Reinsurance Carriers (United States) — NAICS 52413

A NAICS industry (5-digit level). This page is a short rollup. For full detail, see the leaf primer for its one child, NAICS 524130.

1. Overview

Reinsurance is insurance for insurers — a wholesale risk-transfer business. When a primary insurance company (the "cedent") sells a homeowners, auto, life, or commercial policy, it can pass part of that risk to a reinsurer in exchange for part of the premium. The reinsurer never deals with the household or business that bought the original policy; it takes on a slice of the insurer's book. This lets primary insurers write more business than their own capital would safely allow, smooth earnings across good and bad years, and survive events — hurricanes, earthquakes, pandemic-scale mortality — that would otherwise wipe them out. Reinsurers are, in effect, the shock absorbers and capital backstop behind the whole insurance system.[3][4]

For an investor, it is a global, highly cyclical, capital- and model-intensive business. Prices swing hard — surging after big catastrophe years, falling when capital is abundant — and those swings drive returns. This 5-digit level is a single-child pass-through: NAICS 52413 contains exactly one 6-digit industry, 524130, and is economically identical to it. Everything below is the summary; the mechanics, investable names, and outlook live in the child primer.

2. What's inside — the child industries

NAICS classifies businesses in a nested hierarchy: each 5-digit "industry" splits into one or more 6-digit "national industries." NAICS 52413 splits into just one:

Because there is only one child, 52413 and 524130 are the same universe — the same establishments, the same firms, the same receipts. The federal statistics agencies report the two codes with identical values (confirmed below). NAICS created the extra digit only to keep the numbering system consistent, not because there is a second kind of business to separate out.

NAICS 524130 covers establishments primarily engaged in assuming all or part of the risk associated with existing insurance policies originally underwritten by other insurance carriers.[2] The defining feature is that the customer is another insurer, not the public. Two broad kinds sit inside: property & casualty (P&C, or non-life) reinsurance — catastrophe, casualty, specialty, marine, aviation, and credit lines — and life & health (L&H) reinsurance — mortality, morbidity, longevity, lapse, and increasingly asset-intensive reinsurance, where a life insurer cedes blocks of annuities and the reinsurer both assumes the liability and invests the assets behind it.[3][11][26] Direct insurers (NAICS 52411 life, 52412 P&C), brokers and reinsurance intermediaries (524210), and pension/insurance funds (525) are explicitly excluded from this code.[2]

3. How big it is (this level's rollup)

Because 52413 has one child, these federal figures are simultaneously the level total and the child total:

This is an enormous-dollar, small-headcount business: about $98.7 billion of receipts against roughly 14,500 employees is close to $6.8 million of receipts per employee — a capital-intensive, high-skill business, not a labor-intensive one.[1] ("Receipts" is a Census measure of sales, premiums, commissions, fees, and other operating income; it is not the same thing as gross written premium.) The federal file carries no figures for industry assets, reserves, capital, underwriting profit, or investment income, so those are not estimated here.

The undercount caveat — read this before treating $98.7 billion as "the market." These figures count reinsurance establishments located and classified in the U.S. with paid employees. They materially understate the reinsurance the U.S. economy actually buys, for two reasons. First, most reinsurance covering U.S. risk is written cross-border by foreign-domiciled groups (Bermuda, Europe) — the foreign share of U.S. reinsurance business has risen from roughly 44% in 1999 to about 60% by 2025 — so much of the premium leaves the country and isn't captured as domestic receipts.[13] Second, a large share of "reinsurance" is affiliated, intra-group cession (one subsidiary reinsuring another). For scale, the entire global reinsurance market took in roughly $395 billion of premiums in 2024, and the U.S. P&C primary market alone writes over $1 trillion in direct premiums a year.[14][15] Treat the federal number as "U.S.-domiciled reinsurance activity," not "reinsurance protecting the U.S."

4. Investable universe — where value concentrates

With a single child, all the value in NAICS 52413 sits in the same handful of large groups that make up 524130. There is no large-cap U.S. pure-play reinsurer index; the listed names are a mix of Bermuda-domiciled specialists, a U.S. life reinsurer, European majors, and a conglomerate. The clearest listed exposures: Everest (EG), RenaissanceRe (RNR), Arch Capital (ACGL), SiriusPoint (SPNT) for P&C/specialty; Reinsurance Group of America (RGA) for life/health; and Berkshire Hathaway (BRK.B), which runs one of the world's largest reinsurance operations (General Re, TransRe, National Indemnity) inside a diversified conglomerate.[6][7][8][9][10][11][12] The global majors — Munich Re, Swiss Re, Hannover Re, SCOR — trade on European exchanges.[5]

A large share of capacity is held privately or inside groups — Fairfax's Odyssey Group, Covéa's PartnerRe, and the fast-growing asset-manager-backed life reinsurers (KKR/Global Atlantic, Apollo/Athene, Carlyle/Fortitude Re, Sixth Street/Enstar).[27][28][29][30] And a growing slice of catastrophe capacity comes not from companies at all but from capital markets — catastrophe bonds and other insurance-linked securities (ILS). See the child primer §4 and §10 for the full lists and how to reach each route.

5. How the money works

A reinsurer has two profit engines. Underwriting result is measured by the combined ratio (loss ratio + expense ratio); below 100% is an underwriting profit before investment income, above 100% is a loss.[16] Investment income on "float" is the second engine: a reinsurer collects premium today and pays claims years later, and invests the money in between — so higher interest rates since 2022 have been a tailwind for the whole sector. For asset-intensive L&H reinsurers the float logic is the entire proposition: take on annuity and longevity liabilities and earn a spread by investing the assets, often in higher-yielding private credit.[11][26] Total profit therefore equals risk-adjusted underwriting result plus investment income on float, run on a capital base large enough to survive a worst-case catastrophe year. The child primer §5 works through combined ratio, rate-on-line, reserve development, and float in detail.

6. Demand drivers

Demand rises with catastrophe losses and volatility (Swiss Re put 2025 global insured nat-cat losses near $107 billion, a record 92% from secondary perils such as severe storms, wildfire, and flood), primary-insurer growth and capital rules, rising asset values and litigation ("social") inflation, and — a booming secular story — retirement and longevity risk driving asset-intensive L&H reinsurance offshore.[17][26] New, hard-to-model risks (cyber, AI, supply-chain) and alternative capital expand both demand and supply. Overlaying all of it is the cycle: capital destruction after big losses lifts prices (a "hard market"), high returns then attract capital and push prices back down (a "soft market").[19]

7. Regulation

Reinsurance in the U.S. is regulated primarily at the state level, coordinated through the National Association of Insurance Commissioners (NAIC), not a single federal insurance regulator.[4][24] The central mechanism is "credit for reinsurance": a ceding insurer only gets balance-sheet credit for risk it cedes if the reinsurer meets certain standards, and historically an unlicensed or foreign reinsurer had to post collateral. That framework has been liberalized — NAIC Model Law #785/#786's "Reciprocal Jurisdiction" category, U.S.–EU (2017) and U.S.–UK (2018) Covered Agreements, and Bermuda's reciprocal status (2020) all removed collateral requirements for qualified reinsurers.[24][25] The live debate is asset-intensive life reinsurance ceded offshore — Bermuda hosts roughly 84% of offshore-ceded life reserves — where regulators are scrutinizing capital, asset quality, and disclosure.[26] Full detail in the child primer §7.

8. Consolidation

Reinsurance is a scale, capital, and expertise game and is globally concentrated: the top 5 reinsurers hold roughly 40% of global premiums, the top 10 around 59%.[5] Domestically the picture rhymes — the top 20 U.S.-classified firms account for 91.9% of receipts, with an HHI of 1,119.5 (moderately concentrated).[1] Barriers to entry are high: a large, highly rated capital base, sophisticated catastrophe and mortality modeling, and broker relationships. Two structural shifts define the current landscape: capital markets as a competitor (alternative capital reached roughly $136 billion by end-2025, up ~18%) and the asset-manager / reinsurer merger of models (private-equity managers buying or building life and legacy reinsurers).[21][26][27] M&A has been steady rather than frantic. See child primer §8.

9. Risks

The core exposures are catastrophe tail risk (a single mega-event or clustered bad year can erase a year of profit), climate and model risk on rising secondary perils, the pricing cycle (prices are currently falling — U.S. property-catastrophe rates dropped about 12% at the January 2026 renewals), reserve and casualty risk on long-tail liabilities, investment and credit risk on float (heightened for asset-intensive life reinsurers reaching for yield in private credit), counterparty risk, and concentration / regulatory-arbitrage risk from heavy offshore cession.[17][19][20][26] These are detailed in the child primer §9.

10. How to invest & outlook

Because this level equals its one child, the routes are identical to those in NAICS 524130. Publicly, the cleanest exposure is the specialist reinsurers (EG, RNR, ACGL, SPNT, RGA) or reinsurance-inside-a-conglomerate (BRK.B); these are usually valued on price-to-book and judged on combined ratio, renewal pricing, reserve development, catastrophe exposure, capital adequacy, financial-strength ratings, and return on equity (ROE) rather than the earnings-multiple lens used for most sectors.[7][8][9][10][11][12] Privately, reinsurance offers something unusual — you can put capital directly behind the risk through catastrophe bonds and ILS funds, sidecars and collateralized reinsurance, or by backing/building a reinsurer.[21][22][26]

Near-term outlook (forward-looking). After three exceptionally profitable years the market has turned softer — abundant capital and below-peak 2025 catastrophe losses pushed prices down at the January 2026 renewals.[19][20] The likely path is decent-but-declining returns for traditional P&C reinsurers, cushioned by still-elevated investment income on float, while asset-intensive life reinsurance flowing to Bermuda remains the clearer secular growth story — and carries the biggest regulatory and credit questions. As always, the wild card is the weather: a single major catastrophe year could halt the softening and reprice the market upward again.[18] For the complete treatment — full investable tables, the private/ILS diligence checklist, and detailed mechanics — read the child primer, NAICS 524130.

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Sources

Drawn from the child primer (NAICS 524130); this level's own figures come from source [1].

1. U.S. Census Bureau and SBA — ground-truth federal statistics for NAICS 52413 / 524130: County Business Patterns 2023 (establishments, employment, annual and Q1 payroll); 2022 Economic Census / Statistics of U.S. Businesses (firms, receipts, CR4/8/20/50, HHI). https://data.census.gov/table/CBP2023.CB2300CBP; https://www.census.gov/programs-surveys/economic-census.html
2. U.S. Census Bureau NAICS, "524130 Reinsurance Carriers" (definition and exclusions to 52411/52412/524210/525). https://www.census.gov/naics/
3. Umbrex, "How the Reinsurance Industry Works," 2024. https://umbrex.com/resources/how-industries-work/insurance/how-the-reinsurance-industry-works/
4. National Association of Insurance Commissioners (NAIC), "Reinsurance" topic overview, 2024–2025. https://content.naic.org/cipr-topics/reinsurance
5. Statista / A.M. Best, "Largest reinsurers worldwide 2024, by gross premiums" (top-5 ~40%, top-10 ~59%). https://www.statista.com/statistics/273158/largest-reinsurers-worldwide-by-net-premiums/
6. A.M. Best, "World's 50 Largest Reinsurers" market segment report, 2025. https://web.ambest.com/docs/default-source/events/best's-market-segment-report---worlds-top-50-largest-reinsurers.pdf
7. Berkshire Hathaway Inc., FY2024 Form 10-K via SEC EDGAR. https://www.sec.gov/cgi-bin/browse-edgar?action=getcompany&CIK=0001067983&type=10-K
8. Everest Group Ltd., 2025 Form 10-K, SEC EDGAR. https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1095073/000109507326000006/eg-20251231.htm
9. RenaissanceRe Holdings Ltd., 2025 Form 10-K, SEC EDGAR. https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/913144/000091314426000012/rnr-20251231.htm
10. Arch Capital Group Ltd., 2025 Form 10-K, SEC EDGAR. https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/947484/000094748426000017/acgl-20251231.htm
11. Reinsurance Group of America, 2025 Form 10-K (SEC EDGAR); Reinsurance News, "RGA sees net premiums swell 18% in 2024 to $17.8bn," 2025. https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/898174/000089817426000006/rga-20251231.htm
12. SiriusPoint Ltd., 2025 Form 10-K, SEC EDGAR. https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1576018/000157601826000032/spnt-20251231.htm
13. Beinsure, "Largest Reinsurance Companies in the United States," 2026 (foreign share ~44.3% → ~60.5%). https://beinsure.com/ranking/top-reinsurers-united-states/
14. Atlas Magazine, "Global Reinsurance Market" (2024 premiums ~$395 billion). https://www.atlas-mag.net/en/articles/global-reinsurance-market
15. Insurance Information Institute / S&P Global, "Facts + Statistics: Industry Overview" (U.S. P&C direct premiums exceed $1 trillion, 2024). https://www.iii.org/fact-statistic/facts-statistics-industry-overview
16. FIG Investment Banking guide, "The Combined Ratio" and "Insurance Float," 2024. https://ibinterviewquestions.com/guides/fig-investment-banking/combined-ratio-loss-ratio-expense-ratio
17. Swiss Re Institute, "Wildfires, storms, floods contribute to record 92% of global insured losses in 2025," 2026. https://www.swissre.com/press-release/Wildfires-storms-floods-contribute-to-record-92-of-global-insured-losses-in-2025-says-Swiss-Re-Institute/
18. A.M. Best, "Market Segment Outlook: Global Reinsurance," 2026 (reinsurer ROE ~17.6% in 2025). https://web.ambest.com/docs/default-source/events/2026/market-segment-outlook---global-reinsurance.pdf
19. Artemis, "Property catastrophe rates fall 12% globally... : Guy Carpenter," 2026. https://www.artemis.bm/news/property-catastrophe-rates-fall-12-globally-in-the-us-and-apac-15-in-europe-guy-carpenter/
20. Howden Re, "Renewal Report at 1.1.2026: Re-balancing," 2026. https://www.howdengroup.com/news/howden-renewal-report-112026
21. Aon, "Alternative Capital Reaches $121B Record High: Aon ILS Report," 2025, and "Reinsurance Market Dynamics," 2026 (~$136 billion end-2025). https://aon.mediaroom.com/2025-08-28-Alternative-Capital-Reaches-121B-Record-High-Aon-ILS-Report
22. Risk & Insurance, "Catastrophe Bond Market Shatters Records in 2025" (~$25.6B issuance, ~$61.3B outstanding). https://riskandinsurance.com/catastrophe-bond-market-shatters-records-in-2025/
23. NAIC, "Credit for Reinsurance" Model Law (#785) / Regulation (#786) and "Covered Agreement" topic pages, 2019–2025. https://content.naic.org/insurance-topics/covered-agreement
24. Conyers, "NAIC Grants Bermuda Reciprocal Jurisdiction Status," 2020/2025. https://www.conyers.com/publications/view/naic-grants-bermuda-reciprocal-jurisdiction-status-affecting-reinsurers-requirements-to-post-collateral/
25. A.M. Best / Royal Gazette, "Bermuda Remains the Largest Offshore Life/Annuity Reinsurance Domicile" (~84% of offshore-ceded life reserves), 2025; Skadden, "The Bermuda Monetary Authority Reflects on Asset-Intensive Reinsurance," 2025. https://www.royalgazette.com/reinsurance/business/article/20250729/bermuda-gets-most-offshore-life-insurance-reserves-report-finds/
26. Insurance Business / Athene, "Athene ranked No. 1 U.S. annuity provider," 2025. https://www.athene.com/bermuda
27. KKR, "Insurance: Global Atlantic," 2026. https://www.kkr.com/invest/insurance
28. The Carlyle Group / T&D Holdings, "Carlyle and T&D complete acquisition of majority interest in Fortitude Group Holdings from AIG," 2020. https://www.carlyle.com/media-room/news-release-archive/carlyle-group-and-td-holdings-complete-acquisition-majority
29. Enstar Group, "Sixth Street Completes Acquisition of Enstar," 2025. https://www.enstargroup.com/sixth-street-completes-acquisition-of-enstar/
30. PartnerRe, "About Us," 2026 (owned by Covéa). https://www.partnerre.com/about-us/