With 2025 seeing catastrophe bond market activity accelerate to deliver the , it’s also notable that the final quarter of last year saw a number of records broken in a particularly busy three months for the insurance-linked securities industry.We published at the start of the new year and have been taking a look at some of the records that fell.Again, this is not an exhaustive list and there are probably more records in the data on fourth-quarter 2025 catastrophe bond issuance, but the activity levels seen in the period indicate the growing stature and importance of the cat bond structure around the key end of year reinsurance renewal season.Q4 of 2025 was the busiest fourth-quarter for new catastrophe bond issuance that we have recorded in our long-history of tracking the market.

Before going into detail, as we always like to highlight, it’s important to state again that this is a testament to the efforts of everyone involved in structuring and delivering the cat bond pipeline of deals to investors, as well as to the insurance-linked security (ILS) fund managers and end-investors that furnish the capital..Catastrophe bond issuance records set in Q4 2025: In the fourth-quarter of 2025, total issuance across Rule 144A and private catastrophe bonds analysed and tracked by Artemis reached a new record-high for the period of just over $7 billion. That beat the previous record of almost $5.56 billion from Q4 2023.

You can , where you can select and deselect months to include in your analysis to look at single quarters over time.Breaking the quarter down by type of transaction, Rule 144A catastrophe bond issuance reached just over $6.89 billion in Q4 2025, smashing the previous Q4 record of $5.3 billion from 2023.Dissecting it further, to look only at 144A property catastrophe bond issuance for the fourth-quarter, the level of issuance seen was again a clear record at $6.44 billion, meaningfully higher than the nearly $4.9 billion of Q4 2023.

Monthly catastrophe bond issuance records set in Q4 2025: Looking at , both November and December 2025 set new record highs for total cat bond issuance tracked by Artemis.November 2025 resulted in almost $1.84 billion of newly settled cat bond issuance, ahead of November 2023’s $1.675 billion.December 2025 broke the cat bond issuance record for the final month of the year by a significant margin, with almost $4.92 billion of new cat bonds settled, far ahead of the almost $3.6 billion issued in December 2023.

The biggest cyber catastrophe bond quarter and month ever: Finally, the fourth-quarter of 2025 saw $450 million of coming to market, which beat the previous record of $415 million from Q3 2023.With all of that new cyber cat bond limit having settled in December 2025, that was also the largest monthly cyber cat bond issuance ever seen.Helping that record to fall was the fact Beazley sponsored the largest single cyber cat bond issuance seen to-date, with the $300 million deal.

Summing up the record catastrophe bond market activity in Q4 2025: At just over $7 billion, Q4 2025 catastrophe bond and related ILS issuance sets a new record for the final quarter of the year, and is 116% above the 10-year average for the quarter of $3.3 billion, and $1.5 billion higher than the previous Q4 record set in 2023.It’s the fifth time since Q2 2023 that quarterly issuance has surpassed $7 billion, and Q4 2025 issuance was actually the fifth largest single quarter in the market’s history, as sponsor and investor demand remained very strong in the closing months of the year.Further demonstrating just how busy a quarter it was, in Q4 2025, 27 new catastrophe bond deals were successfully placed.

This is an increase on 2024’s 20 deals, but below the record 33 issued in Q4 2023.The average size of cat bond transactions issued in Q4 2025 was the second highest of the past decade at $259.6 million, up from 2024’s $225.4 million and above the 10-year average by 45%..

We will keep you updated on all catastrophe bond and related ILS transaction issuance as we move through 2026, and we’ll report on the evolving trends in the cat bond, insurance-linked securities (ILS) and collateralized reinsurance market.For full details of fourth-quarter and full year 2025 cat bond and related ILS issuance, including a breakdown of deal flow by factors such as perils, triggers, expected loss, and pricing, as well as analysis of the issuance trends seen by month and year.  For copies of all our catastrophe bond market reports, ..

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