The Australian general insurance industry earned $634 million in profit after tax in the March 2026 quarter, according to new data released by the Australian Prudential Regulation Authority (APRA). That number might look respectable in isolation. When set against the quarters before it, the number tells a very different story.
In June 2025, the industry made $2.36 billion. In September 2025, $2.27 billion. Then, in December 2025, profit after tax collapsed to $134 million — the lowest quarterly result in the entire APRA dataset, which runs from September 2023 to March 2026. The March 2026 recovery to $634 million represents less than a third of the mid-2025 run rate.
The industry's total insurance revenue has, by contrast, barely wavered. It reached $20.6 billion in the December 2025 quarter and $20.1 billion in March 2026 — both near the top of the range recorded across the dataset. Premiums kept coming in. Profits did not follow.
The answer is concentrated almost entirely in one line of business: householders insurance. In the December 2025 quarter, net claims incurred in the householders class reached $3.6 billion — against gross written premium of $4.49 billion for the same period. The insurance service result for the line was negative $1.08 billion, the worst single-quarter result for any major class in the dataset.
The timing aligns with the sequence of catastrophe events that struck Australia in the second half of 2025. As Insurance Business reported in March 2026, insured catastrophe losses in Australia reached US$2.9 billion in 2025 according to Aon's Climate and Catastrophe Insight report, with Ex-Cyclone Alfred generating approximately US$1 billion in claims alone. The Insurance Council of Australia separately reported that extreme weather events in 2025 generated almost $3.5 billion in insured losses from roughly 264,000 claims nationwide.
“What you’ll find with homeowners or householders policy performance is that historically the December and March quarters are the worst,” said Scott Guse (pictured left), partner with KPMG Australia.
That’s nearly always the prime catastrophic weather event period with floods, cyclones, hailstorms all generally falling in the October to March window.
Those losses hit the householders book in concentrated form. The December 2025 claims figure of $3.6 billion compares with $1.53 billion in the June 2025 quarter and $1.58 billion in September 2025 — a more than doubling of quarterly claims in a single period.
“Looking at it over the long term, that performance isn’t surprising,” said Guse. “It’s very hard to look at an insurance result quarter on quarter because of the fluctuating nature of events.”
Andrew Hall (pictured right), CEO of the Insurance Council of Australia (ICA) sees this issue of insurer profitability and home insurance as a “conundrum” that brings emotional and rational arguments into a collision. Even when insurer profit is actually very low, consumers don’t really see it that way.
“Out there in the public, there’s a very emotional reaction whenever people hear a profit figure,” said Hall. “We know the profitability of insurers in Australia is challenged — it’s cyclical, a roller coaster driven by external factors that can go up and down dramatically through no fault of anyone, driven purely by weather events.”
He said home insurance is a line that does face profitability challenges.
“In many cases, it’s only supported because it’s part of a diversified suite of other insurance lines within a company,” said Hall.
But the public and many other industry stakeholders don’t fully understand this complex and challenging situation.
“But those close to it — APRA, Treasury — do understand that home and contents has been a very challenged product for a number of years and it remains the case,” said Hall.
The March 2026 quarter showed some improvement. Householders net claims fell to $2.47 billion and the insurance service result for the line recovered to negative $10 million — effectively breakeven, but not profitable. For a line generating over $4.2 billion in quarterly GWP, a breakeven underwriting result represents a significant ongoing drag on sector returns.
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Guse said the last 12 months has seen some return to profitability for home insurance based largely on an absence of big weather events and significant increases in premiums in recent years.
The broader profit recovery to $634 million was supported by the investment result and by stronger performance in domestic motor, commercial lines, and several long-tail classes. But the householders line remains the swing factor. As analysts noted earlier this year, further pricing action across personal lines remains likely as insurers continue to adjust portfolios through 2026.
The wider industry context matters here. KPMG's General Insurance Insights and Analysis 2026 found the Australian general insurance industry recorded net profit of $5.2 billion for full-year 2025 — down from $6.1 billion in 2024. The APRA quarterly data makes clear that the annual deterioration was driven almost entirely by the December quarter catastrophe hit.
For brokers, the profit cliff has two practical implications. The first is pricing. An industry that absorbed a $1.08 billion single-quarter loss in its largest personal lines class is not one that will allow householders premiums to soften materially in the near term, regardless of competitive pressure in commercial lines. GlobalData estimates that Australia's property insurance market will grow at a CAGR of 7.5% between 2026 and 2030, and the structural drivers — climate risk, construction cost inflation, and reinsurance costs — remain firmly in place.
The second implication is for underinsurance conversations. As Insurance Business has previously reported, a building insured for $800,000 in 2021 may cost $1.1 million to rebuild in 2026. When the householders class posts a $3.6 billion claims quarter, the clients most exposed to shortfalls are those whose sums insured have not kept pace with rebuild costs — and that conversation remains one of the most important a broker can have.
The December 2025 quarter was an outlier. But it was also a reminder that in a market where climate risk is structural and reinsurance costs are high, the distance between a strong quarterly result and a near-zero one is shorter than it has ever been.
Source: APRA, Quarterly General Insurance Performance Statistics Database, September 2023 to March 2026, released 29 May 2026. All figures are in Australian dollars and based on APRA-authorised general insurers. Lloyd's Australian operations are not included
