If you were hurt in a crash on I-94 or slipped on an icy lot in Fargo, one of the first questions is how much the law will let you recover. In North Dakota the short answer is reassuring. For an ordinary injury case, the state puts no ceiling on your compensatory damages. There is no cap on your medical bills, your lost wages, or your pain and suffering. The limits that do exist are narrow, and they mostly show up in three places: punitive damages, medical malpractice claims, and lawsuits against the government.
Here is what actually applies in North Dakota, with the statute behind each rule.
The general rule is no cap
North Dakota does not cap compensatory damages in a standard negligence case. Whatever a jury decides your economic losses (medical care, lost income, future treatment) and your noneconomic losses (pain, disability, loss of enjoyment) are worth, that is what you can be awarded.
There is one wrinkle worth knowing. When a jury awards more than $250,000 in economic damages, the defense can ask the court to review the award, and if the judge finds the economic figure unreasonable, the judge reduces it to a reasonable amount.1 This is not a hard cap. It applies only to economic damages, not to pain and suffering, and the court can trim only an award the evidence does not support. In practice it works like the remittitur judges already use, with a $250,000 trigger written into the statute.
Punitive damages carry a real cap
The one dollar limit that shows up in a typical crash case is on exemplary damages, North Dakota's term for punitive damages. You cannot simply ask for them. A plaintiff has to move the court for leave to amend the pleadings and show, by clear and convincing evidence, that the defendant acted with oppression, fraud, or actual malice.2 Ordinary carelessness does not qualify.
If you clear that bar, the award is capped. Exemplary damages cannot exceed two times the amount of your compensatory damages or $250,000, whichever is greater.2 So on a $1 million compensatory verdict, punitive damages could reach $2 million; on a smaller verdict, the $250,000 floor controls.
Drunk driving cases get an easier path. The statute specifically allows exemplary damages against a driver who caused the crash while at an alcohol concentration of at least .08 percent, while under the influence of a controlled substance, or after refusing a chemical test.2 The cap still applies, but you do not have to prove malice separately when the driver was impaired.
Medical malpractice has a hard $500,000 cap
The clearest cap in North Dakota law is in health care cases. Noneconomic damages, meaning pain, suffering, disfigurement, and similar non-financial harm, are limited to $500,000 in a medical malpractice action, no matter how many defendants or claims are involved, and the cap applies even to a wrongful death caused by malpractice.3
Two details matter. First, the cap covers only noneconomic damages; your economic losses, the medical bills and lost earnings, are not capped. Second, the jury is never told about the limit. Jurors return their full number, and the judge reduces it afterward to comply with the statute.3
Patients have challenged this cap as unfair to the most severely injured. In 2019 the North Dakota Supreme Court settled the question in Condon v. St. Alexius Medical Center, upholding the $500,000 limit against an equal-protection challenge and reversing a trial court that had struck it down.4 The cap is current law.
Suing the government means firm limits
If your crash involved a state vehicle, a county snowplow, or a city truck, different rules apply, and here the caps are real. Claims against the State of North Dakota are limited to $500,000 per person and $2,000,000 for any single occurrence as of July 1, 2026, figures the state has raised on a set schedule over recent years.56 Political subdivisions, meaning counties, cities, and townships, face a parallel limit under their own statute.7
Two features sting. The government cannot be made to pay punitive damages at all,57 and if several people are hurt in the same incident, they share the single-occurrence cap rather than each collecting the full per-person amount. For a serious multi-victim crash with a public vehicle, that ceiling can fall well short of the actual harm.
Comparative fault can shrink what you collect
North Dakota follows modified comparative fault, which can reduce or erase a recovery based on your share of the blame. Your award drops by your percentage of fault, and if your fault is as great as the combined fault of everyone else, you recover nothing.8 So at 50 percent fault or more you are barred, while at 30 percent fault on a $100,000 case you collect $70,000. Insurers lean on this rule hard, so how fault gets divided often matters more to your check than any statutory cap.
The no-fault threshold is the quieter limit
For car crashes, the biggest restriction has nothing to do with the size of an award. It controls whether you can sue for pain and suffering at all. North Dakota is a no-fault state. Your own policy pays basic no-fault benefits, capped at $30,000 per person per accident, for medical expenses and lost income no matter who caused the wreck.9
To step outside that system and pursue the at-fault driver for noneconomic damages, you have to clear the serious injury threshold. That means an injury causing death, dismemberment, serious and permanent disfigurement, disability beyond 60 days, or medical expenses over $2,500.9 Below that line, no-fault handles your economic losses and a pain-and-suffering claim is off the table.
Your vehicle is treated separately. Property damage and diminished value claims are not subject to any of these injury caps. Those follow the at-fault driver's property coverage, and you can read how North Dakota handles diminished value on its own page.
What usually limits a real recovery
For most North Dakota crash victims, the real ceiling has nothing to do with these statutes. It is the at-fault driver's insurance. The state's minimum liability limits are just 25/50/25, meaning $25,000 per person and $50,000 per crash for injuries.10 When the at-fault driver carries the minimum and your injuries are worse than that, your own uninsured and underinsured motorist coverage becomes the source of recovery, and North Dakota requires that coverage on every policy.11
Time is the other hard limit. You generally have six years from the crash to file a personal injury lawsuit,12 but only two years for a wrongful death claim.13 Those deadlines do not move for a strong case.
If you are weighing a claim, pull the official crash report first (North Dakota routes those through the NDDOT), and consider talking to a North Dakota injury attorney before you accept an insurer's number, especially where fault, the serious injury threshold, or a government defendant is in play.
This is general information, not legal advice.
Sources
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North Dakota Century Code § 32-03.2-08 (award of damages; review of economic damages over $250,000). https://ndlegis.gov/cencode/t32c03-2.pdf
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North Dakota Century Code § 32-03.2-11 (exemplary damages; cap, motion to amend, impaired-driver provision). https://ndlegis.gov/cencode/t32c03-2.pdf
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North Dakota Century Code § 32-42-02 (limitation on noneconomic damages in health care malpractice). https://ndlegis.gov/cencode/t32c42.pdf
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Condon v. St. Alexius Medical Center, 2019 ND 113 (North Dakota Supreme Court). https://www.ndcourts.gov/supreme-court/opinion/2019/ND/113
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North Dakota Century Code § 32-12.2-02 (liability of the state; limitations). https://ndlegis.gov/cencode/t32c12-2.pdf
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North Dakota Office of Management and Budget, Risk Services (state liability limits, $500,000 per person and $2,000,000 per occurrence effective July 1, 2026). https://www.omb.nd.gov/doing-business-state/risk-services
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North Dakota Century Code § 32-12.1-03 (liability of political subdivisions; limitations). https://ndlegis.gov/cencode/t32c12-1.pdf
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North Dakota Century Code § 32-03.2-02 (modified comparative fault). https://ndlegis.gov/cencode/t32c03-2.pdf
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North Dakota Century Code § 26.1-41-01 (definitions; basic no-fault benefits and "serious injury"). https://ndlegis.gov/cencode/t26-1c41.pdf
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North Dakota Century Code § 39-16.1-11 (minimum motor vehicle liability limits, 25/50/25). https://ndlegis.gov/cencode/t39c16-1.pdf
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North Dakota Century Code §§ 26.1-40-15.2 and 26.1-40-15.3 (mandatory uninsured and underinsured motorist coverage). https://ndlegis.gov/cencode/t26-1c40.pdf
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North Dakota Century Code § 28-01-16 (six-year limitation for personal injury). https://ndlegis.gov/cencode/t28c01.pdf
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North Dakota Century Code § 28-01-18 (two-year limitation for wrongful death). https://ndlegis.gov/cencode/t28c01.pdf