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A spinal cord injury at the top of the neck averages $1,446,827 in the first year alone, and $251,246 every year after that.
Those are not our numbers. They come from the National Spinal Cord Injury Statistical Center, which has tracked 38,647 people with traumatic spinal cord injuries through August 2025. And they cover health care and living expenses only. Lost wages are on top.
Louisiana's minimum auto liability policy pays $15,000.
That gap is the entire problem in a brain or spine injury case, and closing it is the work. At Brandt & Sherman, our Lafayette brain and spine injury attorneys build these cases around what the injury will actually cost across a lifetime, not what an adjuster offers in the first month.
Brain and spinal cord injuries are catastrophic injuries, which is an insurance and legal classification, not a figure of speech.
They can permanently affect movement, cognition, and independence. Families face medical costs, home modifications, and long-term care that can run for decades. The two injuries often arrive together, because the same forces that whip the head also load the cervical spine.
A note on terms, because they get used interchangeably and they should not be. The spine is the column of vertebrae. The spinal cord is the bundle of nerve tissue running through it. You can break the spine without damaging the cord. Damage to the cord is what typically produces paralysis, and it is what drives the numbers on this page.
Motor vehicle crashes are the leading cause of both traumatic brain and spinal cord injuries in Louisiana. That is the Louisiana Department of Health's own finding, reported to the legislature.
Nationally the picture matches. Since 2015, vehicle crashes account for 37.1% of new traumatic spinal cord injuries, the single largest category, followed by falls at 32.5%. Together those two causes produce almost 70% of new injuries.
Here is how those causes reach our caseload:
Nationally, the average person injured is 44 years old, and about 78% are men. The average age has risen from 29 in the 1970s, which means more of these injuries now land on people with mortgages, dependents, and peak earning years ahead of them.
Traumatic brain injuries are classified by how the force reached the brain.
That last point matters for your claim. Secondary complications develop over days and weeks, and insurers routinely argue that anything not visible on the first scan came from something else.
Children are not exempt, and the assumption that they bounce back is wrong. More than 62% of children with moderate-to-severe TBI experience ongoing disability requiring specialized medical and educational support, and so do 14% of children with mild TBI, according to the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine.
Less than 1% of people with a traumatic spinal cord injury experience complete neurological recovery by the time they leave the hospital.
That is the NSCISC finding, and it is the number that should shape every settlement conversation. Among people injured since 2015, 47.7% are discharged with incomplete tetraplegia, 20.4% with incomplete paraplegia, 19.6% with complete paraplegia, and 11.8% with complete tetraplegia. Only 0.4% are discharged neurologically normal.
Tetraplegia (also called quadriplegia) means loss of function in the arms and legs, from an injury in the cervical spine. Paraplegia means loss of function in the lower body, from an injury lower down. "Complete" and "incomplete" describe whether any signal crosses the injury at all.
Three things follow, and each one is a category of damages:
Work does not come back. Among people with traumatic spinal cord injury, 64.5% were employed at the time of injury. At one year post-injury, 17.8% are. The rate climbs slowly and peaks at 31.2% thirty years later, which is still less than half the pre-injury rate. That first comparison is a within-person before-and-after rather than a comparison to strangers, which is what makes it usable in a damages argument. The later figures are follow-up snapshots of people injured decades earlier.
Hospitals stay in the picture. About 29% of people with a traumatic spinal cord injury are rehospitalized at least once in any given year after the injury, averaging 18 days per stay. Genitourinary disease is the leading cause, followed by skin disease.
Life expectancy does not recover. A 20-year-old with high tetraplegia who survives the first year has 32.0 years of life remaining, against 59.2 years for someone the same age without the injury. That is a loss of 27.2 years, roughly 46% of remaining life. If the injury leaves the person ventilator dependent, remaining life expectancy is 16.5 years. NSCISC notes that while first-year life expectancy has improved steadily since the 1970s, life expectancy after the first year "ha[s] not changed since the early 1980s." NSCISC labels these historical figures and publishes an individualized calculator.
The costs below come from the National Spinal Cord Injury Statistical Center's 2026 data sheet, in 2025 dollars, with lifetime figures discounted at 2%.
| Severity of injury | Average first year | Average each later year | Lifetime, injured at 25 | Lifetime, injured at 50 |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| High tetraplegia (C1 to C4), AIS A-C | $1,446,827 | $251,246 | $6,419,617 | $3,528,112 |
| Low tetraplegia (C5 to C8), AIS A-C | $1,045,459 | $154,128 | $4,690,573 | $2,885,122 |
| Paraplegia, AIS A-C | $705,131 | $93,409 | $3,139,165 | $2,060,139 |
| Motor functional at any level, AIS D | $472,190 | $57,353 | $2,144,693 | $1,513,784 |
Read the fine print, because it works in your favor.
These figures cover health care costs and living expenses only. They do not include lost wages, lost fringe benefits, or lost productivity. NSCISC puts those indirect costs at an average of $97,787 per year in 2025 dollars, and that is on top of everything in the table. NSCISC also labels these estimates "historical," because the underlying cost research dates to 2011 and is inflated forward to current dollars.
So when an insurer opens with a number that sounds large, put it next to the row that matches the injury. A $500,000 offer on a low tetraplegia case does not cover the first year.
Traumatic brain injury is harder to price per person, and no source publishes a credible per-case lifetime figure. No United States source publishes a reliable per-person lifetime TBI care cost. What does exist:
Both are aggregate national figures, not what one case is worth. Yours is worth what your medical records, life care plan, and vocational evidence show.
Louisiana requires a driver to carry $15,000 in bodily injury coverage per person. Set that against the table above.
Fifteen thousand dollars covers about 3.2% of the first year for the least severe spinal cord injury category, and about 1.0% of the first year for high tetraplegia. Against a lifetime estimate for a 25-year-old with high tetraplegia, it covers about 0.23%.
The statutory minimums under La. R.S. 32:900(B) are $15,000 per person and $30,000 per accident for bodily injury, plus $25,000 for property damage. An operator's policy carries the same limits under R.S. 32:900(C).
Which is why the coverage that usually matters most in a catastrophic case is your own.
Uninsured and underinsured motorist coverage. Under La. R.S. 22:1295, UM/UIM coverage is included in your policy by operation of law, at your liability limits, unless you affirmatively reject it, select lower limits, or select economic-only coverage. That rejection is only valid on a form prescribed by the Commissioner of Insurance and signed by the named insured. A signed form is presumed to become part of the policy, but a properly completed one creates only a rebuttable presumption that you knowingly rejected the coverage, and the statute puts the duty to verify the form on the insurer. A form that was not properly completed can fail. Whether a valid rejection exists is worth having a lawyer check.
Pull your policy and find out what you actually have. Most people do not know.
How often this matters here. In 2022, 35.6% of Louisiana drivers were underinsured, meaning they carried liability limits too low to cover the harm they could cause. That was among the five highest rates in the country, behind Colorado, Nevada, and Georgia, according to the Insurance Research Council. Nationally in 2023, IRC found one in three drivers was either uninsured or underinsured.
In 2022, more than one in three Louisiana drivers who caused an injury crash did not carry enough coverage to pay for it. That is the argument for stacking every available policy, and it is why these cases take real investigation rather than a demand letter.
Louisiana has a dedicated fund for exactly these injuries. It is worth knowing what it pays.
The Louisiana Traumatic Brain and Spinal Cord Injury Trust Fund was created in 1993 and is financed by fees on DUI, reckless operation, and speeding violations. It was renamed effective February 1, 2025 by Act 278 of 2024, which changed "traumatic head injury" to "traumatic brain injury" in the statute.
In fiscal year 2022, the fund served 553 survivors. Average expenditure per participant: about $3,885 for the year.
Put that against $57,353 to $251,246 for each year after the injury. The state's dedicated program covers somewhere between 1.5% and 6.8% of a single year.
It gets tighter. As of December 2022, 285 people were on the waitlist, the program was receiving about 100 new applications a year, and the oldest pending application dated to January 3, 2019. Roughly four years of waiting. Deposits into the fund fell from $1,642,603 in FY19 to $1,209,445 in FY22, a 26% decline, and the report states the program "no longer has any funds to carry forward to the next year." The same report notes the program then received $800,000 in state general funds for fiscal year 2023, which fully covered the roughly $400,000 shortfall and left $400,000 to begin reviewing waitlisted applicants. It is also a payer of last resort, so an applicant must exhaust Medicare and Medicaid before it approves anything.
We raise this because families are often told the fund is there. It is. It is also, at roughly $3,885 a year, not a plan.
More than one party is usually responsible, and finding all of them is often the difference between a policy limits case and a real recovery.
Where the injury happened at work, a workers' compensation claim and a third-party liability claim can run in parallel, and they compensate different things.
Two rules decide whether a catastrophic injury case is worth anything, and both changed recently.
You have two years to file. For injuries on or after July 1, 2024, Louisiana's deadline is two years from the date the injury was sustained, under La. Civ. Code art. 3493.1. Injuries before that date are governed by the older one-year period. Medical malpractice runs on its own statute.
Fault is now a cliff, not a slope. Louisiana changed its comparative fault rule effective January 1, 2026. Under Act 15 of 2025, amending La. Civ. Code art. 2323:
That is a change from the prior rule, which let a plaintiff recover a reduced amount at any percentage of fault. Act 15 contains no applicability clause. Louisiana generally presumes substantive changes apply prospectively, so claims arising before January 1, 2026 should remain under the old pure comparative fault rule, but that has not yet been tested in court.
Juries are now instructed on what their fault allocation actually does. In a case worth millions, moving a jury from 55% to 45% is the whole case, which is why defense investigators arrive early and why anything you say to an adjuster gets used.
Damages in a catastrophic case are built from evidence, not from a formula.
Where an injury proves fatal, the family may pursue a wrongful death claim, which in Louisiana runs on its own timeline under La. Civ. Code art. 2315.2: one year from the date of death or two years from the date of injury, whichever is longer.
We build the file around the lifetime, because that is where the value is and it is what insurers discount.
That means a life care planner, a vocational expert, and an economist, not just medical records. It means locating every applicable policy, including UM/UIM and any commercial or umbrella coverage. It means dealing with the comparative fault attack early, because for claims arising on or after January 1, 2026 a fault finding of 51% or more ends the case.
Our firm was awarded $3,500,000 for a couple struck by a company pickup and $1,550,000 for a client hit by a big rig. Catastrophic injury cases are a core part of our practice. Past results are not a guarantee of future success, and every case is different.
Motor vehicle crashes are the leading cause of both traumatic brain and spinal cord injuries in Louisiana, according to the Louisiana Department of Health. Nationally, vehicle crashes account for 37.1% of new traumatic spinal cord injuries and falls account for 32.5%, which together produce almost 70% of new cases. Acts of violence and sports injuries account for about another 23%, with medical and surgical complications and other causes making up the small remainder. High-energy events like truck and motorcycle collisions are especially likely to produce serious head or spinal trauma.
The National Spinal Cord Injury Statistical Center publishes cost by level of injury in 2025 dollars. First-year costs average from $472,190 for a motor functional injury to $1,446,827 for high tetraplegia. Each subsequent year averages from $57,353 to $251,246. Estimated lifetime costs for a person injured at 25 range from $2.1 million to $6.4 million. Those figures cover health care and living expenses only, and exclude lost wages and productivity, which NSCISC estimates separately at an average of $97,787 per year.
Less than 1% of people with a traumatic spinal cord injury experience complete neurological recovery by hospital discharge. Among people injured since 2015, 47.7% leave the hospital with incomplete tetraplegia and 20.4% with incomplete paraplegia. Function can improve with rehabilitation, and incomplete injuries have more potential for improvement than complete ones, but full neurological recovery is rare. This is why settlements based on a first-year prognosis so often fall short of what the injury actually costs.
Among people with traumatic spinal cord injury, 64.5% were employed at the time of injury and 17.8% are employed one year later. The employment rate rises slowly over the following decades and peaks at 31.2% at thirty years post-injury, which is still under half the pre-injury rate. Lost earning capacity is usually one of the largest components of a catastrophic injury claim, and proving it takes a vocational expert and an economist rather than a wage statement.
Two years from the date the injury was sustained, for injuries occurring on or after July 1, 2024. Injuries before that date are subject to the previous one-year period. Medical malpractice claims run under a separate statute, and wrongful death claims have their own rule: one year from the date of death or two years from the date of injury, whichever is longer. Because catastrophic cases require expert workup, waiting until the deadline approaches limits what your attorney can build.
It depends on how much. Louisiana changed its comparative fault rule effective January 1, 2026 under Act 15 of 2025. If you are found less than 51% at fault, your recovery is reduced by your percentage of fault. If you are found 51% or more at fault, you recover nothing. Claims arising before January 1, 2026 should remain under the previous rule, which reduced recovery proportionally at any level of fault, though Act 15 contains no applicability clause and that question has not yet been tested. In a catastrophic case this makes the fault fight worth as much as the damages fight.
This is common in Louisiana and it is not the end of the claim. Louisiana's minimum bodily injury coverage is $15,000 per person, which covers roughly 1% of the first year of a high tetraplegia injury. In 2022, 35.6% of Louisiana drivers were underinsured, among the five highest rates in the country. Your own uninsured and underinsured motorist coverage is usually the answer. Under La. R.S. 22:1295 that coverage is included in your policy at your liability limits unless you signed the Commissioner's form rejecting it. There may also be employer, commercial, or umbrella policies in play.
Yes, and you should apply, but plan around it rather than on it. The Louisiana Traumatic Brain and Spinal Cord Injury Trust Fund is funded by fees on DUI, reckless operation, and speeding violations. In fiscal year 2022 it served 553 survivors at an average of about $3,885 per participant for the year, against annual injury costs that run from $57,353 to $251,246. It is a payer of last resort, requiring applicants to exhaust Medicare and Medicaid first, and as of December 2022 it had 285 people on its waitlist with the oldest application dating to January 2019.
For a catastrophic injury, yes. These cases turn on future damages, which have to be proven with a life care plan, vocational assessment, and economic analysis rather than asserted. They usually involve multiple insurance policies that have to be located and stacked. And for claims arising on or after January 1, 2026, a comparative fault finding of 51% or more ends the claim entirely, which makes the early investigation, before the defense builds its fault theory, the most valuable work in the case.
The first offer in a catastrophic case almost never covers the first year.
If you or someone in your family has suffered a brain or spinal cord injury, call Brandt & Sherman for a free consultation. We will tell you what the case looks like across a lifetime, not just what the adjuster is offering this month. We handle these cases on a contingency fee, and clients may be responsible for costs and expenses in addition to the fee.
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