Wrongful Termination Settlement Calculator — your lost pay

Source: U.S. EEOC FY2024 Annual Performance Report (the agency recovered nearly $700M for ~21,000 people overall). This covers employment-discrimination claims broadly, not wrongful termination alone, and the per-person figure is a derived average — use the calculator above for a range based on your salary and time out of work.

California is the one state where the upper figure this calculator produces can be actively misleading, and it is worth understanding why before you use the number. The ceiling we show comes from 42 U.S.C. § 1981a(b)(3), the federal cap on compensatory and punitive damages, which runs from $50,000 for an employer with 15 to 100 employees up to $300,000 for one with more than 500. California claims are usually brought instead under the Fair Employment and Housing Act, and FEHA carries no cap at all on either compensatory or punitive damages. If your claim is a FEHA claim, the ceiling above is not your ceiling.

Three other California differences change the arithmetic rather than the ceiling. Coverage starts at five employees under FEHA, not fifteen, so an employer too small for Title VII may still be covered. The filing window is three years to file with the Civil Rights Department, against 180 or 300 days for an EEOC charge, which changes what is still live. And California recognises a Tameny claim — wrongful discharge in violation of public policy — which is a tort rather than a statutory claim and carries its own damages, including punitive, outside any statutory scheme. New York and New Jersey work similarly to California on the cap question; most other states track the federal structure.

Can I sue for being fired without a reason?

On its own, generally not. At-will employment means either side can end the relationship at any time for any reason or none. The absence of a reason is not itself a claim — what creates one is a reason that the law prohibits, or a contract that removed the at-will default. Two things commonly do remove it: a written employment agreement with a term or a for-cause provision, and a collective bargaining agreement. An employee handbook sometimes does, depending on the state and on how it is written.

Can I sue for retaliation after a complaint?

This is the most common route, and it has a structural advantage: retaliation does not require the underlying complaint to have been correct, only that it was made in good faith about something the law protects. The elements an employer has to answer are a protected activity (a discrimination complaint, a safety report, a wage claim, jury service, taking protected leave), employer knowledge of it, and an adverse action afterwards. Timing carries real weight here: a firing weeks after a documented complaint is much harder for an employer to explain than one a year later.

Can I sue for discrimination?

Where the reason was a protected characteristic — race, colour, religion, sex including pregnancy and sexual orientation, national origin, age from 40, disability, genetic information — the firing is unlawful under federal law, and most states add categories on top. Two practical thresholds decide whether federal law reaches your employer at all: Title VII and the ADA generally require 15 employees, and the ADEA requires 20. Below those numbers the federal caps in the calculator do not apply either, which is exactly the case the tool flags rather than guesses at — your state statute may still cover you, and several have no cap.

How long do I have to sue?

Shorter than most people expect, and the first deadline is administrative rather than judicial. A federal discrimination claim requires an EEOC charge within 180 days of the firing, extended to 300 days in states with their own fair-employment agency. Only after the EEOC issues a right-to-sue letter does the court deadline start, and that is a further 90 days. State-law claims run on their own clocks, which are often far longer — three years in California. Because the shortest of these is the one that binds, the deadline is worth confirming before anything else in this page matters.