The 2026 Atlantic hurricane season looks calmer on paper, but a new forecast from MS Amlin shows the risk of a catastrophic, market-moving storm is still very much alive.
The insurer's 2026 hurricane forecast puts the probability of at least one Category 4 or 5 hurricane making US landfall this year at 27%, down from 39% in 2025. The decline is being driven by strengthening El Niño conditions, which typically increase wind shear across the tropical Atlantic and suppress storm formation and intensification.
The sharpest drop in risk is concentrated in the Gulf of Mexico, where the probability of a Category 4 or 5 landfall has nearly halved, falling from 19% to 10%. Florida tells a different story: despite the broader calming trend, the probability of a major hurricane landfall there has only edged down from 19% to 14%, keeping the state among the most exposed coastlines in the country for carriers writing property catastrophe risk.
MS Amlin's mean forecast points to a below-average Atlantic season overall, with 11 named storms, five hurricanes and two major hurricanes - short of the long-term averages of 14.4 named storms, 7.2 hurricanes and 3.2 major hurricanes.
Sam Phibbs, MS Amlin's head of catastrophe research, cautioned against reading the lower numbers as reduced underwriting risk. "A one-in-four chance of a Category 4 or 5 US hurricane landfall is lower than we were seeing a year ago, but it's still far from negligible," Phibbs said. "It only takes one storm to turn a quiet season into a costly one for communities and insurers."
Phibbs also pointed to a competing factor working against El Niño's calming influence. "While El Niño is expected to dampen hurricane activity, its influence is being partly offset by unusually warm tropical Atlantic waters, which are keeping conditions favorable for storms to form and intensify," he said.
MS Amlin's own data from last year illustrates the gap between storm count and loss severity. No hurricanes made US landfall in 2025 despite forecasts pointing to elevated risk, yet Hurricane Melissa rapidly intensified into a Category 5 storm before striking Jamaica, causing an estimated $8.8 billion in economic damage.
"Where storms make landfall is often more important than how many storms form," Phibbs said. "A quieter season can still produce significant losses if a major hurricane strikes a highly exposed location."
MS Amlin's latest forecast arrive against a backdrop of sharply softening reinsurance pricing, raising questions over whether the market has priced in enough of a buffer for a low-probability, high-severity event.
Risk-adjusted global property-catastrophe reinsurance rates-on-line declined by 14.7% on average at the January 2026 renewals, accelerating from an 8% decline recorded in 2025, according to Howden Re. US property catastrophe reinsurance rates fell a further 12% at the January 2026 renewals, before declining by another 14% at the April 2026 renewal, separate data from Guy Carpenter shows.
That softening has continued through the year. Property-catastrophe reinsurance prices fell at a faster pace at the June 2026 renewal than at any point earlier in the year, driven by record levels of dedicated reinsurance capital and sustained growth in alternative capacity, Howden Re reported. Analysts at KBW had anticipated much of this move, expecting risk-adjusted property catastrophe reinsurance rates to decline by 15%–20% during the January 2026 renewals, attributing the trend to perceived rate super-adequacy following the sharp repricing of 2023.
Notably, per-occurrence attachment points have remained largely unchanged through the rate declines, which KBW reads as evidence of sustained reinsurer discipline rather than complacency.
MS Amlin's analysis also flags above-average typhoon activity in the Pacific Basin this year, with Tropical Storm Risk projecting 27 tropical storms, 18 typhoons and 11 intense typhoons, above long-term averages of 26, 16 and nine respectively.
"The Atlantic may be less active, but risk is shifting rather than disappearing," Phibbs said.
The landfall probabilities were calculated in partnership with Reask, a catastrophe modeling and climate analytics firm, using forecast-based hurricane data combining seasonal climate forecasts with thousands of simulated storm tracks.
