Sourced from Verisk’s Q2 property report and Sedgwick’s Loss Adjusting Insights, corroborated independently, with Washington’s layer from the OIC. National numbers labeled national, Washington labeled Washington.
The shift
Assignments fell to 1.24M in Q2 2026 — down 12.2% year over year, 13.1% below the five-year average, a four-year decline. But it’s not even: non-catastrophe assignments are down 18.65% against the five-year average while CAT slipped only 4.29% — so CAT is now 43% of all assignments, up from 34%, with no increase in actual catastrophe events. Average severity ($17,085 in Q2) is maturing toward ~$18,800–$19,400, the highest in recent years. Verisk’s own sentence: “Property and reconstruction spend is consolidating into fewer, higher cost claims.”
What it does to a small shop
The disappearing segment is the bread and butter — the small non-CAT job. ATI’s CEO names the mechanism: higher deductibles push homeowners to self-handle small losses, commercial owners do repairs in-house, GCs enter for what’s left. Revenue gets lumpier: one large file equals a month of small jobs, and one delayed large file equals a month missing. Documentation becomes the product — scope disputes are increasingly landing in appraisal, and claims reported after 90 days are 10× more likely to litigate. And the adjuster across the table is getting younger: ~25% retire by end of 2027, so thin estimates get cut instead of charitably rounded up. Estimating depth becomes the margin.
The Puget Sound read
The deductible squeeze and severity inflation transfer here; the 43% CAT share does not — Q2’s surge was Midwest hail (Kansas +73%, Iowa +95%); our CAT calendar is inverted (fall/winter wind and rain, late-summer fire/smoke). Washington’s own 2026 lesson was severity, and it ran through Spokane, not the Sound: $600M+ insured wildfire losses, 5,256 damaged properties, $1.9B reconstruction value — the fewer-but-larger story in one event. Statewide: nonrenewals doubled since 2021 (11,763 → 24,106), so more files arrive with friction attached — but WA rate increases have cooled to −0.5% as of May and the FAIR Plan sits at ~400 policies. Hardened, not broken. And the structural point: our biggest CAT exposure, an earthquake, sits mostly outside the assignment system because the coverage is an optional add-on — that recovery economy would be private-pay, which favors shops with homeowner trust over program dependence.
Five operator moves
- Rebuild the pipeline around large-loss and commercial relationships.
- Run documentation as a production system in the first 48 hours — the file that explains itself gets paid.
- Senior estimating eyes, human + AI checking, on every large file.
- Size your credit line to your largest plausible job, not your average.
- Build the surge bench before the weather does — equipment lead times have more than doubled.
Watch quarterly
Verisk assignment volume + CAT share · your own average job size and days-to-payment · WA OIC nonrenewals and FAIR Plan count.
Sources: Verisk’s Q2 2026 property report; Sedgwick’s Loss Adjusting Insights; Washington Office of the Insurance Commissioner.