Insurance Industry Statistics and Trends for 2026

On 25 March 2026, Verisk and the American Property Casualty Insurance Association released the preliminary full-year figures for US property and casualty insurers. The industry had made an underwriting profit of about $63bn. The year before it was $23bn. Two years before that it was a $22bn loss.

Saurabh Khemka, president of Verisk Underwriting Solutions, wrote the caveat into the same release.

“The industry delivered one of its strongest underwriting results in years in 2025, supported by a near-record low combined ratio, but that outcome was driven more by unusually low catastrophe losses rather than a fundamental shift in industry risk.”
Saurabh Khemka, President, Verisk Underwriting Solutions

That is the shape of the industry’s 2026 numbers.

The best results in a decade, published with a warning label by the people who counted them.

What follows collects the figures that matter, from the regulators, reinsurers and trade bodies that produce them, with each linked to its source.

Seven point nine trillion dollars, and the growth is stopping

Swiss Re Institute counted USD 7.9 trillion of global insurance premium in 2024, the most recent year it has totalled. Its July 2026 World insurance report says real premium growth ran at 3.9% in 2025 and will slow to 1.3% in 2026.

The split is the story. Life premiums are forecast to grow 2.3% in real terms, carried by annuity and savings demand in a higher-yield world. Non-life growth falls to 0.6%, and in the United States, the world’s largest market, non-life premium is forecast to contract by 0.5% as property prices fall. Emerging markets hold up at 3.3%.

Profitability follows the same curve with a lag. Swiss Re puts the global non-life return on equity at 14% for 2025, a cyclical high, then 11.4% in 2026 and 7.7% by 2028.

“The latest Middle East conflict is not a one-off shock but another sign that geopolitical risk has become a structural feature of the global economy.”
Jérôme Haegeli, Group Chief Economist, Swiss Re

Haegeli counts four supply shocks in six years: the pandemic, the invasion of Ukraine, the 2025 tariffs and the 2026 energy disruption.

Each one arrived while the previous repricing was still working through the book.

A 92.9 combined ratio, read two ways

The National Association of Insurance Commissioners’ 2025 full-year analysis puts the US P&C combined ratio at 92.9%, down from 96.9% in 2024 and the lowest in its ten-year table. Net premiums written rose 4.6% to $976.8bn. Direct premiums written passed $1.1 trillion. Policyholders’ surplus reached a record $1.27 trillion.

Net losses and loss adjustment expenses fell 1.4%. The NAIC notes it is the first decrease in well over a decade.

Underneath the headline, the year was lopsided. Insured catastrophe losses in the US came to roughly $100bn, close to 2024’s total, but nearly half of that was the Palisades and Eaton fires in a single January week, and no hurricane made landfall. Severe convective storms cost about $50bn for the third year running. The personal lines combined ratio improved from 96.0% to 89.1%, and the homeowners pure net loss ratio dropped 12.5 points to 53.5%. The investment side went the other way: net investment income earned rose to $88.9bn, but realised gains dropped from $79.8bn to $22.7bn and the portfolio yield slipped to 3.56%, so net income fell 10% to $150.6bn even as the underwriting result more than doubled.

Underwriting carried the year. Investments did not.

Robert Gordon, senior vice president for policy, research and international at APCIA, framed the slowdown in the price of cover as the consumer’s share of the good year: net written premium growth slowed from 8.8% in 2024 to 4.8%, and personal and commercial insurance spending both fell relative to total consumer spending and industrial output.

The first quarter of 2026 kept the pattern

Verisk and APCIA’s first-quarter 2026 release, published 23 June, shows a 92.4% combined ratio and a $15.8bn underwriting gain, against an $864m loss in the wildfire-hit first quarter of 2025. Premium growth slowed to 2.9%, from 9.6% in the first quarter of 2024 and 6.8% a year ago, and carriers paid $6.2bn back to policyholders in dividends.

“When factoring in inflation and $6.2 billion returned to policyholders through dividends, written premiums have effectively declined in 2026.”
Robert Gordon, Senior Vice President, Policy, Research and International, APCIA

Khemka called 2025 “a reset after several years of volatility, not a new normal.” The NAIC’s own outlook lists the 2026 headwinds in one sentence: slower premium growth, social inflation in commercial liability reserves, and severe convective storms.

Who writes America’s premium

The NAIC’s 2025 market share tables, based on 98% of filings received by mid-March 2026, put countrywide direct premiums written at $1,110bn.

Ten groups write just under half of it.

The top ten hold 47.9% of the market and the top 25 hold 65.7%, which leaves a third of the largest insurance market in the world with everyone else. The loss ratio column is the more interesting one. Progressive ran 13 points better than State Farm on nearly three-quarters of the premium, and that gap, more than growth, is what the last three years of rate action were for.

Catastrophe and reinsurance, briefly

Global insured natural catastrophe losses were $107bn in 2025 on Swiss Re’s count, against $220bn of economic loss, with a record 92% from secondary perils. The first half of 2026 came in at $42bn, the lowest since 2020. The full ledger, the reinsurers’ disagreement about it and Verisk’s $171bn modelled average year are in our piece on climate change and insurance.

The capital side moved the other way. Guy Carpenter’s property catastrophe rate-on-line index fell 16% through the July renewals, Gallagher Re counts $838bn of reinsurance capital, and catastrophe bond issuance set a half-year record of almost $18bn. The NAIC’s 21 professional reinsurers improved their combined ratio from 100.6% to 97.7% and grew net income 43%.

Marine, which produced both a safer fleet and a $2.8bn single-ship loss in the same decade, has its own set of marine insurance statistics.

Lloyd’s, MGAs and the specialty market

Lloyd’s 2025 results, published 19 March 2026, report gross written premium of £57.9bn, up 4.2%, and profit before tax of £10.6bn against £9.6bn. The combined ratio was 87.6%, seven tenths of a point worse than 2024’s 86.9%, with major claims contributing 5.8 points and the investment return adding £6.0bn. Central solvency stood at 496%.

The number to hold onto is the price change: minus 3.7%.

Patrick Tiernan, the chief executive, described “strong underwriting performance, disciplined growth, and resilient investment returns”, which is what a market says when it is choosing to shrink its rate rather than its book.

Below Lloyd’s, the delegated market grew faster than anything else. US MGA premium rose 12% in 2025 against 5% for the wider market, while AM Best cut its outlook on the channel to stable. The MGA market post works through why both happened at once. The specialty lines that never had an institutional premium series, cannabis first among them, are in our cannabis insurance statistics, and US cyber premium fell 7% in 2024 while policy counts held, the subject of the cyber insurance statistics piece.

Life and annuities set a fourth record

US retail annuity sales reached $461.3bn in 2025, up 6%, the fourth consecutive record year on LIMRA’s count. The fourth quarter alone was $114.4bn, the ninth quarter in a row above $100bn. Fixed-rate deferred annuities took $160.6bn, fixed indexed $128.2bn and registered index-linked $79.6bn.

Bryan Hodgens, who heads LIMRA’s research, said indexed products “represented 45% of total sales in 2025, up from just 24% market share a decade ago.”

Individual life followed. New annualised premium topped $17.5bn, up 10%, with policy count up 7%. Whole life took $6.4bn and 37% of the market, indexed universal life $4.5bn, term $3.1bn, variable universal life $2.6bn. Karen Terry, who heads LIMRA’s insurance research, credited “broader distribution, enhanced products and a strong equity market”.

Two records in a row, in a product line the industry spent a decade describing as mature.

Ownership rates, the protection gap and the global picture are in the life insurance statistics post.

Jobs are falling while premiums grow

US employment in insurance carriers and related activities peaked at 3,025,800 in February 2025, on the Bureau of Labor Statistics’ payroll series. By July 2026 it was 2,935,600, a loss of about 90,000 jobs, or 3%, and the ninth consecutive monthly decline.

The industry is writing more premium with fewer people, at an average hourly wage of $48.98 across 230,857 establishments. Part of that is the retirement wave the industry has forecast for years, and part is the collapse of the junior roles that used to backfill it, which is the argument of our post on the insurance talent shortage.

Part of it is what the capital is being spent on instead. Gallagher Re’s Global InsurTech Report for the second quarter of 2026 counts $2.44bn of funding, the highest quarter since 2022, with 99.1% of it going to AI-focused companies and early-stage funding down 51.8%.

Adoption and production are different numbers.

Camunda’s January 2026 survey of 1,150 IT leaders found 69% using AI agents and 11% of agentic use cases in production; Sedgwick put carriers at 82% and 7%; Bain at 78% and 4%. Why most agentic AI pilots never reach production has its own post, and the broader AI in insurance statistics sit alongside it.

Insurance fraud, meanwhile, costs American consumers at least $308.6bn a year on the Coalition Against Insurance Fraud’s estimate, roughly twice the whole industry’s 2025 net income.

Read together, the 2026 numbers describe an industry at the top of its cycle and unsure what to do with the height. Surplus is at a record and premium growth has slowed to 2.9%. Property rates are falling while casualty reserves are still being added to, the two-speed soft market in one balance sheet. Annuities have set four records in four years and payrolls have fallen for nine straight months.

The carriers that grew premium in 2025 did it with new products in new places, in embedded distribution, in delegated programmes, in parametric covers, and that is a configuration problem before it is a capital one. A product builder that a business user can change, with a rating engine underneath it, is what Openkoda is for, and it is the unglamorous end of a year that otherwise looked easy.

The 92.9 will not repeat. What the industry builds while it lasts might.