The 2026 catastrophe season will face a more distributed and harder-to-predict risk landscape than carriers have historically planned for, according to a new report by global claims administrator Sedgwick.
The complex nature could make claims harder to manage, more expensive to resolve, and more likely to drift, the 2026 Catastrophe Season Playbook outlined.
“The 2025 season may have felt quieter on the surface, but what it actually revealed was a more distributed and persistent form of risk, and one that doesn’t announce itself the way a major hurricane does,” said David Armstrong, executive vice president at Sedgwick. “2026 is shaping up to be one of the most complex catastrophe seasons that carriers have ever faced, and the response models most carriers have in place aren’t built for this new reality. This playbook is about closing that gap and giving carriers the frameworks, the data, and the honest assessment of where preparedness falls short so they can get ahead of it before conditions change.”
Data showed that the three costliest U.S. weather disasters in 2025, each driven by non-hurricane perils outside the traditional peak season, cost $78 billion in total.
In fact, frequent, moderate losses throughout 2025 added constant pressure to resources and partners.
Last year, there were 23 billion-dollar U.S. weather events, with the most expensive events driven by non-hurricane perils outside of the traditional peak season — a broader mix of secondary perils like blizzards, wildfires and inland flooding — that continued a years-long trend of rising frequency and geographic spread.
Non-hurricane perils have been increasing since 2015, Sedgwick reported, accounting for 99% of insured loss in 2025, up nearly 50% from 2024.
Areas not typically considered high risk experienced losses, like a tornado that hit east of the Great Plains, an area outside Tornado Alley.
There was a 12% increase in total modeled risk in 2025 vs. 2024 from non-hurricane perils, including wildfires, inland flooding and severe convective storms.
In the 1980s, the insurance industry could expect a billion-dollar disaster every 82 days; now it is one in every 10 days.
The report outlines how current disaster models are outdated, given changes in frequency, type, and location of catastrophes occurring in North America today.
Insurers have less time to recover and require more coordination to address these changes.
Adding to the dire numbers, 25% of claim adjusters are expected to retire by the end of 2027. Carriers with high turnover among experienced adjusters have already seen operational costs rise by 12%.
“This is draining institutional knowledge from the industry at a critical moment,” the report stated.
And while technology and automation adoption may be the answer in the future, both have only been tested in times of relative quiet and have not been “tested at scale during a major catastrophe.”
The loss of experienced adjusters and the use of automation before being adequately tested could lead to increased compliance risks and operational costs, the report noted.
Carriers can evaluate their operating models before catastrophes occur to identify gaps in their end-to-end claim workflows by running multi-regional, multi-perils simulations, testing FNOL to resolution hand-offs to identify areas of breakdown, and reviewing where changes in volume, complexity, and timing impact the claims cycle.
“A quiet early season can be a misleading signal because you don’t get time back once an event hits, and you can’t prepare after the fact,” said Andy McCallum, vice president of Specialty Operations at Sedgwick. “In responding to catastrophes, the key is to prepare and plan, and always be ready with your resources, no matter the forecast. We always advise taking a proactive, multi-layered approach to CAT preparedness, and balance short-term readiness with long-term resilience.”
Learn more about how to address claims complexity changes this year with recommendations based on El Niño/La Niña conditions by downloading the report at: https://www.sedgwick.com/2026-CAT-Season-Playbook/
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