oregon Revised Statutes – Chapter 30 – Actions and Suits in Particular Cases
5
Oregon State Legislature. Background Brief on Tort Reform
6
Justia Law. Busch v. McInnis Waste Systems, Inc.