Cyber Liability Insurance Market Statistics 2026: Claims, Premiums, and Rate Trends

A Rate Decline That Doesn’t Match the Claims Trend

Cyber liability rates are reported to have fallen 1.5% in CIAB’s Q2 2025 survey, even as the average cost of an actual cyber claim moved in the opposite direction. NetDiligence is reported to have found the average cyber claim payout climbed to $118,000 in 2025, up from $96,000 the year before, a gap between what carriers are charging and what claims are actually costing that is worth watching closely.

Both figures reach this page through secondary reporting rather than an independently confirmed direct pull of the original survey or study, a caveat worth carrying into any conversation that repeats these specific numbers.

Where Cyber Sits Among the Softening Lines

Cyber was one of five commercial lines, alongside D&O, EPLI, terrorism, and workers’ compensation, to post an outright rate decline in CIAB’s Q2 2025 survey, even as the overall commercial market averaged a 3.7% increase that same quarter. That broader five-line pattern is well established in CIAB’s own published data; the specific 1.5% magnitude attributed to cyber is the newer, secondary-sourced figure layered on top of it.

Cyber softening alongside D&O, EPLI, terrorism, and workers’ compensation, while umbrella spiked more than 11% in the same survey, is a reminder that “soft market” is not a single, uniform condition across every line a producer sells.

What a Fifteenth Annual Study Measured

NetDiligence’s Cyber Claims Study is reported to be in its 15th annual edition, analyzing 10,402 cyber insurance claims tied to incidents occurring between 2020 and 2024. A study running fifteen consecutive editions is a meaningfully more established data source than a one-off vendor report, part of why its claim-cost figures carry real weight even though this page reaches them through secondary coverage rather than a direct pull of the study itself.

That scale, over ten thousand claims across a five-year incident window, is also large enough to support the frequency and severity breakdown covered next.

Why Business Email Compromise and Ransomware Tell Different Stories

Business email compromise was reportedly the single most frequent cyber claim type, accounting for 33% of all claims, but its average payout of $68,000 sits well below the study’s overall average. Ransomware ran the opposite pattern: less frequent at 28% of claims, but responsible for 52% of total claims costs, evidence of dramatically higher severity per incident even though it happens less often.

Frequency and severity are two different questions, and a claim type that is common but cheap per incident is a different underwriting problem than one that is rarer but devastating when it happens. Ransomware’s share of total cost, nearly double its share of claim count, is the number that should worry a producer more than the frequency figure alone.

What a Falling Rate and Rising Claims Cost Mean for a Producer’s Pitch

This is reasoning, not a separately cited statistic: an incumbent agent’s client seeing a falling cyber premium is not necessarily getting a better deal in any risk-adjusted sense, since the underlying cost of a claim, when one happens, is reported to be climbing even as the sticker price falls. A producer who can explain that gap, rather than just quoting the lower number, is offering something the falling-rate headline alone does not.

That gap also suggests carriers may tighten sublimits, retention levels, or underwriting scrutiny behind a headline rate that looks soft on the surface, a detail worth confirming account by account rather than assuming from the rate trend alone.

The Numbers

Sources

The external data in this article draws on the sources below. Figures described in the text as estimates or industry triangulations are directional and are not attributed to a single dataset.

• CIAB, Q2 2025 P&C Market Survey
• PR Newswire, NetDiligence Releases Fifteenth Annual 2025 Cyber Claims Study

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