People who spend their lives around valuation develop good instincts for it. A painting is worth what a comparable one brought at auction. A house is worth what the last three on the street closed at. A company is worth a multiple of what it earns.

None of that intuition transfers. When a California court determines what a death is worth, it applies a framework that ignores most of what an appraiser would consider, excludes several things everyone assumes are included, and produces numbers that can be counterintuitive in both directions. Understanding the actual formula is useful well before anyone needs it, because the inputs are things a family either documented or did not.

The Statute Says Almost Nothing

The starting point is remarkably spare. Code of Civil Procedure section 377.61 provides that damages may be awarded that, under all the circumstances of the case, may be just, and that the court determines the respective rights of the people entitled to the award.

That is the entire instruction on amount. There is no schedule, no cap, and no multiplier. The content comes from a century of case law now organized into the pattern jury instructions the Judicial Council publishes, where wrongful death damages are broken into two categories that behave very differently.

The Economic Column

These are the calculable losses, and they are the part that behaves the way a financial analysis would.

Financial Support Over A Lifetime

The largest line is usually the support the decedent would have provided to each heir during the years they would have been expected to provide it. Building it requires establishing earning capacity, projecting a career trajectory, applying work-life expectancy tables, subtracting personal consumption, and reducing the result to present value.

Earning capacity is the operative concept rather than last year’s tax return. A founder between ventures, an artist with irregular income, or a professional who stepped back to raise children can all have a capacity figure substantially above or below recent reported income, and both sides retain economists to argue about it.

The Services Nobody Priced

Household services are separately compensable and routinely understated. Childcare, home management, property oversight, and family caregiving are valued at what it would cost to hire replacements, and over a twenty-year horizon that figure is often large. Funeral and burial expenses and the value of gifts or benefits the heirs would have expected round out the column.

The Non-Economic Column, And What It Excludes

The second category covers the loss of the relationship: love, companionship, comfort, care, assistance, protection, affection, society, and moral support. For a child, it includes the loss of the parent’s training and guidance.

There is no formula for this. A jury assigns a number, and the pattern instruction expressly declines to give them a method. The full set of instructions is published in the Judicial Council’s civil jury instructions, and reading the wrongful death series is the fastest way to understand what a jury is actually told.

What Is Not Compensable

Three exclusions surprise nearly everyone.

The survivors’ own grief, sorrow, and mental anguish are not recoverable. The claim compensates the loss of what the person provided, not the pain of losing them. Jurors are instructed on that distinction explicitly.

Punitive damages are not available in a wrongful death claim at all, regardless of how egregious the conduct was. They exist only in the companion survival action brought by the estate.

And the decedent’s own suffering before death belongs to the estate rather than the family.

The Change That Took Effect This Year

That last point moved recently, and the movement is easy to miss. Code of Civil Procedure section 377.34 limits survival damages to losses the decedent incurred before death, including punitive damages, and expressly excludes pain, suffering, and disfigurement.

A temporary exception allowed those damages in cases granted trial preference before January 1, 2022, or filed on or after January 1, 2022 and before January 1, 2026. That window has now closed. Actions filed in 2026 fall back under the general rule, which means a case with facts identical to one filed in December 2025 can be worth materially less simply because of its filing date.

Because the two claims are governed by different rules and belong to different parties, counsel for negligence‑related deaths in Rosemead and elsewhere in Southern California generally evaluate the survival action and the wrongful death claim as separate valuations from the outset rather than treating them as one number.

Why Documentation Drives The Outcome

Two families with comparable losses can reach very different results, and the difference is usually evidentiary rather than legal.

The records that matter are ordinary ones: tax filings and business records establishing earning capacity, employment agreements and offer letters showing trajectory, evidence of what the decedent contributed to the household in hours as well as dollars, and proof of the relationship itself in the form of photographs, correspondence, travel, and testimony from people outside the family.

That last category carries more weight than most people expect. Non-economic damages turn on whether a jury can see the relationship clearly, and relationships that were lived rather than recorded are genuinely harder to prove. It is an uncomfortable thing to know, and it is the single most actionable fact in the entire framework.