AM Best reports fewer P/C downgrades and more life/health upgrades in H1 2026

AM Best published two special reports on the morning of Oct. 1, time-stamped 14 seconds apart, and both describe rating conditions moving in the same direction. The life/annuity and health report finds more upgrades and fewer downgrades in the first half of 2026, which the summary describes as twice as many upgrades as downgrades compared with the same prior-year period. The property/casualty report puts issuer credit rating downgrades at nearly half the level reported a year earlier.

The P/C figure is the easier of the two to place, since halving the downgrade count year over year describes movement at the tail of the ratings distribution: carriers that would have been cut a year earlier were not. Life/health is doing two things at once, lifting the upgrade side and thinning the downgrade side, so the ratio between them carries the headline.

The emphasis differs as well, with P/C reported through the decline in downgrades and life/health through the growth in upgrades. Neither summary says whether one sector is improving faster than the other, and neither extract gives the size of the rated population the counts are drawn from.

Both reports arrive while the NAIC is widening its solvency perimeter, a project this desk has followed through revised RBC preamble language, narrowed designation gap lists, a fronting-arrangement flag covering roughly $30 billion of unrated premium, and a $1.2 trillion private-credit perimeter letter to Sen. Elizabeth Warren. Neither AM Best summary connects rating actions to that work, and neither describes how published ratings feed the formula itself.

Rating actions are a lagging read by construction. An agency moves after reserve strengthening, catastrophe losses and investment marks have already shown up in statutory filings, so a downgrade count that halves within a single half-year is evidence that fewer carriers crossed the line the agency draws, not evidence that the exposures behind the line shrank by the same amount.

The counts also carry no size. A single-notch change on a large national carrier and a three-notch move on a small regional one both register as one action in a tally like this, so a halved downgrade count can sit alongside materially worse outcomes for individual balance sheets. The summaries as published do not break the actions out by severity or by line of business.

The full reports would answer what the summaries leave open: whether the P/C improvement runs across the rated population or concentrates in a few large accounts, and whether the life/health upgrade tally is broad or narrow. First-half actions rest on first-half experience, so nothing the second half delivers will appear in this comparison.