U.S. Property Insurance Premiums Are Finally Going Down After Hurricane-Free 2025

For insurance brokers such as Danielle Lombardo over the last five years, their work connecting property owners to insurance has felt less like consulting and more like counseling.

“I was a property insurance therapist during the hard market,” said Lombardo, co-leader of real estate practice at insurance consulting firm Howden. “I say that tongue in cheek, but it's actually true when you have the CEO of a South Florida-based real estate developer who's calling you literally crying, saying, ‘I can't do this deal because of insurance. Help me.’”

As the frequency of billion-dollar disasters has increased, so has the cost of property insurance. Some commercial owners are paying twice as much of their revenue toward insurance as they were as recently as five years ago.

But last year was the first time in a decade that no hurricanes struck the U.S., according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. It was also the start of insurance rates coming down, and 2026 is shaping up to be a year of more profound relief, industry professionals said.

Insurance insiders expect rates to decrease by double-digit percentages through the first half of 2026 with insurers taking on more risk and facing increased competition as more companies enter the market.

"Having a quiet year in 2025 has definitely set us up for success for the first half of 2026," Brown & Brown Senior Vice President Christian Zanartu said. 

The surprising lack of tropical storms was a much-needed break after years of increasing natural disasters. Between 1980 and 2010, the U.S. averaged about five billion-dollar disasters per year, according to the National Centers for Environmental Information. Between 2020 and 2025, there were 23 incidents per year of storms, cyclones, wildfires, winter storms and other hazardous weather that caused more than $1B in damages.

As the aggregate cost of storm damage has soared, so has the cost of insurance. 

From 2017 to 2023, commercial property insurance rates rose by about 10% each year — and in some markets, more than 20% — according to a 2024 Moody’s report. Between 2021 and 2023 alone, U.S. property insurance increased between 6% and 19% per quarter, according to Marsh. 

The "hard market" had gotten so volatile that property owners struggled to get coverage or maintain the right coverage for loan agreements, according to Moody's.

But, ironically, starting around when hurricanes Helene and Milton struck the Southeastern U.S. in the fall of 2024, insurance premiums for U.S. properties began to decrease. In the third quarter of 2025, the most recent Marsh data available, rates declined by 9% year-over-year.

The slowdown was largely driven by insurers having greater access to cash flow after tightening coverage and paying out fewer claims over the last year, Resilience Insurance Analytics President and Chief Operating Officer Emily Rasmussen said.

"It's very heavily based on the fact that they're able to retain cash right now, and as soon as they aren't, there's really not anything holding that line," Rasmussen said.

While the U.S. had a quiet hurricane season last year, there were still natural disasters that caused $100B in damage, The New York Times reported, referencing data from Climate Central, a policy-neutral research nonprofit that began logging billion-dollar disasters in 2025 after NOAA announced it would no longer track them. Climate Central said last year was the least damaging year overall since 2019.

The biggest disasters of 2025 were the Eaton and Palisades fires, which destroyed 16,000 structures around Los Angeles in January, claiming 31 lives. The blazes caused between $76B and $131B in economic losses and about $45B in insured losses. A year later, property and business owners are still struggling to rebuild.

Another devastating natural disaster occurred in July when flash river flooding that swept through the Texas Hill Country killed more than 100 people and caused an economic loss of up to $22B.

While those events were tragic, they were isolated enough — and payouts were small enough — that the insurance market should be largely unaffected, said Michael Brodie, a co-leader of the real estate practice at Howden alongside Lombardo.

For insurance premiums to jump again in 2026, there would need to be more than $100B in global insured losses, Lombardo and Brodie said on a joint Zoom call with Bisnow.

"It's fragile to the extent of having $100B-plus events in any one year," Lombardo said. "I think having so many years of a relatively quiet storm season and profitability from a property insurance perspective, it's going to take something pretty big to put us back to where we were during the hard market."

Still, insurance professionals are holding their breath for the second half of the year, when hurricane season rolls around again June 1.

“The hope is that the wind doesn't blow, the market begins to stabilize, and at the end of the day, that should put property owners in a very good position for the entirety of 2026," Zanartu said. "But I will tell you, only time will tell."