PERILS launches 2026 IED, showing $150tn in global nat cat exposures

Catastrophe data aggregator PERILS has released the 2026 edition of its Industry Exposure Database (IED), providing USD $150 trillion of markets sums insured exposed to natural perils for 21 different countries, with like-for-like exposures also rising 4.7% year-on-year at constant exchange rates.

The IED contains markets sums insured exposed to natural perils for 21 countries, including Australia, Austria, Belgium, Canada, Denmark, France, Germany, Ireland, Indonesia, Italy, Japan, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, New Zealand, Norway, the Philippines, Sweden, Switzerland, Thailand, Turkey, and the United Kingdom.

In total the PERILS IED 2026 contains 67 individual market portfolios.

For this year, the IED provides market sums insured exposed to natural perils totalling $150 trillion of insured property assets.

According to PERILS, on a like-for-like basis, this indicates a year-on-year exposure increase of 4.7% at constant USD exchange rates, whereas it also shows a rise of 15.2% at current USD exchange rates. This discrepancy highlights the effect of the weakening dollar relative to other major currencies in 2025.

Every year, the PERILS IED is generated from the ground-up by gathering insured sum information from multiple insurers throughout all regions covered by PERILS and aggregating this data pool to achieve a 100% market level

The resulting market sums insured are available by CRESTA zone, Property and Motor lines of business, occupancy and coverage types. The in-force date of the newest exposure data is January 1st, 2026.

“IEDs are an essential part in understanding natural catastrophe risk in an insurance market. They can be used for estimating potential market losses and serve as a basis for the pricing of industry-loss-based risk transfer products. Together with the PERILS industry loss database, they also serve in assessing the vulnerability of insured assets towards natural hazards, a critical component in every Cat model,” PERILS explained.

Christoph Oehy, CEO of PERILS, commented: “High-quality, real-world exposure and loss data is essential to understanding risk. For over 17 years, PERILS has collected detailed, ground-up data from the insurance industry, ensuring accuracy, consistency, and relevance.

“As the industry continues to integrate advanced analytics and AI into decision-making, the value of our data has become ever more critical, underpinning these ecosystems with reliable, unbiased information. By delivering fresh empirical benchmarks from new exposure datasets and loss events, we enable model calibration and validation, help identify emerging trends, and ensure the industry’s view of risk remains robust and transparent.”

He continued: “We are proud of this achievement and are particularly grateful to our data providers for their ongoing commitment to providing us with their data and making such valuable learnings possible for the industry as a whole.”