Free CPSC Penalty Estimator

By Andy Gaber, Digital Empire Holdings LLC · Published: Aug 13, 2026 · Updated: Aug 13, 2026

Legal review status: no licensed attorney has signed off on this page yet. It is written from primary statutory and regulatory sources, each cited below. See our editorial policy for how we produce and update regulatory content.

How CPSC calculates penalties

The Consumer Product Safety Act gives CPSC authority to seek civil penalties for knowing violations under Section 20, codified at 15 U.S.C. § 2069. The statute itself sets the ceiling: currently $120,000 per single violation and $17,150,000 for any related series of violations, and Congress requires those figures to be readjusted for inflation every five years. The current amounts were set by a Federal Register notice published Dec 1, 2021; the next scheduled adjustment is due Dec 1, 2026 and had not yet published as of this page’s last update.

Below that statutory ceiling, CPSC has real discretion, and it exercises that discretion according to the factors published at 16 CFR Part 1119. Section 1119.4 lists the statutory factors the Commission considers before proposing a penalty: the nature of the product defect, the severity of the risk of injury, whether an injury actually occurred, the number of defective products distributed, and, explicitly, the appropriateness of such penalty in relation to the size of the business of the person charged. None of this is a public formula CPSC runs numbers through. Almost every civil penalty case that becomes public does so as a negotiated settlement agreement, published in the Federal Register once the Commission provisionally accepts it.

Recent enforcement actions

Reviewing what CPSC has actually settled for is more informative than any abstract formula. All five of the settlements below were provisionally accepted by the Commission and published in the Federal Register; every one involved a large company and, in each published case, centered on a failure to timely report a known hazard under CPSA §15(b) rather than a pure paperwork or labeling gap.

Several of these settlements exceed the $17,150,000 single-series statutory cap. That is not an error. The cap applies per related series of violations, and a single settlement agreement can resolve more than one series, for example a reporting violation combined with a separate sale-of-recalled-product violation, within one negotiated total.

Who actually faces CPSC penalty exposure

The Consumer Product Safety Act reaches further down the supply chain than most business owners expect. Section 20 civil penalty authority applies to manufacturers, which includes importers under the CPSA’s own definition, distributors, and retailers, not just the brand name printed on the box. A small ecommerce seller who imports a private-label product, a wholesaler who distributes someone else’s product line, and a marketplace retailer who lists a third-party seller’s item can each independently carry reporting and compliance obligations under the same statute, even though only one of them designed the product.

This matters most for the reporting duty specifically. CPSA §15(b) obligates any of these parties who obtains information reasonably supporting the conclusion that a product contains a defect that could create a substantial risk of injury to report it to CPSC. Waiting for someone else in the supply chain to report first is not a defense, and “I did not know” is a materially weaker position than “I reported within 24 hours of finding out,” which is the standard the statute actually sets.

What typically triggers a CPSC investigation

Investigations rarely start with CPSC proactively testing a random product off a shelf, though the Commission does run its own surveillance testing programs. More commonly, an investigation opens from an incident report filed through CPSC’s public SaferProducts.gov database, a mandatory report the company itself files under §15(b), a referral from another federal or state agency, litigation discovery that surfaces an internal safety complaint, or import screening at the border that flags a product against an existing recall or a known hazard pattern. Once an investigation opens, the penalty factors in 16 CFR 1119.4 come into play regardless of which of those paths led there. The trigger does not change the math, only whether CPSC found out from you or from someone else.

How to reduce your penalty exposure

CPSC’s own published factors point directly at what reduces exposure in practice, even though none of it guarantees a specific outcome. Reporting a known defect or hazard promptly, inside the 24-hour window CPSA §15(b) requires once you have reportable information, consistently shows up as a mitigating fact pattern in settlement narratives, versus a violation CPSC has to discover and pursue on its own initiative. A documented compliance program, prompt corrective action once a defect is identified, and cooperation during an investigation are the recurring themes across CPSC’s public enforcement communications.

None of that is legal advice specific to your situation. If you believe your company may have a reportable hazard, an incomplete eFiling record, or an open CPSC inquiry, the highest-leverage step is contacting a licensed attorney experienced in consumer product safety law before you make any additional filings or public statements.

Methodology and limits of this estimator

This calculator is not a CPSC formula. CPSC has never published one, because the statute directs a case-by-case weighing of facts, not a lookup table. What it does is transparent: it starts from an illustrative anchor value per violation type, informed by the shape of the real settlements above, scales that anchor by a disclosed company-size factor drawn directly from 16 CFR 1119.4(a)(1)(i)(E), applies a disclosed aggravating factor if you flag prior violations, and always caps the result at the real current statutory maximum. Every factor applied to your specific result is listed under your estimate above. Treat the output as an order-of-magnitude educational range, not a number to plan a legal strategy or a settlement negotiation around.

What a CPSC penalty negotiation typically looks like

Published settlements follow a recognizable shape. CPSC staff investigates, proposes a civil penalty amount internally based on the 16 CFR 1119.4 factors, and the company’s counsel negotiates that figure down through a back-and-forth that weighs the company’s cooperation, the strength of CPSC’s evidence, and the company’s ability to pay against the deterrence value the Commission wants the settlement to carry. The final number the Commission votes to provisionally accept, and later publishes in the Federal Register for public comment before it becomes final, is the outcome of that negotiation, not a number CPSC calculated from a formula and refused to move on. This is exactly why the five real settlements cited above range from $8.5 million to just over $19 million despite all five involving a similar underlying violation type: company size, prior history, cooperation, and the specific facts of each case all move the final number within the range the statute allows.

For a company early in this process, the practical takeaway is that the number CPSC first proposes is rarely the number a settlement lands on, and legal representation experienced in CPSC matters consistently correlates with a lower final figure in published case histories, not because the law is negotiable, but because the weighing of factors under 16 CFR 1119.4 genuinely is, and someone who has negotiated these cases before knows which facts to bring forward first.

How this estimate differs from a legal opinion

A licensed attorney building a real exposure assessment for your company would review the specific product, the exact injury or defect pattern, internal emails and complaint records, prior interactions with CPSC, and the precedent set by comparable settlements your counsel has direct visibility into, not just the five public cases summarized on this page. That analysis produces a number grounded in your actual facts. This calculator produces something narrower and more honest about its own limits: a range built from public statutory caps and a small number of disclosed, generic adjustments, useful for getting a rough sense of scale before you ever pick up the phone, not a substitute for the phone call itself.

Frequently asked questions

Primary sources: 15 U.S.C. § 2069 (via Cornell Legal Information Institute); 16 CFR Part 1119 (via eCFR); Federal Register 2021-26082 (current statutory caps); and the five settlement notices cited in the enforcement table above, each linking directly to its Federal Register document.