New guide highlights emerging CAT trends and field-tested strategies to strengthen people, processes and technology ahead of a complex season
MEMPHIS, Tenn., June 11, 2026 /PRNewswire/ — Sedgwick, the world’s leading risk and claims administration partner has released the 2026 Catastrophe Season Playbook, a new guide that equips insurance carriers with emerging CAT trends and field-tested strategies to strengthen preparedness before the season begins.
Built on proprietary claims data and insights from Sedgwick’s catastrophe response leaders, the playbook is designed to help insurance carriers navigate an increasingly complex and unpredictable catastrophe environment with data, insights, and strategies to help stay ahead of the 2026 catastrophe season.
The 2025 CAT season reveals that 2026 is set to face a more distributed and harder-to-predict risk landscape than carriers have historically planned for. The reasons behind the shift go beyond weather patterns. As weather related catastrophe events grow more frequent and geographically dispersed, carriers are facing a growing risk of losing early claim control to third parties. Simultaneously, experienced talent continues to leave the industry, compounding the challenge of managing a higher volume of complex claims at the worst possible time. Together, these pressures could make claims harder to manage, more expensive to resolve, and more likely to drift.
“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.”
Top insights from the playbook include:
- $78 billion: The price tag from the three costliest U.S. weather disasters in 2025, each driven by non-hurricane perils outside the traditional peak season.
- 23 disasters: The total number of billion-dollar U.S. weather events in 2025, with the most expensive events driven by non-hurricane perils outside of the traditional peak season, and continuing a years-long trend of rising frequency and geographic spread.
- 12%: The increase of total modeled risk in 2025 vs. 2024 from non-hurricane perils including wildfires, inland flooding, and severe convective storms.
- 10 days: The current interval of billion-dollar disasters that occur, compared to in the 1980s when it was roughly every 82 days.
- Nearly 25%: The percentage of claim adjusters that are expected to retire by 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.
“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.”
The 2026 Catastrophe Season Playbook is available for download online. To connect with Sedgwick’s catastrophe response experts, visit sedgwick.com.
About Sedgwick
Sedgwick is the world’s leading risk and claims administration partner, helping clients thrive by navigating the unexpected. The company’s expertise, combined with the most advanced AI-enabled technology available, sets the standard for solutions in claims administration, loss adjusting, benefits administration and product recall. With over 33,000 colleagues and 10,000 clients across 80 countries, Sedgwick provides unmatched perspective, caring that counts, and solutions for the rapidly changing and complex risk landscape. Sedgwick’s majority shareholder is The Carlyle Group; Stone Point Capital LLC, Altas Partners, CDPQ, Onex and other management investors are minority shareholders. For more, see sedgwick.
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SOURCE Sedgwick Claims Management Services, Inc.
