A catalog of 1,273 insurers known to have failed across 98 countries since 2000 has been published by Canada's Property and Casualty Insurance Compensation Corporation, and the United States dominates it in ways that may surprise the market.
Of the 1,273 total failures, 522 were US insurers, representing 41% of all known failures globally - roughly ten times more than any other country except Russia, which recorded 117. When individual US states are treated as separate jurisdictions, Florida ranks second globally with 58 failures since 2000, New York ranks third with 51, and four US states - Florida, New York, Texas and Illinois - appear in the global top ten by total failures.
The US also leads the world on failure frequency. New York and Florida are the only two jurisdictions globally where a failure has occurred in more than 20 of the past 26 years. Texas, Illinois and Pennsylvania are all Tier 1 jurisdictions in the catalog's frequency classification, meaning failures are an expected feature of those markets rather than exceptional events.
The raw US total is partly a function of scale. The US has more insurance companies than any other country, and the catalog's own insolvency rate calculation - measuring failures per 1,000 active insurers across 38 OECD nations - puts the US in the upper half but not at the top. Mexico, Greece, South Korea, Spain and several others have higher insolvency rates per insurer than the US when measured that way.
The more useful US-specific finding is the guarantee fund coverage rate. Of all insurer failures in North America since 2000, 86.6% occurred in jurisdictions with a policyholder protection scheme - the highest coverage rate of any continent globally. Every US state maintains its own life and P&C guaranty fund, meaning most American policyholders facing an insurer insolvency have a backstop available. That coverage rate stands against 34% in Europe and just 5.5% in Africa.
The catalog identifies 48 failure clusters in 21 US states since 2000 - clusters defined as three or more failures within a three-year period. New York alone recorded five separate clusters between 2000 and 2023. Florida recorded four. Texas recorded five. Illinois recorded three.
The catalog's second major finding is that long periods without failures reliably precede those clusters rather than indicating they will not occur. Of the 146 jurisdictions with reported failures, 136 had at least five consecutive years of zero failures at some point in the data. Twenty jurisdictions had gaps of 20 years or more between cluster periods.
The practical implication for the US market is direct. Several US states that experienced significant failure clusters in the 1990s and early 2000s - during the liability crisis and in its aftermath - have now gone a decade or more without a failure. The catalog's own language on this is unambiguous: "Those jurisdictions enjoying a period of calm would be well served to use that time to prepare for their next cluster of failures."
Grant Kelly, PACICC's chief economist and the report's lead author, said the research identified clusters of insurer failures occurring 118 times across 59 jurisdictions since 2000, often after sustained periods of relative calm.
"It would be very risky to assume that, because an insurer has not failed recently in a given jurisdiction, it never will," Kelly said. "This should serve as a sobering reminder to all financial services sector stakeholders of the risks of complacency."
PACICC CEO Alister Campbell separately called on the International Association of Insurance Supervisors to make policyholder protection mechanisms a core supervisory standard globally, noting that the majority of failures recorded outside North America occurred in jurisdictions with no compensation scheme in place at all.
The report covers failures through 2025. After a five-year favorable trend that had seen global failure counts fall to a record low of 25 in 2024, the number rose to 40 in 2025 - a one-year uptick of 60%. Campbell noted that this reversal "may signal an important market turn," though the 2025 figure remains well below the highs of the early 2000s.
For US insurers, reinsurers and supervisory bodies, the catalog is primarily useful not as a count of domestic failures - those are documented elsewhere - but as a framework for understanding when failure risk is structurally elevated. The US guarantee fund system provides policyholders more protection than most of the world's markets. The clustering data suggests that protection is likely to be tested again.
