Another cat bond market record: 12-month issuance near $23 billion

The catastrophe bond market has just had its busiest 12-month period on record, as issuance between August 2024 and July 2025 has now reached just slightly under $23 billion, marking a landmark stretch of activity for this segment of the insurance-linked securities (ILS) market.

Readers will know that records have fallen just in the current year 2025 so far, with the most Rule 144A cat bond issuance ever seen in a calendar year and more recently a new annual record for total catastrophe bond issuance tracked by Artemis.

Issuance in 2025 now stands at almost $18.2 billion, based on Artemis’ data on 144A catastrophe bonds as well as the private cat bond transactions we have reported on.

But, our extensive range of interactive catastrophe bond market charts and visualisations also features a way for you to analyse cat bond issuance by month each year.

Tracking month-by-month issuance from that dataset shows that the latest 12-month stretch is the busiest in catastrophe bond market history.

The total issuance over the trailing twelve months now stands at precisely $22.94 billion (close enough to call it $23bn), based on all of the cat bonds tracked in the Artemis database.

During this 12-month stretch of accelerated catastrophe bond market activity, we saw the biggest single month in the market’s history. That was May 2025, at almost $5.93 billion.

There is no other 12-month stretch in the market’s history that gets this close to $23 billion, although there are some other periods that get above the $20 billion mark, one stretch that gets over $22 billion and a number of others that break the previous calendar year record from 2024 (which has fallen in 2025).

It is the accelerated level of cat bond activity in 2025 that has driven all of the $20 billion plus 12-month stretches of cat bond issuance though.

One other notable fact from the latest trailing 12-months of catastrophe bond market activity, is that this almost $23 billion of issuance came from just 106 deals that we have listed in our Artemis Deal Directory.

Which makes the average deal size for this 12-month period since August 2024 an impressive $216.4 million. However, as we explained recently, the average deal size in 2025 so far has reached $240.73 millionat this time, setting another high-bar.

The catastrophe bond market will now be much quieter through the peak of the hurricane season, but we’ll keep you updated here on Artemis as soon as the cat bond market pipeline reopens.

All of our catastrophe bond market charts and visualisations are kept up-to-date as deals settle and mature.

For full details of second-quarter and first-half 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.

Download your free copy of Artemis’ Q2 2025 Cat Bond & ILS Market Report here.

For copies of all our catastrophe bond market reports, visit our archive page and download them all.