PERILS has issued its first industry loss estimate for the severe convective storms that swept across Germany, France, Switzerland and Italy between 13 and 19 July 2026, putting the insurance market loss at €2,186 million.
The figure is now the largest loss from this specific peril in PERILS' European record, and the largest loss estimate the organisation has issued for any European catastrophe since the windstorm series of February 2022.
The estimate covers property and motor lines of business, based on loss data collected directly from affected insurers. An updated figure is due on 19 October 2026, three months after the event ended.
The outbreak was triggered when cooler high-level air moved in from the northeast across the continent, creating a suction effect that lifted hot, humid air left over from a preceding heatwave, producing ideal conditions for a wide scatter of convective storm cells. Some of these cells generated very large hail, high wind gusts and unusually intense rainfall. The storms first struck northern Germany on 13 July and continued through the week until 19 July, moving through southern Germany, France, Switzerland and northern Italy.
Where the storms hit, the damage followed a familiar pattern for the peril: high winds and flying debris damaged properties, large hailstones damaged vehicles and buildings, and flash flooding affected cellars and basements.
Aon's own weekly catastrophe reporting had earlier flagged the same event as it developed, initially estimating hundreds of millions of euros in losses with the potential to reach a billion, and noting that agriculture was expected to be a significant contributor to the overall economic toll alongside property damage.
Luzi Hitz, product manager at PERILS, said that while multi-billion-euro severe convective storm losses in Europe aren't unheard of, the sheer scale of this tally is striking. He said that unlike floods, cyclones or earthquakes, severe convective storms rarely attract international attention because they are typically localised events, which can create a perception bias that leads to the overall impact of these storms being underestimated. He said this is precisely why systematically collecting loss data from major outbreaks is essential to establishing the true scale of these weather events.
Hitz said the combination of large hail, high gusts and torrential rain is typical for this kind of storm, but what stood out about the mid-July event was its lengthy duration, wide geographical extent and the intensity of individual storm cells. He said these features are driven by a steadily warming atmosphere, meaning this is unlikely to be the last time Europe sees a multi-billion-euro severe convective storm event.
The mid-July outbreak was not an isolated event this season. Severe convective storms struck parts of Europe again in August, including a rare, strong tornado in France, alongside further severe storms and damaging hail in Switzerland and Italy later in the month. Aon separately estimated a late-August outbreak spanning Spain to Ukraine and Belarus, with an ESTOFEX Level 3 warning covering the Balearic Sea to northern Italy, produced hundreds of millions of euros in further economic and insured losses, with tornado damage in Germany and wind damage across Czechia, Slovakia, Austria and Poland, and large hail up to 6.5cm recorded in France.
Hitz's point about perception bias is really a point about how catastrophe risk gets communicated versus how it actually accumulates. A single flood or windstorm that produces a comparable industry loss draws sustained international coverage, while a week of scattered hail and wind cells across four countries, each individually unremarkable, adds up to a record loss for the peril with comparatively little public attention.
For insurers and reinsurers pricing European property risk, that gap between visibility and actual cost is precisely the kind of blind spot systematic loss aggregation exists to correct, and Hitz's warning that a warming atmosphere makes repeat multi-billion-euro events more likely suggests this record won't stand for long.
