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DUI vehicular homicide costs: manslaughter fines & prison frames by state
Our injury DUI guide stops at serious bodily injury. This page covers the step beyond it: the homicide charges that follow when an impaired driver causes a death — DUI manslaughter in Florida, intoxication manslaughter in Texas, and vehicular manslaughter while intoxicated in California — priced component by component from the statutes themselves, with no total added up for any state.
A death changes the charge, not just the sentence
When nobody is hurt, a first DUI in the states priced on this page is a misdemeanour measured in hundreds or low thousands of dollars of fine. When a person dies, the same impaired driving is prosecuted as a stand-alone felony homicide offence with its own name, its own classification and a prison frame measured in years or decades. The fine, notably, does not scale with the custody: Florida and Texas both cap the homicide fine at $10,000, the same ceiling each state applies to far lesser felony tiers, while California's gross-negligence tier is priced in the statute by its prison triad and carries no fine figure of its own in Penal Code § 191.5 — a gap this page states rather than fills, because the general felony-fine authority sometimes quoted for it is a separate provision, not a figure § 191.5 publishes for this offence.
Three further components follow a homicide conviction in every state priced here, and none of them carries a published price. Restitution to the victim's family is ordered case by case and reflects the family's losses, not a schedule. Funeral and medical costs enter the case as evidence and restitution items, not as fees the state sets. And the licence consequence — permanent revocation in Florida's published summaries, a court-set suspension of 180 days to two years in Texas — is measured in eligibility, not dollars. Those components are described on this page because they are part of the honest cost of the tier; they are never converted into an estimated dollar amount.
The homicide tiers, state by state
Florida names the offence DUI manslaughter and grades it by what the driver did after the crash: the standard offence is a second-degree felony, and it rises to a first-degree felony where the driver knew or should have known the crash occurred and failed to give information or render aid. Texas names its offence intoxication manslaughter, requires that the death be caused by reason of the intoxication by accident or mistake, and enhances it to a first-degree felony in the circumstances § 49.09 lists, including where the person killed was a firefighter, emergency medical services personnel, peace officer or judge on duty. California splits its offence by negligence: ordinary negligence sits in § 191.5(b), gross negligence in § 191.5(a), and a driver with qualifying prior DUI-related convictions faces 15 years to life under § 191.5(d).
| DUI component | Published amount |
|---|---|
| Florida — DUI manslaughter, standard (§ 316.193(3)(c)(3)) | Second-degree felony; up to 15 years; fine up to $10,000 under § 775.083; mandatory minimum 4 years; permanent revocation in published summaries |
| Florida — DUI manslaughter, failure to give information or render aid (§ 316.193(3)(c)(3)) | First-degree felony; up to 30 years; fine up to $10,000 under § 775.083; mandatory minimum 4 years |
| Texas — intoxication manslaughter (§ 49.08; punishment § 12.33) | Second-degree felony; 2 to 20 years; fine up to $10,000; licence suspension 180 days to 2 years; community service 240 to 800 hours where community supervision is granted, in published summaries |
| Texas — intoxication manslaughter enhanced (§ 49.09) | First-degree felony in the listed circumstances, including a victim who was a firefighter, EMS personnel, peace officer or judge; 5 to 99 years or life under § 12.32 in published summaries |
| California — gross vehicular manslaughter while intoxicated (Penal Code § 191.5(a), (c)(1)) | Felony; state prison term of 4, 6 or 10 years; § 191.5 states no fine figure for this tier |
| California — vehicular manslaughter while intoxicated, ordinary negligence (§ 191.5(b), (c)(2)) | Up to 1 year in county jail, or 16 months, 2 years or 4 years; § 191.5 states no fine figure for this tier |
| California — gross tier with qualifying priors (§ 191.5(d)) | 15 years to life in state prison where the driver has one or more of the prior convictions the subdivision lists |
Sources: Florida Statutes §§ 316.193(3)(c)(3) and 775.082–775.083, as reproduced in published statute references and Florida DHSMV penalty summaries; Texas Penal Code §§ 49.08, 49.09, 12.32 and 12.33; California Penal Code § 191.5 (California Legislative Information text). Last verified: October 2026.
The fine is one line in a longer stack — court costs, program fees, interlock, supervision and reinstatement all bill separately. Price the layers that apply to your case in the calculator.
Open the DUI cost calculatorWhat no authority publishes for this tier
No state priced on this page publishes a single cost of a DUI homicide, and the largest components resist pricing altogether: a prison term of up to 15, 20 or 30 years, a permanent or multi-year loss of driving eligibility, restitution set by the sentencing court on the family's proven losses, and civil liability that runs in a separate courtroom under separate rules. Attorney fees at this tier are private retainers with no published schedule, and this site does not estimate them. There is likewise no published figure in any of these states for the effect of a homicide conviction on car insurance prices, and none is estimated here — a driver facing permanent revocation may have no insurable driving to price in the first place.
One comparison caution matters when reading the table: the $10,000 figures in Florida and Texas are ceilings, not floors or typical awards, and California's silence on a fine in § 191.5 is not a zero — it means the homicide statute itself does not publish the number, so this page does not borrow one from elsewhere and present it as this offence's fine. Floors, ceilings and statutory silence are three different kinds of figure, and merging them would misprice every row.
There is no added-up total on this page for the same reason there is none anywhere on this site: the published components above are the figures the statutes actually set, and the remaining components are fixed case by case. Readers comparing tiers should work from our DUI causing injury guide, our felony DUI guide and our DUI hit-and-run guide, which price the neighbouring offences the same component-by-component way.
Common questions
- What is the fine for DUI manslaughter in Florida?
- Up to $10,000, for both the second-degree felony form (up to 15 years, 4-year mandatory minimum) and the first-degree form that applies when the driver failed to give information or render aid (up to 30 years).
- How is Texas intoxication manslaughter punished?
- As a second-degree felony under Penal Code § 49.08: 2 to 20 years and a fine of up to $10,000, rising to a first-degree felony in the § 49.09 circumstances.
- Does California set a fine in its vehicular manslaughter statute?
- Penal Code § 191.5 prices its tiers in prison terms — 4, 6 or 10 years for the gross-negligence tier — and states no fine figure of its own, so none is quoted here as this offence's fine.
Related cost guides: DUI causing injury costs, felony DUI costs, DUI hit-and-run costs, third-offense and felony DUI costs.
Sources: Florida Statutes §§ 316.193(3)(c)(3), 775.082 and 775.083; Texas Penal Code §§ 49.08, 49.09, 12.32 and 12.33; California Penal Code § 191.5. Last verified: October 2026. This page is educational information about costs only — not legal advice. Laws and fees change; confirm current figures with your court and your state's driver-licensing agency.