A remittitur is a court order that reduces a jury’s damage award after trial when the judge finds the amount excessive given the evidence. The jury’s verdict on liability stays intact. Only the dollar figure changes, and the plaintiff is given a choice: accept the lower number or go through a new trial on damages.
When a Judge Will Cut a Jury Award
Judges do not second-guess jury awards simply because they seem high. The threshold is much steeper. A verdict has to be so disconnected from the proven harm that it “shocks the conscience” of the court, meaning no reasonable jury looking at the same evidence could have arrived at that number.1Legal Information Institute. Shocks the Conscience
The tool exists for two reasons. It corrects verdicts that lack a rational basis in the trial record, and it spares both sides the cost of a full retrial by offering a reasonable figure instead.2Legal Information Institute. Remittitur Courts use it with restraint. Setting damages is the jury’s job, and a verdict at the high end of a defensible range will survive.
Before granting a remittitur, the court checks a few threshold boxes. The damages have to be the kind a jury assesses rather than a fixed contractual amount. The verdict must not have been driven by passion or prejudice. And the award has to be genuinely excessive, not simply generous.2Legal Information Institute. Remittitur Judges often look at awards in comparable cases within the same jurisdiction to see whether the number is a dramatic outlier.3Legal Information Institute. Excessive Verdict
Non-economic damages for pain, suffering, and emotional distress are the most frequent target. They are inherently harder to quantify than medical bills or lost wages, so a jury that awards $5 million in pain and suffering on top of $50,000 in medical expenses is the kind of verdict a judge is most likely to review.
How the Process Starts
Nothing happens on the court’s own. The defendant has to file a post-trial motion, usually a motion for a new trial under Federal Rule of Civil Procedure 59, arguing the damages are excessive and asking the court to reduce the award as an alternative to ordering a retrial. The deadline is short. In federal court, the motion must be filed within 28 days after entry of judgment.4Legal Information Institute. Rule 59 – New Trial; Altering or Amending a Judgment Miss it and the verdict stands no matter how inflated. State courts set their own deadlines, which vary.
If the judge agrees, the court issues an order setting a specific reduced amount. The number is not arbitrary. The prevailing federal approach is to reduce the award to the highest figure a reasonable jury could have reached on the evidence. The reasoning is that since the jury clearly intended to award at the top of the range, the defendant has no legitimate complaint about any amount within what the record supports.
The Plaintiff’s Choice
A judge cannot simply slash the award and move on. The plaintiff faces a binary decision:2Legal Information Institute. Remittitur
- Accept the reduced amount. A final judgment is entered for the lower figure and the case is over.
- Reject the reduction. The court grants the defendant’s motion for a new trial, usually limited to damages. The jury’s finding of liability stays in place.
Neither option is clean. Accepting means walking away from what could have been a much larger recovery. Rejecting means more attorney fees, more waiting, and a new jury that could award even less than the remittitur figure. The right call depends on how strong your evidence of high damages actually is, how much another trial will cost you, and how long you can afford to wait for payment.
What Accepting Does to Your Appeal Rights
This is the trap that catches plaintiffs off guard. Under the longstanding federal rule, accepting a remittitur waives the right to appeal the reduction. The logic: you consented to the lower amount, so there is nothing left to challenge. Accepting “under protest” has traditionally not been enough to preserve appeal rights in most federal circuits.
Rejecting is not a clean path to appellate review either. A new trial order is not a final judgment, so you cannot appeal the remittitur right away. You have to sit through the retrial first, then seek review of the original reduction after a final judgment comes out of the second trial.
And when the appeal does happen, the standard works against you. Appellate courts review remittitur decisions for abuse of discretion, overturning the trial judge only when the decision was plainly wrong.5Legal Information Institute. Abuse of Discretion That is a hard standard to meet. Betting on reversal is a real gamble.
Punitive Damages and Remittitur
Punitive awards get extra scrutiny because they punish rather than compensate. The U.S. Supreme Court has set constitutional outer limits, and remittitur is the mechanism courts use to pull a punitive verdict back inside those limits.
In BMW of North America v. Gore, the Court identified three factors for evaluating a punitive award under due process: the reprehensibility of the defendant’s conduct, the ratio between punitive and compensatory damages, and the gap between the punitive award and civil penalties available for similar misconduct.6Legal Information Institute. BMW of North America Inc v Gore, 517 US 559 (1996) In State Farm v. Campbell, the Court sharpened the ratio factor, stating that punitive awards exceeding a single-digit ratio to compensatory damages will rarely satisfy due process.7Justia Law. State Farm Mut Automobile Ins Co v Campbell, 538 US 408 (2003) A $100,000 compensatory award paired with $5 million in punitives, a 50-to-1 ratio, will almost certainly be reduced.
The single-digit guideline is not a hard ceiling. Especially egregious conduct that caused only modest financial harm can support a higher ratio. Substantial compensatory damages can push punitives past the constitutional line at a lower ratio. In practice, most courts treat something around 9-to-1 as the upper boundary.
Additur Is Not the Same Thing
Additur is the mirror procedure, used when a jury’s award is unreasonably low. A judge proposes a higher figure and the defendant chooses whether to accept it or go to a new trial.8Legal Information Institute. Additur In federal court, though, additur is unconstitutional. The Supreme Court held in Dimick v. Schiedt that requiring a defendant to pay an amount no jury ever awarded violates the Seventh Amendment right to a jury trial.9Legal Information Institute. Dimick v Schiedt, 293 US 474 Remittitur survived because it had roots in common law practice at the time of the founding; additur did not. Some state courts do allow additur under their own constitutions, so if you received a low verdict in state court it is worth asking whether your jurisdiction permits it.