At a glance
- Gallagher Re counted six consecutive quarters without a single natural catastrophe producing more than $10 billion in insured losses, a run it described as one of the longest such stretches in decades.
- Severe convective storms accounted for nearly 60 per cent of all insured catastrophe losses worldwide in the first three quarters.
- The $92 billion total excludes Hurricane Isaias, the first major hurricane of the 2026 Atlantic season, which made landfall as a Category 2 storm in the Florida Panhandle on October 9.
Global insured losses from natural catastrophes reached $92 billion in the first nine months of 2026, according to Gallagher Re's Q3 2026 Natural Catastrophe and Climate Report. That total is 29 per cent below the 10-year average of $128 billion and the lowest year-to-date since 2019.
Gallagher Re counted six consecutive quarters without a single natural catastrophe producing more than $10 billion in insured losses, a run it described as one of the longest such stretches in decades.
Severe convective storms accounted for nearly 60 per cent of all insured catastrophe losses worldwide in the first three quarters. Gallagher Re said individual events produced $54 billion of economic losses and $24 billion of insured losses globally, both broadly in line with historical averages, while lower event severity kept the aggregate well below average.
The $92 billion total excludes Hurricane Isaias, the first major hurricane of the 2026 Atlantic season, which made landfall as a Category 2 storm in the Florida Panhandle on October 9. Gallagher Re expects the storm to drive a low- to mid-single-digit billion insured loss and said Isaias set the record for the latest first hurricane formation in the Atlantic basin in data going back to 1851. If Isaias stays an earnings event, the loss will land in fourth-quarter figures rather than in this count.
Activity is not the same as loss
Steve Bowen, Gallagher Re's chief science officer, said 2026 looks favourable at first glance, largely because the industry has avoided a meaningful concentration of major loss events. "However, catastrophe activity and catastrophe losses are not necessarily the same thing," he said. "The world has still experienced a sizeable number of significant disasters in 2026, but relatively few have occurred in locations or under circumstances that generated outsize insured losses."
Global temperatures over the first nine months ranked as the second warmest such period in the modern record dating to at least 1850, and France, the UK and the contiguous US each registered their warmest summer on record. Gallagher Re cautioned that the recent stretch of below-average losses should not be read as evidence of reduced underlying risk.
Gallagher Re has already said Isaias is unlikely to materially influence January 1 renewals, citing the abundance of available reinsurance capital, as ICD reported. Fitch's 2027 outlook put the sector's surplus at $1.3 trillion, which this publication has argued turns January into a test of underwriting discipline rather than of loss-bearing capacity.
Reported by the Cat bonds & reinsurance desk from Royal Gazette Bermuda Re. Published . Corrections