Verisk: U.S. claims hit five‑year low

Insurance claims got quieter in 2025. That sounds like simple good news for carriers, adjusters, and policyholders. But the real story is stranger than that. Verisk’s annual claims trends report says U.S. claim counts fell across most major lines last year, in some cases to the lowest level in five years. Yet the losses that did come in were often more concentrated, more unusual, and harder to work. ### What actually fell? The broad answer is: almost everything important by volume. Homeowners claims fell 19% year over year to 5.3 million in 2025. Personal auto claims dropped to 31.6 million, extending a three-year slide from the 2022 peak of 34.4 million. Commercial auto fell 5% to 1.8 million. Commercial property dropped to 710,000, down from 910,000 in 2023. ### Why did claims get so quiet? Weather did a lot of the work. Verisk ties the decline at least partly to less severe weather activity in 2025, especially a relatively quiet hurricane season that helped pull homeowners volume down. That matters because catastrophe weather can flood the system with routine roof, water, and wind claims all at once. When that wave does not arrive, total counts can fall fast. ### So was 2025 just a better year? Not exactly. Fewer claims does not mean lower risk in a clean, simple way. Verisk’s point is basically that risk became more elevated and concentrated even as raw volume fell. In other words, the industry got fewer files to handle, but a bigger share of them came from tricky pockets where severity, causation, and long-tail development are harder to judge. ### What made the remaining claims harder? Wildfire smoke is one example. The January 2025 Los Angeles wildfires did not just create obvious fire losses — smoke damage became a meaningful claims driver too, and those losses can keep developing after the event itself. That is the catch with “quiet” years. One big catastrophe can leave a much longer tail than the headline claim count suggests. ### Where else is risk concentrating? Auto is a good example. Verisk says personal auto theft claims fell again in 2025, but the theft that remained became more targeted, with Acura theft rates specifically rising in the report’s auto-theft section. On the commercial side, gig-related auto claims have jumped 96% since 2021 and now make up 10% of commercial auto claims, pushed by ride-hailing and food delivery exposure. ### Why do insurers care if volume is lower? Because low volume changes what management watches. In a surge year, the main question is throughput — can you get claims opened, staffed, inspected, and paid fast enough? In a quiet year, the spotlight shifts to file quality, leakage, reserving discipline, and implication shows up in industry coverage around Verisk’s report. ### Does this help policyholders? Sometimes, but not automatically. A calmer claims year can ease pressure on carrier operations and repair networks, which should help service times. But concentrated risk can still keep pricing and underwriting tight in exposed segments like wildfire-prone property or theft-heavy vehicles. Lower frequency is helpful — it just does not erase severity. ### Bottom line? The headline is that 2025 produced fewer U.S. insurance claims. The more important takeaway is that the easy claims disappeared faster than the hard ones. For insurers, that means the job is shifting from handling lots of files to understanding a smaller pile of weirder, more expensive risk.