Illinois is having a terrible, horrible, no good, very bad year.

Severe storms have rocked the Land of Lincoln throughout 2026, with Tuesday’s tornado scare blasting emergency alerts to cellphones across Chicago and activating warning sirens downtown, sending many office workers to the lower levels of skyscrapers to weather the storm.

On Tuesday, a section of the roof of the Credit Union 1 Amphitheatre in Tinley Park was heavily damaged, with debris blown off and scattered across the venue’s lawn. The storm also ripped up trees, cut off power and tore off the roof of an animal daycare in Orland Park. 

“This is the craziest storm season I’ve ever seen,” WGN-TV meteorologist Bill Snyder told Block Club Chicago. “There’s been no rest for the wicked.”

The onslaught of severe weather has major implications for the insurance costs of the state’s commercial property owners and could dampen Illinois’ long-held advantage as a relative safe haven for climate risk compared to counterparts along the coasts. 

“An increase in the number of claims will almost always lead to an increase in premium and some sort of evisceration of coverage,” said Anthony Lopez, CEO of Your Insurance Attorney. “You can almost certainly bet your bottom dollar that you're going to be paying more for the same, if not less, coverage.”

Illinois occupies the top spot on an unsavory National Weather Service leaderboard in 2026: most severe storm reports. The database tracks tornadoes, severe wind and severe hail. 

A staggering 233 tornadoes have spun up in Illinois this year, according to preliminary NWS data, about 2.5 times more than the state with the next most, Indiana. More than 100 annual twisters have battered Illinois for four consecutive years, a dramatic shift given that between 1950 and 2022, there had only been four total years when tornadoes eclipsed the century mark. 

Illinois saw $4.6B in costs from billion-dollar weather and climate disasters in 2023 and another $4B in 2024, according to the most recent data from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. While the data doesn't provide a clean breakout for commercial property damage, both years were more than three times Illinois' $1.3B historical average.

Property and casualty insurers licensed in Illinois wrote $1.8B in commercial property premiums in 2025, up 5.6% from the year before, even as incurred losses on those policies fell nearly 20% to $856M, according to the Illinois Department of Insurance.

This year’s storm activity has been “out of the norm,” World Insurance Associates Division Leader Katie Scheuer said, and as severe storm patterns increase in Illinois, insurers will step up underwriting scrutiny. Premiums and deductibles are likely to increase, and wind and hail coverage — a rarity a decade ago — will continue to become more of the norm.

For higher-risk buildings or locations, some carriers may pull out, and it will be harder to land insurance for older buildings because they get damaged first, Scheuer said. 

“By the time your next renewal comes in, you're going to have an impact,” she said. “Insurance companies have to react, and they have to act fast because they don't have the money that they used to sit on because of all the natural disasters and the storms.”

Higher premiums reduce net operating income, leading to knock-on effects on debt service, loan proceeds and ability to refinance, Lopez said. Those increased premiums come alongside decreased coverage in some instances. 

Across the country, places historically seen as relatively safe from a climate risk standpoint, like the Midwest, Texas and Colorado, are increasingly seeing catastrophes including hail, wildfires, extreme rainfall and flooding, Lopez said. These trends have reduced investors' ability to diversify their climate risk exposure, as the distinction between markets becomes less clear and insurers model risk using more granular data. 

“What people don't realize is the areas in the country that used to be considered low risk are no longer low risk anymore,” Lopez said.