The BLS reported that the CPI motor vehicle insurance index rose 11.3% over the 12 months ending December 2024. For carriers, that kind of widely quoted number is a reminder that “insurance economics” isn’t abstract in 2026, it’s something customers, regulators and agents experience in real time.
The encouraging part is that several trends are becoming clearer and more workable: regulators are creating more explicit pathways for forward-looking catastrophe modeling, NOAA publishes a consistent public record of high-cost disaster activity, and NAIC cyber reporting provides enough detail to support real benchmarking.
Model Behavior
One of the most carrier-relevant trends for 2026 is that catastrophe modeling is moving closer to the center of rate review and market access discussions, not just internal pricing. California’s Department of Insurance announced it completed its review of the first forward-looking wildfire catastrophe model and will begin accepting rate applications using the Verisk Wildfire Model.
In the same policy direction, California also tied pricing inputs to availability by requiring insurers that use catastrophe modeling or account for reinsurance costs in rate filings to write at least 85% of their statewide market share in wildfire-distressed areas.
The trend to watch isn’t a new model. It’s the expectation that carriers can explain, govern, and defend how models shape price, underwriting appetite, and mitigation recognition, and that usually means the logic has to travel cleanly across policy, claims, and billing workflows inside your insurance carrier software.
- Build a model governance package that’s filing-ready year-round, including what changed, why it changed, and who approved it.
- Translate model outputs into mitigation logic that’s consistent (and documented) from underwriting through claims, so discounts and eligibility don’t feel arbitrary.
- Align your availability strategy to your modeling strategy, because regulators may increasingly evaluate the two together rather than as separate conversations.
- Make “explainability” a distribution capability, not just a compliance task, so agents can confidently connect mitigation actions to pricing outcomes.
Once modeling becomes more visible, the next trend question is obvious: what kind of catastrophe year should your plan treat as “normal enough to be ready for”?
27 Reasons to Plan
NOAA’s National Centers for Environmental Information (NCEI) reported 27 U.S. weather and climate disasters in 2024 with at least $1 billion in damages each, with analysis current through January 10, 2025 and totals potentially rising as more data becomes available. That’s a trend marker carriers can use without arguing about anyone’s portfolio: big events are showing up frequently enough that readiness becomes an operating rhythm, not a once-a-year scramble.
NOAA also reported that the 2020–2024 total cost of U.S. billion-dollar disasters was $746.7 billion, with a 5-year annual cost average of $149.3 billion, which supports planning assumptions built around persistent activity rather than rare spikes.Another 2026 trend worth calling out is methodological transparency, because it changes how comfortably leaders can use public data in board and regulator discussions.
NOAA explains that it adjusts prior-year estimates in its billion-dollar disaster analysis for inflation to 2024 dollars using the Consumer Price Index, and it explicitly describes the analysis as conservative because it excludes events below the $1B threshold (in 2024 dollars).
NCEI also describes how it draws from public and private sources, including insured loss data that is scaled to estimate total economic losses, which is useful context when carriers are careful to separate “economic damage” from insured loss.
The trend for 2026 is to use NOAA’s categories as a planning structure. If the public record shows winter storms, tornado outbreaks, tropical cyclones, severe convective storms, flooding, wildfire, and drought/heat all regularly crossing the billion-dollar mark, then operational readiness can be scheduled and staffed with that seasonal cadence in mind.
Cyber Grows Up
Cyber is also settling into a more measurable, benchmarkable line, which is a trend carriers can build on in 2026. NAIC staff reported a U.S. cyber insurance market (including U.S. domiciled insurers and alien surplus lines insurers writing in the U.S.) of roughly $9.7 billion in 2022 direct written premium, up 47.6% from the prior year. NAIC also reported standalone cyber direct written premium of about $5.1 billion in 2022, up 61.5%, and that the total number of standalone policies increased 31.8% versus 2021.
The trend underneath those numbers is maturity through discipline: tighter applications, clearer controls expectations, and more deliberate risk selection. For a carrier, that’s a positive setup, because it means competitive advantage can come from repeatable underwriting quality and aggregation awareness, not from chasing growth with fuzzy definitions.
A question that’s worth taking into 2026 planning meetings is this: as cyber scales, are we building the same level of consistency in verification, wording control, and accumulation monitoring that we already expect in property cat management?
2026 Is a Build Year
Zooming out, the most useful way to frame these trends is “build capabilities that travel well.” Regulators are signaling that forward-looking wildfire modeling can be part of rate review when it’s vetted, transparent, and connected to market participation expectations. Public catastrophe reporting is giving carriers a stable external reference for the frequency and scale of costly events, with clearly stated adjustment choices and limitations. And cyber has enough regulatory reporting structure to support benchmarking and sharper underwriting decisions that don’t rely on gut feel.
2026 rewards the teams that can measure risk clearly, explain decisions simply, and operationalize readiness across the year.
