Verisk Raises Prices on the Loss-Cost Data Actuaries Use

Every advisory rate filing that leans on an ISO loss cost starts with a number Verisk sets, not the carrier's own experience. In the second quarter of 2026 Verisk's underwriting segment grew revenue to $569 million, up 5.6% on an organic constant-currency basis, attributed mainly to annual price increases on forms, rules and loss cost services (Verisk, July 2026).

US CPI ran 3.5% over the same period. The gap does not appear in the earnings release.

Key Takeaways

$569 million of underwriting revenue, up 5.6% organic constant currency, which Verisk attributed mainly to annual price increases on forms, rules and loss cost services.
5.6% against a 3.5% CPI puts advisory-data pricing roughly 210 basis points ahead of general inflation, on a product line where the customer has limited ability to substitute.
Multiyear contracts run roughly four to five years with price escalation and expanded scope built into each renewal cycle rather than negotiated fresh annually.
The exposure sits in the expense ratio, not the loss ratio, and compounds through a contract's back half before scope expansion is counted.
Claims revenue grew 6.1% organic in the same quarter, so one vendor is deepening its position on both sides of the loss ratio at once.

What an ISO Loss Cost Is, and What It Cost This Quarter

Verisk's Insurance Services Office is the rating advisory organization most US property and casualty carriers lean on for the baseline machinery of a filing: policy forms, rating rules, classification plans, and loss costs, the projected claim cost per exposure unit before a carrier adds expense and profit load.

A contracting insurer can adopt ISO's filed forms, rules and loss costs wholesale, filing only the state-specific items ISO leaves blank plus a loss cost multiplier converting the advisory figure into its own rate. That structure makes the arrangement a dependency rather than a convenience. NCCI performs the equivalent function for workers' compensation, but ISO's reach across auto, homeowners, commercial property and general liability makes it the default statistical backbone for carriers that never built parallel in-house capability.

Total revenue reached $806 million, up 4.3% reported and 5.8% organic constant currency. Underwriting revenue rose to $569 million, up 3.5% reported and 5.6% organic, while claims climbed 6.3% reported and 6.1% organic to $237 million. Subscription revenue, 83% of the total, grew 8% organic, driven by the same three businesses management names each quarter: forms, rules and loss costs; catastrophe and risk solutions; anti-fraud analytics.

Metric	Q2 2026	Reported growth	Organic constant currency
Total revenue	$806M	4.3%	5.8%
Underwriting revenue	$569M	3.5%	5.6%
Claims revenue	$237M	6.3%	6.1%
Subscription revenue (83% of total)	—	—	8%
Adjusted EBITDA	$464M	4.2%	7.4%

Profitability split. Adjusted EBITDA reached $464 million, up 4.2% reported and 7.4% organic, at a 57.5% margin, with adjusted diluted EPS up 5.3% to $1.98. GAAP net income fell 9.8% to $229 million and GAAP EPS 3.3% to $1.75 on a higher effective tax rate and elevated interest expense. Operating cash flow jumped 49.7% to $366 million, free cash flow 57.9% to $298 million, funding $1.9 billion of first-half repurchases with $800 million of authorization left. Guidance held at $3.19 to $3.24 billion of revenue.

The number worth sitting with is the organic underwriting rate. 5.6% against a US Consumer Price Index of 3.5% year over year through June 2026 (Bureau of Labor Statistics) puts advisory-data pricing roughly 210 basis points ahead of general inflation.

Management attributes it to its own product investment rather than to market conditions. CFO Elizabeth Mann told analysts that "investment in Core Lines Reimagine continues to drive strong price realization through subscription renewals as clients experience the additional value" (Verisk Q2 2026 earnings call).

Why the Price Increase Holds

The Q2 pricing was not a surprise renegotiation. On the first-quarter call Verisk described forms, rules and loss cost contracts running multiyear terms averaging roughly four to five years, with price escalation and expanded scope built into each renewal cycle (Verisk Q1 2026 earnings call). A carrier signing one locks in years of compounding increases before the next filing cycle starts.

Asked on that call about carriers rebuilding equivalent datasets internally with AI, Saurabh Khemka, president of underwriting solutions, gave four reasons the substitution rarely happens: proprietary and self-sourced data, proprietary normalization across carrier submissions, risk-segmentation expertise built over decades, and status as a trusted provider of filed analytics, meaning outputs already cleared through regulatory review.

The last one carries the most weight. Khemka noted Verisk's scale lets it "offer our turnkey solution to our customers" when carriers face regulators, collapsing a state-by-state filing burden into one relationship that a small or mid-size carrier's actuarial staff would otherwise replicate department by department.

That is the mechanism behind the pricing power rather than a temporary bargaining edge. For a national carrier with a large actuarial and data science staff, the subscription is one line among many. For a regional or specialty carrier writing lines where ISO loss costs anchor the base rate, building an internal loss-cost function requires years of aggregated experience across enough policies to be credible, statistical staff to maintain it, and the regulatory relationships to get it filed and accepted.

The practical exposure sits in the expense ratio, not the loss ratio. A subscription escalating at roughly 5.6% annually inside a four-to-five-year cycle compounds into a materially larger data line by the contract's back half, before scope expansion is counted, and a carrier with a thin actuarial bench has no credible in-house alternative to absorb it.

Two categories of vendor tool get conflated here. ISO forms, rules and loss costs are the baseline the carrier's own rate is built on. A newer category, exemplified by Akur8's Discover after its January 2026 acquisition of Matrisk, ingests public rate and rule filings so a carrier can benchmark its pricing against competitors' accepted language. Discover helps a carrier use ISO-anchored filings more intelligently once they exist. It does not replace the loss cost.

The Same Vendor on Both Sides of the Loss Ratio

The 6.1% organic growth in claims is not a separate story. XactAI's licensee count grew nearly tenfold since March to roughly 7,000 users, embedding AI-assisted estimating inside the Xactimate workflow underlying a large share of US property claim files.

A carrier depending on ISO for its baseline rate and on Xactimate-adjacent tooling for its claim estimates is exposed to one vendor on both sides of the loss ratio: the projected cost entering the rate, and the actual cost leaving the claim file. Neither dependency is new alone. The two growing in the same quarter, 5.6% organic in pricing data and 6.1% in claims data, describes a company deepening across the full pipeline from rate filing to reserve indication.

That matters most for benchmark independence. If a growing share of property claim estimates is shaped by AI-assisted workflows inside a Verisk-adjacent product, and the loss cost trend those claims eventually feed into ISO's advisory rate development draws on the same aggregated industry experience, then an actuary testing reserve adequacy against industry benchmarks is comparing figures that share more upstream instrumentation than the benchmark methodology assumes independent.

The acquisition track shows the same direction from the other side. On July 29, 2026 Verisk acquired McKenzie Intelligence Services, a UK geospatial firm specializing in real-time catastrophe and political-violence event data, joining Catastrophe and Risk Solutions (Verisk, July 2026). Terms were undisclosed and the company said the deal would not materially affect results.

Read together the strategy runs two tracks. Where Verisk holds the entrenched, regulator-accepted position it raises price on renewal, because the switching cost inside a four-to-five-year term is prohibitive. Where it does not, as with real-time catastrophe event intelligence, it acquires rather than builds. Both tracks leave fewer carriers with a genuine alternative source for the data their pricing and claims functions run on.

Verisk Raises Prices on the Loss-Cost Data Actuaries Use

Key Takeaways

What an ISO Loss Cost Is, and What It Cost This Quarter

Why the Price Increase Holds

The Same Vendor on Both Sides of the Loss Ratio

Further Reading

Sources