What 2025 Claims Data is Really Telling You

April 20, 2026 / 5 min read

2025 ClaimSearch^® Trends Report: How a "quiet" year created both relief and new risk for insurance leaders

At first glance, 2025 looks like a year the industry exhaled. Claims volume fell across nearly every major line of business. Catastrophe-exposed lines such as homeowners and commercial property posted their steepest declines in years. For chief claims officers and underwriting leaders carrying scar tissue from 2022 and 2023, the numbers might feel like a reprieve.

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But the 2025 ClaimSearch Trends Report—pulled from the world's largest database of property and casualty claims—tells a more complicated story. It’s one where headline volume relief masks structural exposure shifts with the potential to shape capacity decisions, reinsurance strategy, and operational planning across the remainder of the decade.

The numbers behind the calm

Personal auto claims fell from a 2022 peak of 34.4 million to 31.6 million in 2025, an 8% decline over three years. Homeowners claims dropped 19% year over year, from 6.47 million to 5.27 million—the lowest volume in the past five years. Commercial property claims have been declining sharply since 2023, dropping from 0.91 million to 0.71 million. Workers' compensation and general liability held relatively steady, as they have over the five years from 2021 through 2025.

The primary driver of the homeowners and commercial property declines is straightforward: 2025 delivered a relatively quiet hurricane season with fewer landfalls, lower severity, and less concentrated coastal losses.

That's real, and it matters. But it's also exactly the kind of signal that can create strategic blind spots.

Commercial auto: A growth story with a caveat

Commercial auto tells a different story from the rest of the portfolio. After rising steadily from 1.6 million claims in 2021 to 1.94 million in 2024, volume pulled back 5% to 1.84 million in 2025—a pivot that warrants attention. Despite the decline, commercial auto volume still sits 14% above 2021 levels.

Much of that growth traces to the expanding gig economy. Ride-hailing and food-delivery platforms have fundamentally changed commercial vehicle exposure, and the claims data reflects this shift. Leaders who treat the 2025 dip as mean reversion may be underestimating how structurally different the commercial auto book looks today compared with five years ago.

Why a quiet CAT year is not a lower-risk year

Here's where the 2025 data demands the most careful interpretation. Reduced hurricane activity pulled homeowners and commercial property claim volumes down sharply. But the same year produced the costliest wildfire event in U.S. history.

The January 2025 Los Angeles fires—the Palisades and Eaton fires combined—generated an estimated $28 billion in insured losses. To put that in context, the previous record holder, the 2018 Camp Fire, cost $12.4 billion in 2025 dollars. The Tubbs Fire in 2017 cost $11.4 billion. Three record-breaking wildfire loss events in eight years, after a 26-year gap between comparable events, is not a streak of bad luck. It is a signal that the risk environment in the Western U.S. has fundamentally shifted.

The ClaimSearch data reinforces this. California homeowners fire and smoke claims spiked dramatically in January 2025, with the Eaton Fire alone generating over 15,000 claims in its first 30 days—more than the Camp Fire produced in the same window. Properties in the Palisades fire zone carried median home values of $3.2 million to $3.5 million and average replacement costs of $1.18 million per single-family residence. These are not rural losses. They are high-value, densely developed urban-interface losses that stress reinsurance towers in ways traditional cat models weren’t built to anticipate.

A quiet Atlantic hurricane season and a catastrophic California wildfire season can exist in the same calendar year. In 2025, they did. Aggregate loss metrics that look reassuring at the portfolio level may be masking severe concentration risk in specific geographies and lines.

What this means for 2026 planning

For senior leaders, the 2025 claims picture surfaces three areas that deserve immediate strategic attention.

Rethink wildfire aggregates and reinsurance structures. The LA fires demonstrated that wildfire losses can now rival or exceed Gulf Coast hurricane seasons in terms of insured impact, and they can occur in densely populated areas with dramatically higher per-structure replacement costs than historical wildfire events. Cat aggregate assumptions and treaty structures built around pre-2017 wildfire norms may be underpriced for the current environment.
Resist the temptation to scale back after a quiet year. Hurricane seasons follow cycles. A below-average 2025 does not de-risk 2026. Claims operations that reduce vendor partnerships, staffing capacity, or response infrastructure during quiet periods face compounded operational strain when major events return. The ClaimSearch data provides the historical volume context to calibrate those decisions against cyclic long-term patterns rather than the most recent year's performance.
Use data to distinguish cyclical relief from structural change. The 8% decline in personal auto or the 19% drop in homeowners claims may reflect weather patterns, not underlying exposure reduction. ClaimSearch, with five-plus years of normalized claims data across all major lines, is the benchmark that can help leaders answer that question with evidence rather than assumptions. Knowing whether a volume shift is seasonal, cyclical, or structural could be the difference between a well-timed strategic adjustment and a costly miscalibration.

The bottom line

The industry enjoyed a year of relative quiet in 2025 across the lines most exposed to Atlantic hurricane activity. The year also delivered the costliest wildfire season on record. That combination—volume relief in some lines, historic loss severity in others—is precisely the kind of environment where data quality and analytical depth can determine which carriers are positioned to compete in 2026 and beyond.

The ClaimSearch 2025 Year-End Trends Report provides line-of-business breakouts, geographic data, and five-year trend benchmarks to support that planning. Download the full report for detailed charts and analysis to inform your 2026 strategy.