Maryland's cap on noneconomic damages in personal-injury and wrongful-death lawsuits stands at $980,000 for cases filed after Oct. 1, with the limit set to climb by $15,000 every year. A bill that would have wiped out that cap entirely died in committee during the 2026 legislative session, leaving the fight to resume when lawmakers return to Annapolis for the next General Assembly session on Jan. 13, 2027.
The legislation, sponsored by Sen. Jeff Waldstreicher and Del. Natalie Ziegler, would have eliminated the cap for personal-injury and wrongful-death actions, but the House Judiciary Committee sent it to summer study in March, according to the Maryland Daily Record. Official legislative records for the measure, filed as SB 474, describe it as repealing certain limitations on noneconomic damages and applying the change prospectively, per the Maryland General Assembly.
Noneconomic damages cover intangible losses such as pain and suffering, emotional distress, and loss of care, support or enjoyment of life. Maryland courts reduce any jury award exceeding the cap down to the legal limit, though juries themselves are not informed of that cap during deliberations.
Advocate Says Cap Shifts Costs to Patients
Emily Malarkey, legislative chair with the Maryland Association for Justice, testified before the House Judiciary Committee on Oct. 20 that the state's cap has not made insurance more affordable, kept doctors practicing, or kept hospitals open. She argued the cap effectively shifts costs from insurance companies to patients and should be repealed.
Malarkey also told the committee that repealing Maryland's cap would not cause liability insurance premiums to soar, pointing to Washington, D.C., which has no cap on noneconomic damages. Per her testimony, two insurers in the District charge rates within 1% of Maryland's, while a third D.C. insurer charges 19% less than its Maryland counterpart — evidence, she said, that the District's insurance rates run similar to Maryland's despite the absence of a cap there.
Defense Attorney Warns of Costlier Catastrophic Cases
Joseph Johnston, a medical malpractice defense specialist at Goodell DeVries, warned that repealing the cap could make severe catastrophic injury cases considerably more expensive to settle. Those cases often target hospitals in birth injury lawsuits, and plaintiffs' attorneys frequently hire economists and life care planners to testify on the long-term costs of care.
Life care plan damages are not subject to any cap and, according to Johnston, routinely reach tens of millions of dollars. He cautioned that removing the noneconomic-damages limit could compound hospitals' difficulties defending medical malpractice lawsuits already complicated by those uncapped life care plan figures.
Other Liability Measures Also Stalled
The push to end the damages cap wasn't the only civil liability fight to fizzle this year, as reported by the Daily Record. A separate proposal to cap the Maryland Transit Administration's total tort liability at $400,000 was stripped out of legislation before it passed, meaning that bill became law without the liability limit intact.
Maryland's noneconomic-damages framework traces back decades: Chapter 639 of 1986 established the state's first cap on such damages, initially applying strictly to medical malpractice cases, according to a report from the Maryland Department of Legislative Services. Separate fiscal analysis from the department notes that Maryland places no cap on economic damages or punitive damages, with limits applying only to the noneconomic category.
With Waldstreicher's bill shelved rather than resolved, the question of whether Maryland will join jurisdictions like Washington, D.C. in dropping the cap entirely remains unsettled. Lawmakers are expected to pick the debate back up when the General Assembly reconvenes in Annapolis in January.
