What CIAB’s Own Data Confirms by Elimination
CIAB, the Council of Insurance Agents and Brokers, surveys its member firms quarterly and names specific lines by name when a rate trend is strong enough to call out. Its Q2 2025 survey did exactly that for five lines that posted outright declines that quarter: cyber, D&O, employment practices liability, terrorism, and workers’ compensation. General liability is not on that list, which is the confirmed fact this page is built on: whatever direction general liability rates were moving in Q2 2025, they were not moving in the direction those five lines were. Insurance Journal’s own coverage of the same CIAB Q2 2025 survey independently corroborates both the overall 3.7% figure and the same five-line list, reading directly from the same underlying data rather than a different source entirely.
That is a real finding, read correctly. It is a process-of-elimination finding, not a precise percentage, and the difference matters enough to state plainly rather than dress up as more than it is.
The Lines Still Rising in the Same Quarter
General liability was not alone in the still-rising group. The same CIAB Q2 2025 survey put commercial property increases at 1.9% and umbrella and excess liability increases at 11.5%, the outlier of the quarter, driven by 135 nuclear verdicts in 2024, up 52% year over year. Overall commercial rates rose 3.7% across the full survey, down from 4.2% in Q1, the 31st consecutive quarter of increases even as the pace of increase kept decelerating.
General liability sits inside that broader still-rising group. Naming the two lines that do have a published percentage, property and umbrella, is the closest this page can get to sizing where general liability likely sits without inventing a number CIAB has not itself published.
Why No Exact General Liability Percentage Appears Here
A secondary trade-press mention referenced a specific general liability rate change for the same period, attributed to what may be a different, separately run rate index rather than CIAB’s own survey. That figure could not be independently confirmed as CIAB’s own published number during this research, and repeated attempts to pull CIAB’s own survey page and PDF directly were rate-limited before a clean confirmation could be made either way. Rather than publish an unconfirmed figure under CIAB’s name, this page states the honest limit: the direction is confirmed, general liability was not among Q2 2025’s five declining lines, and the exact size of that continued increase is not, as of this writing.
The Numbers
Overall commercial P&C rates rose 3.7% in CIAB’s Q2 2025 survey, decelerating from 4.2% in Q1 2025, the 31st consecutive quarter of increases.
Five lines posted outright rate declines that same quarter: cyber, D&O, employment practices liability, terrorism, and workers’ compensation. General liability was not among them.
Commercial property rates rose 1.9% and umbrella and excess liability rates rose 11.5% in the same survey, both in the still-rising group general liability sits in by elimination.
Umbrella’s 11.5% increase was driven by 135 nuclear verdicts in 2024, up 52% year over year, evidence of how uneven the pressure is even among lines that are still rising together.
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.