Catastrophe bond issuance is on track to make this first-quarter at least the second busiest start to any year on record, with already projecting close to $5.86 billion of cat bond issuance for Q1 2026, only falling behind the total from last year at this stage.With February not even over yet there is time for the pipeline of new catastrophe bonds to continue building as well, so the eventual first-quarter 2026 issuance total is likely to be higher still.In addition, it’s worth highlighting that the figures quoted below will become stale in just a few days, as there are a number of already priced cat bond transactions that will settle and then get included in our data this week, while additional new cat bonds may emerge.The main message will stand though, this is shaping up to be at least the second busiest start to the year ever for the cat bond market.

Catastrophe bond market activity has started briskly in 2026, following on from .Having said that, January 2026 was not an especially active month with only $683 million of newly settled cat bond issuance tracked in our , making it only the eighth busiest on record.However, February has seen the market pipeline expand significantly, as numerous new catastrophe bond deals came to market.

So far almost $1.7 billion of new cat bond issuance has settled in February, which already makes it the second busiest for that month that we’ve tracked.If the remaining three deals price and settle within the month, as currently scheduled, then February 2026 looks likely to set a new record for the month by a small margin over last year.As a result, in terms of completed or settled issuance, the total for the first-quarter currently sits at approaching $2.38 billion.

But, the market pipeline now features another $3.48 billion of cat bond notes so far, after a number of additional transactions began marketing in recent days and others were upsized (some significantly ).Which gives us a current real-time projection for almost $5.86 billion of catastrophe bond issuance for the first-quarter of 2026, across 144A deals and a few private cat bonds, the second-highest figure for a Q1 ever.You can see catastrophe bond market issuance and the current pipeline, as well as the size of the outstanding cat bond market in our chart below.

.The Q1 record from 2025 stands at over $7.07 billion.Beating that record is not out of the question in 2026, given there are still a number of weeks left to run this quarter.

But it will take the current pace of activity in the catastrophe bond market to persist, perhaps accelerate, for the market to get there and set a new Q1 high.First-quarter issuance has been on a steady upward trend over time in the catastrophe bond market, but last year saw a significant leap to a new and higher benchmark level.It looks like 2026 will keep the Q1 issuance bar higher in the cat bond market, but it remains too early to say whether a new level can be set this year.

We are hearing that more new cat bonds are likely to emerge that will be scheduled to close before the end of March.So it feels safe to assume Q1 2026 issuance will surpass the just under $5.86 billion projection our data currently shows.We have a chart where you can analyse catastrophe bond issuance by month and year over time.

, as you can see in the image below.We’ve marked the current projection for Q1 2026 on the image, but remember this is very likely to rise higher.Helping to drive activity levels are the high number of maturities coming due, alongside capital raised by catastrophe bond fund managers, growing allocations to cat bonds from certain multi-asset and hedge fund investment managers as well and of course the rising number of sponsors and repeat sponsors in the market.

On maturities, there are still over $1.98 billion of cat bonds scheduled to mature before the end of the first-quarter of 2026, .But, with the pipeline already showing $3.48 billion in new cat bonds scheduled to settle before the end of the quarter, will grow by well over a billion dollars by the end of March, Overall, participants in the catastrophe bond market have started 2026 as they ended the prior year, extremely busy and with an eye on at least near-record levels of issuance for the months ahead..

We track , the most prolific sponsors in the market, most active , which risk modellers feature in cat bonds most frequently, plus much ., or via the Artemis Dashboard which provides a handy one-page view of cat bond market metrics.All of these are updated as soon as a new cat bond issuance is completed, or as older issuances mature.

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