High-net-worth clients are increasingly worried about cyber risk, but many still decline personal cyber insurance even when coverage is available and relatively affordable.
A 2026 RiskScan survey of more than 1,700 US and UK respondents from the Insurance Information Institute and Munich Re US found that cyber and flood remain among the most stubborn personal protection gaps, with coverage lagging well behind consumers' stated awareness of the risks.
The reluctance also comes as personal cyber exposures are becoming more visible. The FBI's 2025 Internet Crime Report recorded more than one million complaints for the first time and reported losses of $20.877 billion, with cyber-enabled fraud accounting for $17.697 billion of those losses.
The report also recorded $893 million in AI-related losses in its first-ever section dedicated to artificial intelligence, driven partly by voice cloning and deepfakes used to impersonate trusted contacts, creating substantial risk to affluent individuals and their advisors.
Jason Ott, president of Aon Private Risk Management, flagged the disparity in a recent conversation with Insurance Business.
"Our take-up rate is under 10% for our clients on adding cyber coverage," Ott said. "We talk about it a lot. We do surveys with our largest clients, and we ask, 'What keeps you up at night?' Cyber is always one of the number one or number two things that they tell us. But then when we actually go to offer the cyber coverage, they pass on it."
This dynamic comes as personal cyber insurance has becoming more accessible than ever. Ott said standalone policies are easy to obtain, and insureds can add coverage onto most homeowners insurance policies by endorsement. In many cases, clients can secure $50,000 or $100,000 of coverage, while some carriers may offer up to $1 million by endorsement, depending on the policy and client profile. Despite that availability, adoption remains low.
For Ott, part of the challenge is confidence among US consumers that a major personal cyber event will not affect them directly, or that existing benefits through credit cards or other services will be sufficient. "There is a level of confidence in the United States that ‘we don't need it, or we're going to be taken care of. It can't happen here,’" he said. "Or ‘I have some sort of coverage tacked on somewhere else with a credit card.’ Those are good coverages; they're just sometimes not as robust as what's offered in the high-net-worth space."
Federal data suggests that individual cyber events can be severe. Americans aged 60 and older reported $7.7 billion in losses in 2025, up roughly 59% year over year, and more than 12,000 people in that group each reported individual losses exceeding $100,000, according to the FBI.
A separate federal tally from the Federal Trade Commission's Consumer Sentinel Network logged a record $15.9 billion in consumer fraud losses across about three million reports in 2025, up from $12.5 billion the year before.
Affordability is one factor contributing to low takeup. Many private clients have already absorbed several years of steep property rate increases, particularly in catastrophe-exposed states.
"If you're looking at a 15% to 25% rate increase on property year over year for five years, the last thing someone wants to do is say, 'Oh, you know what, let's add $500 more to put cyber coverage in place,'" Ott said.
That may begin to change as some property pressures ease. Ott said property rate increases are now more commonly in the 5% to 15% range, potentially giving clients more room to revisit cyber and flood coverages they previously declined.
At the same time, liability remains under pressure. Ott said excess liability pricing for high-net-worth clients is still rising, driven by social inflation, litigation funding and larger jury awards. The Swiss Re Institute estimates US liability claims costs have risen about 57% over the past decade, reaching a 20-year high with a 7% increase in 2023.
Nuclear verdicts, those exceeding $10 million, climbed 52% in 2024, with the average such verdict now topping $51 million, according to Sedgwick's 2025 Liability Litigation Commentary. Those outsized awards routinely breach primary and lower excess layers, pushing carriers to raise attachment points and prices on exactly the umbrella and excess programs high-net-worth clients rely on.
The broader picture is a private client market where wealth creation is expanding the number of people with complex exposures, but insurance decisions are not always keeping pace.
Munich Re's 2026 personal cyber survey similarly pointed to a "perception gap" around personal cyber risks, noting that individuals often underestimate the relevance and potential consequences of cyber threats even as incidents and damages rise.
For Ott, the concern is that cyber insurance may look easy to buy until the moment clients most need it.
"What I am really worried about is that we are going to have a large-scale cyber attack in the United States, and it's going to affect a large swath of individuals," he said. "At that point, the insurance (capacity) might dry up.”
