Also known as: mitigation costs · mitigation of damages · duty to mitigate
Written by attorneys · grounded in primary & secondary sources — see below
Expenditures incurred by an injured party to reduce or avert further harm from tortious conduct or a contractual breach. Reasonable outlays of this kind are recoverable as damages.
Grand View Hotel posted false reviews claiming bedbugs at Maple Lane Inn. Maple Lane hired exterminators, paid for lab tests, and ran corrective ads to restore guest confidence. These outlays qualify as mitigation costs that reduce the inn's pecuniary loss from lost bookings.
Mrs. Cipollone continued smoking after warnings and later required surgery. Her estate sought full medical damages, but the court considered whether expenses for smoking-cessation programs would have constituted recoverable mitigation costs.
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Daly drove without a seatbelt and suffered greater injuries in a collision. The manufacturer argued that Daly's failure to incur the modest cost of a seatbelt increased harm, and the court weighed that conduct in apportioning recovery.
Twentieth Century-Fox breached Parker's contract for a lead role. Parker declined comparable substitute employment that would have reduced her lost wages. The court held that her refusal to mitigate barred recovery of the avoidable portion of damages.
Kridel abandoned the apartment and stopped paying rent. Sommer incurred advertising and showing costs while making reasonable efforts to relet. The court credited those mitigation costs against the unpaid rent claim.
Knolls Atomic Power Laboratory laid off Meacham under a plan that disproportionately affected older workers. Meacham sought back pay but had not conducted a diligent job search. The court reduced damages by the wages he could have earned through reasonable mitigation efforts.
Mitigation costs include reasonable outlays for inspections, treatments, or corrective advertising that directly counteract the harm. The Restatement (Second) of Torts § 920 addresses related benefit offsets in mitigation of damages.
Yes when the refusal is unreasonable and increases harm. The duty to mitigate damages appears in uniform landlord-tenant statutes and is applied by analogy in tort.
A plaintiff may recover reasonable costs of corrective publicity along with other losses when those outlays mitigate the harm. Restatement (Second) of Torts § 920 supplies the equitable framework for such offsets.
Reasonable efforts satisfy the duty to mitigate under the Uniform Residential Landlord and Tenant Act § 604(d). The landlord must make reasonable efforts to relet without priority over other units.
No. The duty arises after the breach or harm occurs. Uniform Residential Landlord and Tenant Act § 104(b) simply requires mitigation once relief is sought.
…has, however, been undermined by the adoption in California of a rule that lessors — like all other contracting parties — have a duty to mitigate damages upon the lessee's abandonment of the property by seeking a substitute lessee. (See Civ. Code, § 1951.2.) (8) Furthermore, the values that go into the personal selection of a lessee…