If you've placed a cyber renewal any time in the last three years, you'll know the drill: quote comes in, price is down again, client is delighted, broker quietly wonders how long this can go on. According to a panel of UK cyber specialists who spoke to me on Insurance Business TV, the answer seems to be: not forever, but nobody's quite ready to call the turn just yet.
The numbers back up the unease. International cyber rates have fallen 43% since the fourth quarter of 2023, according to specialist underwriter DUAL, which has said the cyber market is approaching a critical turning point in 2026 as claims severity climbs even as premiums keep sliding. Lockton's own portfolio data shows premiums down an average of 11% in 2025, and broker guidance is that further reductions are likely at least through the first half of this year, driven largely by aggressive growth targets among London market carriers and a steady flow of new capacity - Lockton counted two new MGAs and a syndicate launching cyber books in the first quarter of 2026 alone.
INSERT CHART
Ethan Godlieb, associate partner for cyber and fintech at Consilium Insurance Brokers, put a figure on it during the panel: around 12 consecutive quarters of pricing decreases, in his estimation, with competition still fierce for well-run risks. "It can't get any cheaper than this, can it?" was, he said, the standing joke among brokers - one they've apparently been telling themselves for a couple of years now.
Read more: IB reveals the UK’s best cyber insurers
Not everyone on the panel is convinced the joke has much longer to run. Colin Fox, cyber insurance consultant at Integrity, part of Hayes Parsons, was the most sceptical: "I don't think it's sustainable," he said, pointing out that nobody expected the current soft cycle to outlast the last hard market by this much - rates jumped by as much as 100-150% almost overnight back in 2020-21, in his recollection, and the pendulum was assumed to swing back on a similar timescale. It hasn't. Fox also flagged early signs of hardening in the US market, historically the bellwether for London, which he thinks could feed through to UK pricing within six to twelve months - though he's cautious about pinning down exactly when.
That US signal is worth taking seriously. Ratings agency S&P Global has forecast a 15-20% premium increase across the market this year as claims severity finally catches up with pricing, and underwriting results are already showing the strain: DUAL says combined ratios are deteriorating across the US, UK, Europe and Australia/New Zealand, with some markets at risk of turning unprofitable by 2027 if nothing changes. Claims data tells a similar story - insurer At-Bay found the average ransomware claim rose 16% year-on-year to $508,000 in 2025, while Coalition put the average ransom demand above $1 million, up 47%.
So why hasn't the UK market reacted? Daniel Winn, a development broker at Jensten London Markets specialising in technology, media and cyber, thinks frequency is the thing to watch, not just severity - if claims keep coming in at pace while rates keep dropping, brokers may eventually be having some awkward renewal conversations. "We're all fighting for the 10 that buy cyber insurance rather than the 90 that don't," he added, framing the softening less as an existing-client giveaway and more as a scramble for a market still heavily under-penetrated - a point that lines up with Insurance Business's own data on UK SME cyber insurance uptake, which GlobalData puts at only around 40%, against 63% for medium-sized firms and roughly 70% among FTSE 100 companies.
Selorm Kofi Domeh, broking manager at Talbot Jones, was the most relaxed of the group, arguing that a profitable book and healthy competition mean the current pricing environment could simply hold: clients who couldn't afford cover two or three years ago can now afford it, which he sees as a market functioning as intended rather than one storing up trouble. Godlieb, for his part, pointed to a structural reason the reckoning may be delayed regardless: the "longer liability tail" in cyber means the full claims picture from current underwriting years often doesn't emerge for two or three years, leaving plenty of scope for today's pricing to look fine right up until it doesn't.
Nobody on the panel was predicting a hard market by name. But the direction of travel in the hard data - falling rates, rising severity, deteriorating combined ratios - suggests the "how long can this last" question brokers have been asking each other for two years is edging closer to an actual answer.
