Austin Spinal Cord Injury Lawyer

Where the injury happened on the cord, and why that number decides everything

Every conversation about money on a spinal cord case starts with two pieces of shorthand: a level and a grade.

The level is where on the cord the damage sits, written as a vertebral segment. C1 through C8 is the cervical spine, in the neck. Damage there affects all four limbs and, high enough, affects breathing. T1 through T12 is the thoracic spine, L1 through L5 the lumbar. The lower the level, the more function is preserved below the shoulders.

The grade is the ASIA Impairment Scale, produced by the American Spinal Injury Association and applied through the International Standards for Neurological Classification of Spinal Cord Injury, the exam most families hear called simply "the ASIA exam." In ASIA's own words to patients:

• A: COMPLETE. No muscle movement, light touch, pin prick, or pressure feelings are present in or around your anus.
• B: SENSORY INCOMPLETE. Feeling is present in or around your anus. There might be a few muscle movements preserved below your neurological level of injury but only in the first adjacent segments.
• C: MOTOR INCOMPLETE. You can move some muscles well below your neurological level of injury, but many are not strong enough to lift against gravity.
• D: MOTOR INCOMPLETE. Muscle strength in most muscles below your neurological level of injury are strong enough to lift against gravity.
• E: NORMAL. The tested sensation and muscle movements have returned to normal.

Those two letters and one number are the input to every cost model in the case. The National Spinal Cord Injury Statistical Center at the University of Alabama at Birmingham publishes the table that most life care planners, economists and defense experts in the country start from, and it is organised on exactly that axis.

Before any figure below: every number in this section comes from the NSCISC 2026 SCI Data Sheet. We pulled it on 5 September 2026 and it is reproducible from the sheet itself, which is linked at the bottom of this page. The dollar amounts are in the sheet's own 2025 dollars, discounted at two percent, and they come from a cost study the sheet names by title.

What a lifetime costs, by level

Source: NSCISC, "Traumatic Spinal Cord Injury Facts and Figures at a Glance," 2026 SCI Data Sheet. Average yearly expenses in 2025 dollars; lifetime costs discounted at 2%. The sheet attributes the underlying cost model to "Economic Impact of SCI," Topics in Spinal Cord Injury Rehabilitation, Volume 16, Number 4 (2011).

Read the second column before the third. The gap between $251,246 and $57,353 a year is the whole argument in most of these cases, and it is why a defense expert will spend a deposition trying to move a client one grade down the scale.

The caveat that makes the table honest

The sheet says this about its own numbers, and we quote it because a firm that hides it is selling you something:

So the table is care and living costs. Lost earnings sit on top of it, and they get proved separately, by a different expert, under a different rule. We come back to that below.

One more thing the table does not do: it is a national average, and your client is one person. It is a sanity check on a life care plan, never a substitute for one. No adjuster is obligated to pay a national average and no jury is asked to award one.

What a life care plan actually contains

A life care plan is a document, usually sixty to two hundred pages, prepared by a certified life care planner, most often a rehabilitation nurse or a physiatrist with that credential. It is the spine of the damages case, and it is the difference between a demand that says "our client will need a lot of care" and a demand that a carrier's own actuary can price.

A plan that will survive cross-examination has, at minimum:

1. A medical foundation. Every item traces to a treating physician's recommendation, a discharge instruction, or the planner's consultation with a treating specialist. An item the planner invented is the item defense counsel opens with.
2. Physician and therapy visit schedules by year. Physiatry, urology, neurology, pulmonology where the level requires it, plus physical, occupational, and where indicated respiratory and speech therapy — each with a frequency and a duration, not a lump sum.
3. Medication tables. Antispasmodics, neuropathic pain agents, bowel and bladder programs, prophylaxis. Named drugs, doses, and a source for the price.
4. Durable medical equipment with replacement cycles. This is where plans get long. A manual chair, a power chair, a shower chair, a transfer board, a standing frame, a hospital bed, a mattress rated for pressure redistribution, a lift. Each one has a service life and a replacement year, and the plan lists every replacement across the client's remaining life expectancy.
5. Supplies, consumed and reordered forever. Catheters, gloves, bowel program supplies, wound care, skin barrier products.
6. Attendant care. Its own section below, because it is usually the largest single line.
7. Home and vehicle modification. With a schedule for when a ramp, a lift or a van gets replaced.
8. Case management and evaluation. Periodic re-evaluation by a rehab professional, which is what keeps the plan from going stale.
9. Projected complications. Discussed in its own section below.

The plan states quantities and unit costs. It does not state a present value. That conversion is a separate job, done by a forensic economist, and keeping the two roles separate is what makes both harder to attack.

Life expectancy is the multiplier on every recurring line in the plan. Get it wrong and everything downstream is wrong. NSCISC publishes the table the field uses, and it also warns that post-first-year life expectancies for people with SCI have not improved since the early 1980s and remain substantially below the general population.

Years of life remaining, for persons surviving at least one year post-injury. Source: NSCISC 2026 SCI Data Sheet. NSCISC also publishes an individualised life expectancy calculator, which is what a planner should be using rather than a table row.

Notice what this table does to a defense argument. A carrier that wants the number down has an incentive to argue a shorter life expectancy, which means arguing that the client will die sooner. Watching a defense expert make that argument out loud in front of a jury is one of the reasons these cases settle.

The costs nobody warns you about: the house, the van, the chair

The hospital talks about the injury. Nobody sits the family down and talks about the building.

The house. A standard Austin-area home is not usable by a wheelchair user, and the list of what has to change is longer than most people guess. A zero-step entry, which usually means a ramp or a regraded walk and a modified threshold. Doorways widened to clear a chair, including the bathroom door, which is almost always the narrowest in the house. A roll-in shower with a proper drain slope, because a curbed tub is a fall waiting to happen. Grab bars anchored into blocking, not drywall. Lowered counters and cooktop clearance if the client will cook. Reachable switches and outlets. Flooring that a chair can turn on. Depending on level and body weight, a ceiling track lift over the bed, which requires structural work in the ceiling.

If the house cannot take those changes, the plan prices a different house or a full accessible build. Central Texas has an added wrinkle: a lot of the housing stock around Austin sits on sloped lots, and a sloped lot turns a ramp into a retaining wall.

The van. A wheelchair-accessible vehicle is a converted minivan with a lowered floor and a ramp or a full-size van with a lift, plus tie-downs, plus hand controls or a transfer seat depending on whether the client will drive. It has a service life, and the plan has to replace it, more than once, across the client's remaining life. The conversion also has to be re-done onto the next vehicle.

The chair. Most SCI clients need more than one. A power chair for daily distance and a manual chair for transfers and travel is a common pairing. Add a shower or commode chair, a standing frame if indicated, and seating and positioning components — cushions and backs — that get replaced on a far shorter cycle than the chair itself. Everything in that list wears out.

We do not publish a price for any of it on this page, and here is why. The honest number for a van conversion in Travis County in the month your case is valued comes from a quote, not from an article. The honest number for a bathroom conversion comes from a contractor who walked the house. Any figure we posted here would be stale before you read it, and a stale figure in a demand package is a gift to the other side. What we can tell you is that these categories are inside the NSCISC first-year and subsequent-year totals in Section 1, which is part of why the first-year figure is so much larger than the years that follow.

Attendant care: hours, rates, and who is expected to provide them

Attendant care is usually the single largest line in a spinal cord life care plan, and it is the line carriers attack hardest.

The plan has to answer three questions, in order.

How many hours a day? This follows from level and grade, and it is a clinical judgment, not a negotiation. A C1–C4 client may need twenty-four-hour coverage, and if ventilator dependent, coverage by someone trained on the vent. A C5–C8 client typically needs substantial help with transfers, bowel and bladder program, dressing, and skin checks, with hours concentrated morning and evening. A person with paraplegia at a thoracic level may live largely independently and need help sized to specific tasks, or need very little. The hours have to come out of the treating team's assessment and the planner's own functional evaluation of the client at home.

At what level of skill? Not every hour is the same hour. A licensed vocational nurse doing a bowel program and a home health aide doing meal prep and laundry are different line items at different rates, and a plan that bills every hour at the highest rate is a plan that will be cut on cross-examination. A defensible plan splits the day.

At what rate? The rate comes from the planner's own market survey of home health agencies in the client's county, documented, dated, and reproducible. We do not publish a rate on this page. Rates move every year, they differ between Travis County and the counties around it, and a national average is not evidence of anything in a Texas courtroom.

Then comes the argument that families find hardest to hear. The defense will assume the spouse does it for free.

It gets phrased carefully. The adjuster will say the plan "overstates commercial attendant care because family support is already in place." What that means is that a spouse who quit her job to do transfers, run a bowel program, and turn her husband every few hours is being valued at zero because she loves him.

The answer is documentation, not indignation. The plan prices the care at what it would cost to buy, because that is what it costs to replace her, and because she will not be able to do it at sixty-eight the way she does it at forty. A vocational expert can also quantify what she gave up in her own earnings to do it. Families who keep a plain log of hours in the first year — who did what, for how long, on which days — hand their lawyer something an adjuster cannot wave away.

Secondary complications and why they belong in the plan

A life care plan that only prices a stable baseline is understating the case, because the baseline does not hold. Spinal cord injury generates a predictable set of downstream medical problems, and the plan prices them as expected events rather than as speculation.

NSCISC measures this directly. Since 2015, about 29% of people with traumatic SCI are re-hospitalised at least once during any given year following injury, with an average stay of about 18 days. The leading cause is diseases of the genitourinary system, followed by diseases of the skin. Respiratory, digestive, circulatory and musculoskeletal disease follow.

That single data point does a lot of work. It converts "he might get an infection someday" into a documented annual rate, from a federally funded registry, that a planner can build a line item on.

The complications that recur most in these plans:

• Pressure injuries. Skin over bone, in a person who cannot feel it and cannot shift weight, breaks down. A deep ulcer can mean months of bed rest, a flap surgery, and a hospital stay. This is the "diseases of the skin" line in the re-hospitalisation data, and it is preventable in exactly the way that attendant care hours and a properly specified mattress and cushion are preventable.
• Urinary tract infections and other genitourinary disease. The leading re-hospitalisation cause in the NSCISC data. Bladder management after SCI is a lifelong program, and the program has failure modes.
• Autonomic dysreflexia. In injuries at roughly T6 and above, an irritating stimulus below the level of injury — a blocked catheter, a pressure sore, an ingrown nail — can trigger a sudden, dangerous rise in blood pressure. It is a medical emergency, it recurs, and families have to be trained to recognise it. It is also a reason the plan prices caregiver training rather than assuming it.
• Respiratory complications. Higher cervical injuries compromise the muscles of breathing and coughing. NSCISC reports that among people surviving the first year after injury, respiratory disease is the leading cause of death, at 19.6%.
• Shoulder and upper-limb overuse. A manual chair user pushes, transfers, and weight-shifts with the shoulders for decades. Rotator cuff disease in that population is not bad luck; it is wear. Plans that ignore it are pricing a twenty-five-year-old who never gets older.
• Spasticity, neuropathic pain, bone density loss, and heterotopic ossification, each of which carries its own medication or procedure line.

None of that is speculative. It is what the registry says happens, and it is why a plan built only around the client's condition at discharge is worth less than the case.

Paid, incurred, or projected: three different rules for three kinds of medical bill

This is the section to send to the relative who keeps asking why the hospital's $840,000 bill is not simply the value of the case. Texas applies genuinely different rules to three categories of medical expense, and mixing them up is how families end up disappointed at disbursement.

Past medical expense: the paid-or-incurred rule

Texas Civil Practice and Remedies Code § 41.0105 reads, in full:

The Texas Supreme Court construed that language in Haygood v. De Escabedo, 356 S.W.3d 390 (Tex. 2011). "Paid or incurred" means the amount the provider has a legal right to be paid. So when a hospital bills $840,000 at its chargemaster rate but its contract with the client's insurer entitles it to $180,000, the recoverable past medical expense is the $180,000. The written-off balance is neither recoverable nor admissible. The Court restated that holding in its own words in In re K & L Auto Crushers, LLC, No. 19-1022 (Tex. 2021).

Two practical consequences follow, and both matter on a catastrophic case.

First, on a client with good health insurance, a very large hospital bill can shrink dramatically once the write-offs are applied, and that shrinkage is not a mistake by your lawyer. Second, § 41.0105 is not the only limit. It applies "in addition to any other limitation under law," and the older common-law rule that the charges must also be reasonable still stands on top of it.

Future medical expense: a different rule entirely

Read § 41.0105 again and notice the word "incurred." It is a rule about expenses that already exist.

Future care has not been incurred by anyone and there is no write-off to apply to it. Texas proves it under the reasonable probability rule. As the Fort Worth Court of Appeals put it in Antonov v. Walters, No. 2-04-255-CV (Tex. App.—Fort Worth June 30, 2005, pet. denied): "Texas follows the 'reasonable probability' rule for damages for future medical expenses. Thus, the plaintiff must show that there is a reasonable probability that such medical expenses will be incurred in the future." The same opinion notes that while expert medical testimony is the preferred practice, no rule makes it the only permissible proof.

That distinction is the entire argument for the life care plan. Past medicals are constrained by what somebody already paid. Future medicals are constrained by what the evidence shows will reasonably probably be needed and what it will reasonably cost. On a spinal cord case the future column is usually many times the past column, and it is the column that is built rather than collected.

Present value: what the economist does

The life care plan produces a stream of costs across decades. A jury awards a number today. A forensic economist converts one to the other, applying medical-cost growth on the way up and a discount rate on the way down, across the life expectancy established for that client.

Small assumption changes move large amounts of money. A discount rate a point higher, or a life expectancy three years shorter, can move a catastrophic case by a seven-figure amount without anyone disputing a single item of care. That is where a lot of the real fight lives, and it is fought expert to expert.

Earning capacity when you can still work but not the way you did

Texas measures this as loss of earning capacity, and the measure is not the paycheck.

As the Fourteenth Court of Appeals put it in Strauss v. Continental Airlines, Inc., No. 14-00-00694-CV (Tex. App.—Houston [14th Dist.] Jan. 10, 2002): "Recovery for loss of earning capacity is not based on the actual earnings lost, but rather on the loss of capacity to earn money." The same opinion quotes the working definition of earning capacity as the "ability and fitness to work in gainful employment for any type of remuneration, including salary, commissions, and other benefits, whether or not the person is actually employed."

That last clause is why this element is recoverable for a client who was between jobs, working cash, in school, or raising children when the injury happened. Capacity is the thing that was destroyed.

The registry data shows what happens to work after a spinal cord injury. NSCISC reports that 64.5% of people with traumatic SCI were employed at the time of injury. At one year post-injury the figure is 17.8%. It climbs slowly, reaching 31.2% at thirty years post-injury, and never returns to the pre-injury level.

That curve is the shape a vocational rehabilitation expert has to explain. Partial return to work is common and it is not the end of the claim. The realistic post-injury picture usually includes some combination of fewer hours, a narrower range of jobs, more sick days, a career ceiling that moved down, and a work life that ends earlier than it would have. A vocational expert prices the gap between the pre-injury and post-injury capacity; the economist reduces it to present value alongside the care costs.

Do not let anyone treat a return to work as an admission that the case got smaller. Someone who goes back to a desk at a reduced schedule, on a shorter work life, has still lost a great deal of capacity.

For the other damages categories on the case, see loss of earning capacity, medical expenses, disability and disfigurement, and pain and suffering.

Liens, set-asides, and protecting benefits you already receive

A settlement number is not the number the family receives. Between the two sits a set of repayment obligations that have to be identified early and resolved before disbursement. Handled late, they can eat a life-changing amount of money.

Texas hospital and EMS liens — Property Code Chapter 55. A hospital gets a lien on the injured person's claim if the person is admitted within 72 hours of the accident (§ 55.002(a)). An emergency medical services provider has a parallel lien only in a county with a population of 800,000 or less (§ 55.002(c)), which leaves Travis County out, and that EMS lien is capped at $1,000 (§ 55.004(f)). The lien attaches to the cause of action, any judgment, and the settlement proceeds (§ 55.003). Section 55.004(b) caps the hospital lien at the lesser of three amounts: the hospital's charges for the first 100 days of hospitalisation, 50 percent of everything recovered, or — where the trier of fact specifies what it awarded for hospital charges — that award less a pro rata share of the reasonable attorney's fees and expenses incurred in pursuing the claim. H.B. 2064 added that third limb in 2021, and it is the limb that nets fees out of the lien. It is secured by filing written notice with the county clerk in the county where services were provided, before money is paid (§ 55.005). And under § 55.007, a release is not valid unless the lien is paid or the lienholder is a party to it — which is the provision that makes an unresolved Chapter 55 lien everybody's problem, not just the client's.

Medicare. CMS states the rule plainly: "Medicare does not pay for items or services to the extent that payment has been, or may reasonably be expected to be, made through a liability insurer." Where Medicare has paid in the meantime, those are conditional payments — in the agency's words, "the payment is 'conditional' because it must be repaid to Medicare when a settlement, judgment, award or other payment is made." The statute is 42 U.S.C. § 1395y(b). The Benefits Coordination and Recovery Center runs the recovery, a Conditional Payment Notification carries a 30-day response window, and interest runs from the date of the demand letter. This is calendar work that starts at intake, not at disbursement.

Medicare set-asides. Where a client is a Medicare beneficiary now, or reasonably expects to be, part of the settlement may need to be set aside to pay for future injury-related care that Medicare would otherwise cover. Whether a set-aside is appropriate on a particular liability settlement is a case-specific judgment made with the client, and the analysis belongs in the settlement conversation rather than after it.

Medicaid. In Texas, applying for or receiving medical assistance operates by statute as an assignment of the recipient's right of recovery against the person who caused the injury (Human Resources Code § 32.033). The same section obligates the recipient to tell the agency about an unsettled tort claim.

Special needs trusts. A large settlement paid outright can end eligibility for needs-tested benefits. Federal law provides for a trust holding the assets of a disabled individual under age 65, established by the individual, a parent, grandparent, legal guardian or a court, with the State repaid from what remains at death up to the total medical assistance it paid (42 U.S.C. § 1396p(d)(4)(A)). Getting this in place before funds move is the difference between preserving benefits and losing them.

Structured settlements. Some or all of the recovery can be paid as periodic payments rather than a lump sum. Texas regulates what happens afterward: under the Structured Settlement Protection Act, Civil Practice and Remedies Code chapter 141, no transfer of structured settlement payment rights is effective without prior court approval on express findings, including that the transfer is in the payee's best interest taking into account the welfare and support of dependents, and that the payee was advised in writing to seek independent professional advice (§ 141.004). If a company later offers to buy out the payments, that statute is the reason a judge has to look at the deal first.

One Texas program families rarely hear about. Texas HHS runs the Comprehensive Rehabilitation Services program for people with a traumatic brain injury, a traumatic spinal cord injury, or both, caused by an external physical force, where the injury significantly affects the ability to perform daily activities and the person is medically stable. It is a payer of last resort by design: participants must first use all available personal medical benefits, including insurance, Medicare or Medicaid, before CRS funds pay. It does not replace a claim, and it is worth knowing about while a claim is pending.

Spinal cord rehabilitation in Central Texas

Acute care usually starts at Dell Seton Medical Center at The University of Texas, which Ascension describes as the only adult Level I trauma center in the 11-county Central Texas region around Austin, ACS-verified and State of Texas designated. On a high-energy crash on I-35, MoPac, US 183 or SH 71, that is where the helicopter goes.

What happens after acute care is where geography starts to matter to the case.

The federally funded SCI Model Systems — the network that produces the NSCISC data used throughout this page — has two Texas centers: TIRR in Houston and the Baylor Scott & White Institute for Rehabilitation. Neither is in Austin. Central Texas families frequently end up doing inpatient rehabilitation in Houston or the Dallas–Fort Worth area, an hour and a half to three and a half hours from home, at exactly the point when a spouse is also trying to hold a job and keep other children in school.

That has three consequences for the claim, and all three are routinely under-documented:

1. Travel and lodging during inpatient rehab are case costs to the family, and they are recorded contemporaneously or they are not recovered.
2. Follow-up specialty care may stay out of town for years. A physiatrist who knows SCI, a urologist who manages neurogenic bladder, a seating clinic that fits chairs properly — the plan has to price the travel to reach them, not just the visit.
3. The distance shapes the attendant-care line. Care that would be delivered by a clinic in a city with a Model System center gets delivered at home here, by paid staff or by family.

NSCISC also gives the timeline families ask about. Since 2015 the average acute-care hospital stay is 18.6 days and the average rehabilitation stay is 36.3 days — down from roughly 30 and 110 days in the 1970s. Those are averages across the national registry, and they are shorter than most families expect. Shorter inpatient stays move care into the home, which moves cost onto the family, which is one more reason the attendant-care section of the plan carries so much weight.

Why the first offer on a catastrophic case is always low

The first offer arrives before the case is knowable, and that is the point of it.

Three to six months after the injury, nobody has an ASIA grade that anyone would call settled, no life care plan exists, the client has not yet had the first pressure injury or the first UTI, and no economist has run a present value. An offer made in that window is priced against an information gap the carrier is comfortable with and the family is not.

What the offer is actually built on:

• The number that is easy to count. Paid medical bills to date and wages missed to date. Both are the smallest they will ever be, and § 41.0105 has already shrunk the medical figure.
• A guess that recovery continues. Every early offer contains an implicit bet that the client will improve. NSCISC reports that since 2015, less than 1% of people with traumatic SCI experienced complete neurological recovery by the time of hospital discharge, and that incomplete tetraplegia is now the most common category, at 47.7%.
• Policy limits, sometimes. On a catastrophic case the available insurance is frequently smaller than the damages. When a policy limit is genuinely the ceiling, that changes the strategy — toward finding other coverage, other defendants, and umbrella policies — rather than toward accepting the first letter.
• Financial pressure. The offer often lands the same month the income stopped and the home-modification quotes arrived.

There is a real cost to waiting and we will say so plainly: the case takes longer, the money comes later, and that is hard. There is a larger cost to signing a release on a fifty-year injury in month four. A release is final. If the plan turns out to need a ceiling lift and a second surgery, there is nobody left to ask.

We will tell you straight what we think the case is, including when we think the honest answer is that the offer on the table is fair and you should take it. That happens. It is rarer in the first six months than adjusters would like.

What our fee covers on a case this expensive to build

We work on a contingency fee. No hourly billing, no retainer, nothing out of pocket. If there is no recovery there is no fee and you do not owe us the case expenses.

The part worth understanding on a spinal cord case is the expense side, because this is one of the most expensive kinds of case to build properly and the firm advances every dollar of it.

A catastrophic-damages case is carried by experts, and the experts here are the case:

• A certified life care planner to build and defend the plan described above, including a home evaluation and a local cost survey.
• A physiatrist or treating specialist to establish the medical foundation for every line in it.
• A vocational rehabilitation expert for the earning-capacity analysis.
• A forensic economist to reduce a fifty-year cost stream to present value.
• Where liability is genuinely contested, an accident reconstructionist or a premises or safety engineer.

On top of that: complete medical records from every facility, and on an SCI case that is thousands of pages across acute care, rehab, home health and durable medical equipment vendors; imaging in a form an expert can read; depositions with a court reporter and often a videographer; and the exhibit work that makes a plan comprehensible to twelve people who have never seen one.

Compare that to what a rear-end soft-tissue case needs, which is a records request and a demand letter, and you can see why we say the money side of an SCI case is built rather than collected. We front all of it. You approve the big-ticket expenses before we spend them, and the fee percentage and how expenses are handled are written into the agreement in plain language before you sign anything.

The Texas rules that put a floor and a ceiling on this case

The deadline. Under Civil Practice and Remedies Code § 16.003(a), suit has to be filed within two years of the day the claim accrues. On a spinal cord case that clock starts on the day of the crash or the fall, even though the damages run for the next fifty years, and the discovery rule will not extend it for an injury the client obviously knew about from the first hour.

Comparative fault. Chapter 33 governs. Under § 33.001 a claimant recovers nothing if his own percentage of responsibility is greater than 50 percent, and under § 33.012(a) the court reduces the award by the claimant's percentage. On a case valued in the millions, a single percentage point is real money, which is why the defense will invest in an argument over five percent that would not be worth making on a smaller file.

Responsible third parties. A defendant can move to designate someone else as a responsible third party under § 33.004(a), generally on or before the 60th day before trial. That mechanism gets a fuller treatment on our Austin construction accident page, where it comes up constantly.

Caps, and where they do not apply. In an ordinary Texas negligence case there is no statutory cap on actual damages, economic or non-economic. Two sets of caps exist and neither is general. Health care liability claims are capped for non-economic damages at $250,000 per claimant against a physician or a health care provider other than a health care institution under § 74.301(a), at $250,000 per claimant against a single health care institution under § 74.301(b), and, where judgment runs against more than one institution, at $250,000 per institution with a $500,000 aggregate per claimant under § 74.301(c). Exemplary (punitive) damages are capped under § 41.008(b) at the greater of two times economic damages plus non-economic damages up to $750,000, or $200,000 — with § 41.008(c) listing the conduct that removes the cap. If someone tells you a Texas car crash case is "capped," ask which statute they mean.

Statute links: CPRC § 16.003 · CPRC ch. 33 · CPRC ch. 41 · CPRC ch. 74 · CPRC ch. 141 · Property Code ch. 55 · Health & Safety Code ch. 92 · Human Resources Code § 32.033

Crash severity in Central Texas, and what these numbers can and cannot tell you

Before the figures: Texas does not publish a spinal cord injury count. Spinal cord injuries are reportable to the Department of State Health Services under Health and Safety Code § 92.002, and DSHS runs a TBI/SCI registry that hospitals and rehabilitation facilities are required to report into. As of 5 September 2026, DSHS publishes no current public data brief giving a Texas SCI count. So we do not state one. The numbers below are crash severity numbers from TxDOT, and CRIS does not code spinal cord injury as such. Treat them as a proxy for how often a Central Texas crash produces a catastrophic injury, and nothing more.

Statewide, in calendar year 2025, TxDOT recorded 14,396 serious injury crashes with 17,420 people sustaining a serious injury, alongside 3,769 deaths and 244,534 people injured overall. TxDOT's own note: that report reflects Texas Peace Officer's Crash Reports received and processed as of 7 April 2026.

Source: TxDOT, "Crashes and Injuries by County 2025." The statewide totals in that county table read 14,395 and 17,418, one and two lower than the crash-facts sheet. We report each figure against its own TxDOT document and have not reconciled them.

Here is the part that matters. TxDOT's own instruction manual for officers, CR-100 (2025 Edition, Version 29.0), defines a Suspected Serious Injury as a "[s]evere injury that prevents continuation of normal activities," and the list of examples it gives ends with a single word:

An officer standing at the scene, filling in code A, is applying a definition that names this injury explicitly. That is why the CR-3 crash report matters on an SCI case from day one.

Nationally, NSCISC puts the annual incidence of traumatic spinal cord injury at roughly 54 cases per one million people, about 18,482 new cases each year — a figure that excludes people who die at the scene — with approximately 311,560 people living with traumatic SCI in the United States (range 261,168 to 399,079). The average age at injury has risen to 44.3 years since 2015, up from 29 in the 1970s. Causes since 2015: vehicular 37.1%, falls 32.5%, violence 15.2%, sports 7.6%, medical/surgical 3.8%, other 3.9%.

Where you see a number on this page it is national NSCISC registry data or it is Texas crash data, and we have said which.

What to do in the next thirty days

This is the list for a family who is three to six months out and has just been handed a discharge plan and an offer.

1. Get the life care plan started before you negotiate anything. The plan is the case. A demand without one is a guess, and an offer answered without one is answered blind.
2. Ask the treating physiatrist to put the long-term recommendations in the chart. Attendant care hours, equipment, the therapy course, and the follow-up schedule. A recommendation that lives only in a conversation cannot anchor a plan line.
3. Start an attendant-care log today. Date, who provided care, what tasks, how many hours. Paper is fine. A phone note is fine. This is the single most valuable document a family can create, and it cannot be reconstructed a year later.
4. Photograph the house before anything is modified. Every doorway, the bathroom, the entry, the steps. Once the ramp goes in, the evidence of what was needed is gone.
5. Keep every receipt and every mileage record for out-of-town rehab. If inpatient rehab is in Houston or Dallas, that travel is a real cost and it is provable only if it is written down as it happens.
6. Give your lawyer the health insurance card, the Medicare or Medicaid card, and any letter from a hospital about a lien. Lien and set-aside work starts at the beginning of the case. Started at disbursement, it delays the money and shrinks it.
7. Do not sign a release, and do not give a recorded statement to the other driver's carrier, until someone on your side has read the discharge plan.
8. Request the CR-3 crash report if the injury came from a crash, and keep it. It carries the injury severity code discussed above.

Where these numbers came from

• National Spinal Cord Injury Statistical Center, University of Alabama at Birmingham. Traumatic Spinal Cord Injury Facts and Figures at a Glance, 2026 SCI Data Sheet. Data on 38,647 people with traumatic SCI collected through August 2025 by 31 federally funded SCI Model Systems centers. PDF
• American Spinal Injury Association. ISNCSCI Patient Brochure, 18 November 2022. PDF
• Model Systems Knowledge Translation Center (NIDILRR). SCI Model System Centers. msktc.org
• Texas Department of Transportation. Texas Motor Vehicle Traffic Crash Facts, Calendar Year 2025. PDF
• Texas Department of Transportation. Crashes and Injuries by County, 2025. PDF
• Texas Department of Transportation. State of Texas Instructions to Police for Reporting Crashes, CR-100, 2025 Edition, Version 29.0. PDF
• Texas Department of State Health Services. EMS and Trauma Registries. dshs.texas.gov
• Texas Health and Human Services. Comprehensive Rehabilitation Services (CRS). hhs.texas.gov
• Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services. Medicare Secondary Payer and Medicare's Recovery Process. cms.gov
• Ascension. Dell Seton Medical Center at The University of Texas. healthcare.ascension.org
• Texas Legislature, Texas Statutes. statutes.capitol.texas.gov
• Texas Judicial Branch, Opinions. txcourts.gov

What is deliberately absent from this page, and why. No price for a wheelchair van, a home modification, a power chair or an hour of attendant care — those figures are local, dated, and belong in a quote or a planner's market survey rather than on a web page. No Texas spinal cord injury count, because DSHS publishes none that is current. No case results and no settlement figures.

Questions families ask in the first six months

Nineteen questions families ask us in the first six months, answered for this page.

Related pages on this site

• Brain injury claims and how they are proved
• Spinal injuries from a job site fall
• Riders and spinal injury
• When the injury was fatal
• Loss of earning capacity
• Disability and disfigurement

Talk to someone about the number

This page is general information about Texas law. It is not legal advice, and reading it does not create an attorney-client relationship. Every case turns on its own facts. Past results do not guarantee future results.