A wave of severe storms across the US, Europe, and Australia has left insurers counting what is likely to be hundreds of millions of dollars in losses, the latest catastrophe data from Aon shows.
The US was hit on two fronts. In Colorado, golf ball-size hail disrupted travel and caused scattered property and auto damage across the Denver area. Aon called it one of the state’s “more notable hail events of the season.”
Repeated thunderstorms across Texas compounded the damage, producing large hail, damaging winds, and flash flooding. Aon said the overall pattern was “characteristic of early-summer severe convective storm season: frequent but localized outbreaks.”
Severe thunderstorms with large hail and intense rainfall swept broad areas of Western and Central Europe, damaging property and infrastructure across Benelux, Germany, southeastern France, Switzerland, Czechia, and Poland.
The continent’s exposure to this type of event has been growing for decades. Gallagher Re has warned that very large hail is now three times more likely in Europe than in the 1950s, with recent years producing several billion-euro loss events across the same regions hit by the latest storms.
Storms now outpace hurricanes as the costliest insured peril
The latest events are part of a larger and accelerating trend. Severe convective storms have overtaken hurricanes as the costliest cumulative insured peril of the 21st century, according to Aon’s Climate and Catastrophe Insight report.
Price-adjusted industry losses from severe convective storms have reached an estimated $794 billion this century, compared with $785 billion from tropical cyclones over the same period.
The shift is drawing attention across the industry. Allianz Commercial chief executive Thomas Lillelund said cumulative SCS losses now rival or exceed those from hurricanes. He added that businesses need to reassess their risk exposure in response. Gallagher Re puts SCS at nearly half of all insured catastrophe losses in 2025.
This finding sits within a broader pattern of elevated global losses. Aon’s full Climate and Catastrophe Insight report found that 2025 produced 30-billion-dollar insured loss events worldwide. That is nearly double the historical average of 17, despite the year being considered relatively quiet for major catastrophes.
The data points to a market where the traditional hierarchy of catastrophe perils no longer holds. Models built around hurricane seasons and tropical cyclone tracks are increasingly out of step with where the losses are coming from.
