Statutory Damages

Statutory damages are damages whose amount is set in advance by a statute rather than calculated from proof of actual loss. Cornell's Legal Information Institute notes they are commonly used where it would be hard to establish the exact harm. If your privacy was violated or you got an illegal robocall, it is difficult to put a dollar figure on the harm, so Congress or a state legislature did it for you.

Several consumer laws use them:

• TCPA: $500 per unlawful call or text, up to $1,500 if willful.
• Video Privacy Protection Act: actual damages but not less than $2,500.
• Illinois BIPA: $1,000 per negligent violation and $5,000 per intentional or reckless violation.
• Fair Credit Reporting Act: $100 to $1,000 for willful violations.

Statutory damages are what make many class actions possible. Because the damages are fixed per person or per violation, a court does not need to measure each class member's individual loss, which makes it easier to certify a class of thousands or millions of people. Multiplied across a class, the numbers can be enormous, which pushes companies to settle.

That does not mean each person receives the full statutory amount. Settlements are compromises, and the fund is split among everyone who files a claim after fees and costs, so individual payments are often a fraction of the statutory figure. Courts also sometimes reduce awards that would be ruinously large. See how much you can get from a TCPA lawsuit, the BIPA explainer, and the FCRA explainer.