Start with what’s clear. There’s no pain level that is officially labeled an emergency. Instead, there’s a list of reasons to contact your provider right away — and pain is on it.
The list of reasons to contact your provider right away reads: Redness, increased pain, or yellow or green pus, or excessive clear fluid around the injury. These are signs of infection. Black edges around the injury. This is a sign of dead tissue. Bleeding at the injury site that will not stop after 10 minutes of direct pressure. Fever of 100°F (37.7°C) or higher for more than 4 hours. Pain at the wound that will not go away, even after taking pain medicine. A wound that has come open or the stitches or staples have come out too soon.
One of those is about pain on its own: pain at the wound that will not go away, even after taking pain medicine. Read it carefully, because it does not depend on how severe the pain is. It depends on whether the pain responds. Pain that is bad but settles after you take something sits outside that line. Pain that does not settle sits inside it, however you would score it.
Two others on the list are not about pain but change what pain means when they happen together with it. Black edges around the injury are a sign of dead tissue. A wound that has come open, or whose stitches or staples have come out too soon, is its own entry. Neither is something to monitor at home alongside pain.
What this article won’t do is give you a pain score that means go to the hospital, or a number of hours to wait. There isn’t one to give, and a made-up figure would read like guidance when it is nothing of the kind. The idea is that you make contact when something changes — not that you wait until a threshold is reached.