Legal Trends
New York Led the U.S. in Med Mal Payouts in 2024 and 2025. The Public File Doesn't Say Which Hospitals.
New York paid $1.28 billion across 2,474 med mal reports in two years. NYC H+H alone settled $45.77M in FY24. NPDB tracks practitioners, not hospitals.
Key Finding
The National Practitioner Data Bank tracked $729.58 million in New York medical malpractice payouts across 1,269 reports in 2025, more than any other state. The 2024 figure ran $550.12 million across 1,205 reports. Combined, that's $1.28 billion across 2,474 reports. NYC Health + Hospitals alone settled $45.77 million in tort claims in fiscal year 2024, the fifth-highest agency total. NPDB reports by practitioner, not hospital, so the question of which hospital systems carry the concentration remains a public-records gap. Lavern's Law (CPLR 214-a(b)) keeps cancer-misdiagnosis cases alive years after the underlying care.
Key Facts
New York led every state in medical malpractice payouts in 2024 and 2025. NPDB tracked $729.58 million across 1,269 reports in 2025, $550.12 million across 1,205 reports in 2024.
NYC Health + Hospitals reported $45.77 million in tort claim payouts in FY24, the fifth-highest agency total in the city. FY23 paid $51.5 million across 64 resolved med mal claims.
NPDB tracks practitioners, not hospitals. The public file ranks states cleanly but can’t tell you which NYC hospital systems carry the concentration without a separate affiliation cross-walk.
Lavern’s Law (CPLR 214-a(b)) keeps cancer-misdiagnosis claims alive up to seven years from the date of the malpractice, measured from when the patient discovered the missed diagnosis.
New York led every state in medical malpractice payouts in 2024 and 2025. The National Practitioner Data Bank logged $729.58 million across 1,269 reports in 2025, on top of $550.12 million across 1,205 reports in 2024.
That’s $1.28 billion in two years, spread across 2,474 NPDB-reportable payouts. Florida, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, and California round out the 2025 top five, and all trail New York.
$1.28B
Combined NY medical malpractice payouts reported to NPDB in 2024 and 2025 across 2,474 practitioner reports. New York led every state both years.
National Practitioner Data Bank Public Use File, 2024 and 2025
Methodology
The state-level totals here come from the National Practitioner Data Bank Public Use File for calendar years 2024 and 2025. NPDB receives a mandatory report on every medical malpractice payment of $30,000 or more made on behalf of a licensed practitioner.
The sample frame is every reportable payment tagged to a New York-licensed practitioner with a New York primary practice address.
NYC Health + Hospitals payout data comes from the NYC Comptroller. The FY23 figures come from the published Annual Claims Report for fiscal year 2023.
The FY24 figure ($45.77 million) comes from the Comptroller’s Claims Dashboard, since the FY24 data publishes through that dashboard rather than a standalone report. Top-tier verdict figures come from TopVerdict.com and from published verdict reporting by NY plaintiff firms.
Note
NPDB tags by practitioner, not by hospital, so a payment on a hospital-employed physician is counted against the physician’s record. Hospital-system-level concentration cannot be derived from the public NPDB file without a separate cross-walk through NY State Department of Health practitioner-hospital affiliation files, which are not built into the NPDB release.
Two Years, Two Records
New York’s $729.58 million 2025 NPDB total broke the prior-year record by 33%. The 1,269 reports averaged out at roughly $570,000 per payout. Both numbers led the country.
The 2024 total of $550.12 million was already a national high. The 1,205 reports averaged out to about $456,000. Two years running, no other state came close.
The state-by-state gap is the part the headline misses. New York’s 2025 total led the next-ranked state by a comfortable margin. Florida, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, and California round out the top five, each well behind New York.
California and Florida, both larger by population, settle for less per state. New York’s combination of plaintiff-friendly liability rules, no statutory cap on non-economic damages, and a NYC jury pool drawn from five boroughs with the highest cost basis in the country produces a payout curve that flattens nowhere else.
New York leads the country in med mal dollars, two years running. The public file can rank states. It can’t rank hospitals.
NYC Health + Hospitals at $45.77 Million
Inside New York City, the public-hospital side of the story has its own number. NYC Health + Hospitals reported $45.77 million in tort claim settlements and judgments in fiscal year 2024, per the NYC Comptroller.
That made H+H the fifth-highest city agency, behind NYPD, the Department of Correction, the Department of Education, and the Department of Transportation. H+H operates 11 acute-care hospitals across the boroughs and serves more than a million patients a year, so the per-capita exposure runs differently from a private system.
The Comptroller’s FY23 report logged 398 medical malpractice claims filed against H+H, down 10% year-over-year, and $51.5 million paid across 64 resolved claims.
The FY24 number ($45.77 million) suggests continued moderation, though the long tail on med mal cases (most resolve five to ten years after the underlying care) means current-year claim filings won’t show up in current-year payouts.
H+H is one fraction of the citywide picture. The private side of New York’s hospital map (Mount Sinai, NYU Langone, NewYork-Presbyterian, Northwell, Montefiore, Maimonides) carries the majority of the city’s hospital-employed practitioner workforce, and the majority of the dollars passing through NPDB.
Where the Top-Tier Verdicts Come From
Top published New York medical malpractice outcomes in the recent reporting window run in the eight- and nine-figure range. Three examples from NY plaintiff-firm verdict pages and published reporting:
$120 million
Stroke misdiagnosis verdict, Westchester County
A man arrived at a Westchester stroke center with a basilar artery stroke. Resident radiologists missed the occlusion on his CT scan, and the delay in treatment caused permanent brain damage.
Reported New York case, not a case this firm handled.
$103 million
Birth-injury verdict, Broome County
A delayed emergency cesarean section left a newborn with cerebral palsy after an obstetrician did not diagnose oxygen deprivation in time.
Reported New York case, not a case this firm handled.
$90.9 million
Birth-injury verdict
A missed placental abruption delayed delivery and resulted in cerebral palsy.
Reported New York case, not a case this firm handled.
These cases are outliers, not the median. Most NY medical malpractice payouts resolve far below this tier. The verdict ceiling rides on three structural factors.
CPLR § 214-a sets the time window inside which a case has to land. New York places no statutory cap on non-economic damages. And NYC jury pools draw from boroughs with the country’s highest lost-wage and medical-care baselines. Severity of harm translates directly into damages.
What Lavern’s Law Changed
CPLR § 214-a(b) , the Lavern’s Law amendment, took effect January 31, 2018. It applies to cancer and malignant-tumor diagnosis failures specifically. The clock for filing now runs from the date the patient discovered the missed diagnosis, or reasonably should have, with a seven-year outer cap measured from the date of the malpractice itself.
Before Lavern’s Law, the 2.5-year standard SOL ran from the date of the care. That structure routinely barred cases where a cancer was missed and not detected until years later, after the deadline had passed.
Lavern Wilkinson, the law’s namesake, died in 2013 of lung cancer that a Brooklyn hospital had failed to follow up on after an abnormal X-ray two years earlier. Her family could not sue because the SOL had already expired.
The 2018 amendment changes three rules for the cancer-misdiagnosis subset:
- Starts the SOL clock from discovery, not from the date of the missed diagnosis.
- Applies to acts of malpractice occurring on or after January 31, 2018. Pre-2018 misses don’t get the discovery rule.
- Caps the outer window at seven years from the date of the malpractice, so the rule isn’t open-ended.
For every other type of medical malpractice (surgical errors, anesthesia, OB-GYN injuries outside cancer misdiagnosis, ER misdiagnosis of non-cancer conditions, medication errors), the standard 2.5-year clock under CPLR § 214-a still controls. Continuous treatment can toll the clock in some circumstances, and minors’ rights are preserved separately under CPLR § 208.
The Hospital Concentration Question
The five-hospital-systems hypothesis (that a handful of NYC systems carry most of the med mal volume) is plausible on its face. NYC’s private hospital market is dominated by a small number of large multi-hospital systems, and procedure volume concentrates inside them. But the public data doesn’t answer the concentration question directly.
NPDB tags by practitioner. A payout in a Mount Sinai cardiac surgery case is reported against the operating cardiac surgeon’s record, not against Mount Sinai’s.
Hospital-system attribution requires a separate cross-walk: pulling the practitioner’s primary affiliation from the NY State Department of Health profile, joining it to the NPDB record on the practitioner’s NPI or license number, then aggregating dollars per hospital system. That join is buildable but not built into the NPDB Public Use File release.
The closest publicly available proxy today is the NYC Comptroller’s H+H claims data ($45.77 million in FY24) combined with TopVerdict.com’s individual hospital-named verdicts and published verdict reports from NY plaintiff firms. None of that gets you to a clean hospital-system ranking.
A complete picture would require the NPDB-to-DOH-Profile cross-walk plus a TopVerdict-to-Comptroller-to-private-insurer-disclosure merge that no single public file supports today.
The hospital concentration map is the next data move on this beat.
What This Means for People Injured by NYC Hospital Care
If you were hurt by hospital care in NYC, three points the data above changes:
The dollar exposure is real. New York’s national lead in med mal payouts, two years running, means insurers and self-insured systems carry capacity for large settlements when liability is clear. The $570,000 average across 1,269 NPDB reports in 2025 reflects what actually resolves, not what gets demanded.
The deadline is the trap. The 2.5-year clock under CPLR § 214-a is one of the shorter SOLs in the country.
Many cases that would survive in California (three years) or Florida (two years from discovery, four-year cap) die in New York because the clock starts at the care, not at the discovery. The cancer-misdiagnosis exception under Lavern’s Law is the only carve-out, and it applies only to cancer cases.
NYC Health + Hospitals settles differently than private systems. H+H is the city’s public hospital network, and tort claims against it run through the Comptroller’s claims process with notice-of-claim requirements under NY GML § 50-e.
The 90-day notice deadline is shorter than the underlying SOL, and missing it is the most common preventable error in public-hospital med mal cases.
Hospitals settle quickly when a case is built for trial.
Sources
- NPDB / HRSA. (2025). National Practitioner Data Bank Public Use File, 2024 and 2025. https://www.npdb.hrsa.gov/resources/publicData.jsp
- NYC Comptroller. (2024). Claims Dashboard, fiscal year 2024 data. https://comptroller.nyc.gov/services/for-the-public/claims-dashboard/
- NYC Comptroller. (April 16, 2024). Annual Claims Report, Fiscal Year 2023. https://comptroller.nyc.gov/wp-content/uploads/documents/Annual-Claims-Report-FY2023.pdf
- TopVerdict. (2024). Top 50 New York Verdicts of 2024. https://topverdict.com/lists/2024/new-york/top-50-verdicts
- NY State Senate. (2018). CPLR § 214-a, including Lavern's Law amendment effective January 31, 2018. https://www.nysenate.gov/legislation/laws/CVP/214-A
Updated July 23, 2026
Frequently asked questions
- How much did New York pay in medical malpractice payouts in 2024 and 2025?
Per the National Practitioner Data Bank, New York reported $729.58 million in medical malpractice payouts across 1,269 practitioner reports in 2025, and $550.12 million across 1,205 reports in 2024. That's a combined $1.28 billion across 2,474 NPDB-reportable payouts in two years. New York led every state in total payouts both years.
- How much did NYC Health + Hospitals pay in tort claims in fiscal year 2024?
NYC Health + Hospitals paid $45.77 million in tort claim settlements and judgments in fiscal year 2024. That made H+H the fifth-highest city agency for tort claim costs, behind NYPD, DOC, DOE, and DOT. In FY23, the agency paid $51.5 million across 64 resolved medical malpractice claims, while 398 med mal claims were filed, a 10% decrease in filings from the prior year.
- Can the NPDB tell you which New York hospitals pay the most in med mal?
No. The National Practitioner Data Bank tracks payments made on behalf of licensed practitioners, not on behalf of hospitals or hospital systems. A payout on a surgical case is reported against the surgeon, not the hospital where the surgery happened. That means the public NPDB file can rank states, but it can't directly answer which hospital systems carry the concentration. A hospital-level ranking would require a cross-walk through NY State Department of Health practitioner-hospital affiliation files.
- What is Lavern's Law and how does it change New York med mal deadlines?
Lavern's Law is the 2018 amendment to CPLR 214-a that added a discovery rule for cancer and malignant tumor misdiagnosis cases. The clock now runs from the date the patient discovered, or reasonably should have discovered, the misdiagnosis, with a seven-year outer cap from the date of the malpractice. The standard 2.5-year limit still applies to non-cancer cases. The law is named for Lavern Wilkinson, who died in 2013 from a lung cancer diagnosis a Brooklyn hospital missed after an abnormal X-ray.
- What constitutes medical malpractice in NY?
Medical malpractice in New York happens when a licensed health-care provider departs from the accepted standard of care in the medical community and that departure causes measurable harm to a patient. Under CPLR § 214-a, an injured person generally has two and a half years from the date of the malpractice, or from the end of continuous treatment for the same condition, to file suit. Common departures include surgical errors, misdiagnosis or delayed diagnosis, medication mistakes, and failure to obtain informed consent. The National Practitioner Data Bank, which tracks malpractice payments tied to licensed practitioners, recorded 1,269 New York reports totaling $729.58 million in 2025 alone.
- What are the four things that must be proven to win a medical malpractice suit?
An injured person has to establish four elements. First, a doctor-patient relationship existed, creating a duty of care. Second, the provider deviated from the accepted standard a reasonably competent practitioner would have followed in similar circumstances. Third, that deviation directly caused the injury. Fourth, the injury produced measurable damages such as additional medical costs, lost income, or pain and suffering. CPLR § 214-a gives most injured people two and a half years from the date of the negligent act to file. Causation is often the hardest element to prove, because the file has to show the provider's specific deviation, rather than the underlying condition, produced the harm. NY also requires a certificate of merit under CPLR § 3012-a, signed by a qualified medical professional, before the case can proceed.
- What are the odds of winning a medical malpractice suit?
No attorney can predict an individual outcome. Published research shows physicians win the majority of medical malpractice jury trials nationwide, with plaintiffs prevailing in a minority of tried cases, while a much larger share of claims resolve through negotiated settlement before any verdict. New York's procedural barriers, including the certificate of merit under CPLR § 3012-a and the strict two-and-a-half-year filing window under CPLR § 214-a, mean cases that survive those hurdles tend to be the better-documented ones. NYC cases routinely involve large institutional defendants and city-run hospitals covered by the 90-day notice-of-claim requirement under General Municipal Law § 50-e, which shapes how the case gets built. The strength of the medical records, the clarity of the departure from accepted practice, and the ability to tie that departure directly to the injury carry more weight on outcomes than any general statistic.
- Is it worth suing a doctor for malpractice?
Whether pursuing a claim makes sense depends on the severity of the injuries, the strength of the medical evidence, and the realistic value of the damages. New York's statute of limitations under CPLR § 214-a generally gives injured people two and a half years from the date of the malpractice to file, so the 30-month clock starts at the date of care. The National Practitioner Data Bank reported $729.58 million in New York malpractice payouts in 2025 across 1,269 practitioner reports, and the NYC Comptroller logged $45.77 million in tort claim payouts from NYC Health + Hospitals in fiscal year 2024 alone. New York requires a certificate of merit and a supporting affirmation from a qualified medical professional under CPLR § 3012-a before the case can proceed, which means these claims carry real upfront costs and demand careful case evaluation by a trial lawyer.
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Antin, J. S. (2026, May 13). New York Led the U.S. in Med Mal Payouts in 2024 and 2025. The Public File Doesn't Say Which Hospitals.. AEE Law Insights. https://aeelaw.com/insights/nyc-medmal-payout-concentration-2024-2025/
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