179: Catastrophe bond issuance exceeds $15bn by end of May in 2025

As Artemis.bm continues to track catastrophe bond market activity through this very busy year of 2025, total settled issuance analysed by Artemis has already surpassed $15 billion, while the outstanding cat bond market has grown by 15.5% since the end of 2024. Catastrophe bond issuance is breaking all records so far in 2025, with now $15.025 billion of offerings settled across Rule 144A cat bonds and the few privately placed deals Artemis has tracked. Impressively, the level of issuance now settled in 2025 has already broken the record for first-eleven month issuance. Meaning, in every previous year the catastrophe bond market has existed, Artemis hadn’t ever seen that volume of deals settle between January and the end of November. Given we are still at the end of May, with a whole month to run until the middle of 2025, it’s clear the first-half cat bond issuance record is being broken by a particularly significant margin. The previous record for first-half cat bond issuance came in 2024, when just over $12.6 billion of deals were tracked by Artemis. Remember you can use all the interactive charts and visualisations over at www.artemis.bm to analyse catastrophe bond issuance, the outstanding market and view leaderboards of the top cat bond sponsors and service providers. Cat bond issuance settled in the month of May has reached a significant record high of almost $5.9 billion in 2025. Which beats the previous record for the month by approaching $2 billion. It also makes May 2025 the biggest single month of catastrophe bond issuance in the market’s history, another very notable record that has been soundly broken this year. The rapid rate of catastrophe bond market activity seen in 2025 has also helped to propel the size of the market considerably higher already. Recall that 2025 has seen the highest level of cat bond maturities ever for the first-half, but the market has outpaced that with new issuance, to grow by around 15.5% since the end of 2024. Artemis’ measure for the outstanding cat bond market, which does include some private deals and also may not factor in all principal reductions, or extensions of maturity, as we don’t always receive that data, has now reached just over $57.12 billion. Which, as Artemis said, represents 15.5% growth in the outstanding catastrophe bond market since December 31st 2024, when the total stood at just under $49.48 billion. Artemis has seen more first-time cat bond sponsors come to market in H1 2025 than any other half-year so far, which has helped to propel this market expansion and growth. Alongside that, repeat sponsors have been issuing larger deals and growing cat bond’s share of their reinsurance towers, in some cases, while other sponsors have seen an increased need for reinsurance and grown their cat bond coverage proportionally with that. The catastrophe bond market is well on-course to break the annual issuance record in 2025, as a reminder that stood at almost $17.7 billion by Artemis' numbers for 2024. Whether it is broken will depend on loss activity through the wind season, any other particularly impactful catastrophe losses, or if some kind of disruption to capital markets occurs. However, with only just under $1.6 billion of additional issuance needed to come to market, beyond what we have seen already and what is scheduled in the pipeline for June, it is now hard to think the annual record won’t be broken in 2025. Stay tuned to Artemis for critical catastrophe bond market insights as the rest of 2025 progresses!

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