Evening edition · Thursday, 12 November 2026
€514 million for nature, 80.0 on the ratio: Munich Re's quieter quarter was not a cheap one
The world's biggest reinsurer paid far more for natural disasters this summer than last, still beat its own expected loss and raised its profit target. The costliest event was an earthquake, which is a lesson in itself.
Munich Re, the world’s largest reinsurer, reported on Thursday that natural catastrophes cost it €514 million in the third quarter, after retrocession and before tax1. In the same quarter last year it booked a release of €47 million, meaning old provisions turned out larger than needed1. So the summer of 2026 was not cheap for the people who insure the insurers. And yet the company called its major-loss expenditure “below average expectations”1.
The ratio that tells you. All major losses, natural and man-made, came to €646 million, against €118 million a year earlier1. That was 14.9% of net insurance revenue in property-casualty reinsurance, below the 18% the company budgets for in an average quarter1. The combined ratio, the share of each premium euro spent on claims and costs, was 80.0%, against an unusually low 62.7% a year earlier1. Munich Re now expects the full-year figure in that business to be below 80% and has raised its 2026 profit target from €6.3bn to €6.6bn1.
The costliest event was not the weather. The largest single natural disaster of the quarter for Munich Re was the El Choco earthquake in Colombia, with nominal losses of about €0.3bn1. That is worth remembering on a desk called Climate & Weather: the reinsurer’s nature bill is a portfolio of storms, floods, fires and the earth moving under a city, and a single event can outweigh a season of weather.
Where the growth came from. The quarter’s fastest growth was not in catastrophe cover but in life and health reinsurance, where revenue rose to €3,769m from €2,868m; the company says it is expanding in “less volatile segments”1. Its solvency ratio stood at 301%, against a Solvency II target of more than 200%1.
Desk arithmetic: €514m in natural-catastrophe losses against a €47m release a year earlier is a swing of €561m in one line of one quarter, and the company still raised its annual target. That is what pricing, reserves and a diversified book are for: the dull machinery that turns a bad week somewhere in the world into a budgeted number in Munich. Nothing here is investment advice.
What to watch
- Whether Munich Re's property-casualty reinsurance ends the year with a combined ratio below 80%, its newly improved guidance, which the company says assumes major losses stay 'within normal bounds'1.
- The full-year results, which will show whether the fourth quarter's major losses also stayed below the 18% of revenue the company budgets for1.
A good year for an insurer is not a year without disasters. It is a year in which the disasters cost what the tables said they would.
Sources
- Quarterly statement: Munich Re expands its business and raises its profit target to €6.6bn — Munich Re, 12 Nov 2026.
Every figure in this piece traces to a source above or to the desk’s own arithmetic on those sources, marked as such. Quotations are short and attributed. Spot an error? Write to the desk; corrections are logged on the method page.
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