"What is my claim worth?" is the first question everyone asks and the one nobody answers straight — usually because the honest answer is that it depends on things a stranger can't see. What can be explained is how the number is arrived at, which is enough to tell whether an offer on your table is serious.
1. Two separate pots
German compensation splits in two, and conflating them is why people misjudge offers:
- Financial loss (materieller Schaden) — everything with a receipt or a calculation behind it: treatment costs, lost earnings, damaged property, travel to appointments, help you had to pay for. In principle you are put back in the position you would have been in.
- Pain and suffering (Schmerzensgeld) — the non-financial harm. No receipts, no formula in the statute.
An offer that looks generous is often covering only the first pot, or only part of it. The two are assessed differently and should be checked separately.
2. How Schmerzensgeld is actually set
There is no tariff and no multiplier in German law. Courts decide by comparison: what have other courts awarded for comparable injuries and comparable consequences? Practitioners work from published tables of decided cases (Schmerzensgeldtabellen), which collect thousands of judgments by injury type.
Two consequences worth understanding:
- Anyone quoting you a confident figure from a description alone is guessing. The comparison depends on the diagnosis, the treatment, the recovery, and what you could not do while recovering.
- German awards are lower than US ones. If your instinct is calibrated on American figures, recalibrate — that gap is not a sign your claim is being undervalued.
3. What pushes the figure up
Broadly, the things that move a Schmerzensgeld award are:
- severity of the injury, and how long treatment lasted;
- hospital stays, operations, and how many;
- whether anything is permanent — scarring, restricted movement, chronic pain;
- psychological consequences, which are frequently under-documented and under-claimed;
- how much it changed daily life, work and things you did before;
- your age, since a permanent consequence at 25 is not the same as at 75;
- the other side's conduct — including dragging out payment without good reason.
Notice how many of these are matters of evidence rather than argument. The claim is largely decided by what was written down at the time.
4. The items people forget to claim
Financial loss is routinely under-claimed because people only count the obvious things:
- Household help (Haushaltsführungsschaden). If you could not run your home as before, that is a loss even where a partner or parent absorbed it unpaid. It is frequently one of the larger items and one of the most often missed.
- Care given by family — again, real even though nobody invoiced.
- Future loss of earnings, where you cannot return to the same work or the same hours.
- Travel to treatment, prescriptions, aids and adaptations.
- A lump sum for incidental costs — calls, post, admin — which is conventionally allowed without itemising.
5. Judging an insurer's offer
An early offer arrives at the point when least is known about how you will recover. That timing is not accidental, and it is not evidence of bad faith either — it is simply cheaper to settle uncertainty early.
Three questions worth asking of any figure:
- Which pot is this? Does it cover financial loss, pain and suffering, or both?
- Has recovery finished? Settling before that is known means guessing on your own behalf.
- What does it ask me to give up? See below.
Worth knowing: where another party is liable, their insurer normally also bears your reasonable legal costs. Taking advice on an offer therefore often costs you nothing, which makes accepting a first offer unadvised a poor trade in almost every case.
6. Why "final settlement" is the dangerous phrase
A settlement described as final, or a declaration headed Abfindungserklärung, typically closes the matter for good — including consequences that emerge later.
That matters most in exactly the cases where it is hardest to see: back and neck injuries, head injuries, and psychological consequences, which can surface or worsen months afterwards. Once signed, a further claim is generally not available even if your condition changes.
Where lasting consequences are possible, how a settlement is framed can matter as much as the number in it. A smaller sum that leaves the door open is sometimes worth more than a larger one that closes it. That is a judgement to make with advice, before signing, not after.
The short version
Nobody can price your claim from a paragraph, and anyone who offers to should be treated with suspicion. What you can do is make sure the medical record is complete and contemporaneous, keep a diary of what you could not do, count the household and care items everyone forgets, and never sign anything with "final" in it while you are still recovering.