Definition:Property & casualty
| Property & casualty | |
|---|---|
| Abbreviation | P&C |
| Category | business segment |
| Aliases | Non-life insurance; Property and casualty |
| Related terms | Life & health, Business segment, Gross written premiums, Net written premiums, AXA XL |
| Definition | The insurance business segment covering damage to property and liability to third parties, including motor, home, commercial and specialty lines. |
🚗 Property & casualty is the insurance business segment that covers damage to things and liability to third parties: motor, home, commercial property, general liability, and the specialty lines that insure everything from ships to cyber attacks. Insurers abbreviate it P&C. Europe often says non-life, the UK and parts of Asia say general insurance, and all three names bound the same territory: contracts that pay when an insured event damages property or creates a legal obligation, as opposed to cover tied to human life and health.
⏱️ The segment's economics run on short policies and uncertain claims. Most P&C contracts last a year, so the insurer reprices its whole book annually, and the premiums it earns must carry claims that sometimes surface years later in long-tail liability lines. The combined ratio judges profitability: claims plus expenses over premiums, with a figure below 100 percent meaning the underwriting itself made money. Catastrophes are the segment's signature risk. A single hurricane season can consume years of margin, which is why P&C insurers buy reinsurance and watch their aggregation limits carefully.
🌪️ For a composite group, the segment supplies annually repricing earnings that complement the long-duration economics of life business: P&C results respond quickly to rate action but swing with catastrophe and inflation surprises. Pricing moves in cycles, hardening after heavy losses and softening as capital returns, so a P&C growth figure means little without knowing where the cycle stands. In group reporting the segment cuts across organizational units; at AXA, most units write P&C, and AXA XL writes almost nothing else.