FBD’s annual return for 2025 showed profit before tax of €54.1m, a drop of €22.9m from the previous year. Claims relating to storm Éowyn and poor weather in January 2025 amounted to a net cost for the insurer of €30.8m.

Despite the drop in profit for the year, FBD maintained its annual dividend at €1 per share, the fifth year in a row the payout to shareholders has been at that level. During 2025 FBD also paid an interim dividend of 75c/share. The insurer also announced it had allocated €4m for the potential repurchase of its own shares in 2026. FBD said that its solvency capital ratio at 201% remains in excess of its target risk ratio, and reflects the capital strength and stability of the business.

Looking at the insurance business, insurance revenue increased to €487m from €441m the previous year. That revenue was split into €227m for motor insurance policies and €260m for non-motor polices.

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The company said that while it saw growth across all sectors, the farm sector accounted for two-thirds of the increase in gross written premiums during the year. Total gross written premiums were above €500m for the first time.

Car insurance premiums increased by 5% in 2025, average home premiums increased by 7.7%, while the average farm premium was 9.7% higher. FBD said the rise in motor premiums was driven by sustained inflation and increased claims frequency for motor damage in recent years.

The increase in home and farm insurance was largely due to indexation applied to property sums insured as rebuilding costs continue to rise.

FBD CEO Tomás Ó Midheach told the Irish Farmers Journal that the work the company had done in recent years to combat the problem of under-insurance among customers had progressed well. When it came to storm Éowyn, the company had a net cost from claims of €30.8m.

“We filed 9,000 claims [relating to the storm] and under-insurance was essentially not a feature. This shows that we had closed the under-insurance gap that arose in the period of high inflation.”

The total payouts from the storm by FBD were considerably higher than €30.8m, but the majority of the cost was met by reinsurance recoveries.

For companies like FBD, reinsurance is where they take out insurance premiums with global reinsurance companies to cover claims from large and catastrophic events. FBD had net income from reinsurance contracts of €34.2m in 2025, an €85.7m increase from the previous year, primarily due to increased recoveries in the wake of the weather events in January 2025. There was also a small reduction of reinsurance premium compared to 2024.

FBD said that its reinsurance programme for 2026 has been successfully placed, with a reduction in casualty reinsurance rates and a minor increase applied to property reinsurance.

Check your records

FBD shares have had a relatively strong performance over the past 12 months, gaining more than 20% to trade around €16.50. Commenting on the rise, Ó Midheach said: “We do think the story is getting through. We are a return company, and a value-driven company.”

Since the insurer restarted paying dividends in 2022, the company has paid and announced dividends totalling €7.75 per share. The company’s shares were trading at €7.60 each at the start of 2022, so that certainly would have been a very profitable investment for anyone who purchased then.

In this year’s annual report there is a writeback of €1.9m for dividends which have been awarded but never claimed. Ó Midheach said that the company had made strenuous efforts to find the shareholders who would be entitled to those dividends, but have not been able to find them. The writeback relates to dividends which have been unclaimed for more than 12 years.

Kate Tobin, chief financial officer at FBD, told the Irish Farmers Journal that this is the first time the company is writing back dividends which were awarded but never claimed. “We are talking about dividends going back from 12 years ago to the listing of the company, so if we were to do it again, it would not be as large a feature as it was [in 2025],” she said.

FBD is what is known in investment circles as a ‘tightly held’ company, which means its shareholders generally trade their shares very little

Ó Midheach did say that if any shareholder was to come forward to claim historic dividends, then the company would be happy to look into individual cases. So if you do have some old FBD share certificates shoved into the back of a drawer somewhere, it is probably worth pulling them out to make sure you are getting the payouts you are entitled to on them.

FBD is what is known in investment circles as a ‘tightly held’ company, which means its shareholders generally trade their shares very little. Farmer Business Developments – the separate company which runs the FBD Hotels and Resorts business – has maintained its 23.7% stake in the company for years. Farmer Business Developments also hold 1.34m 60c 14% non-cumulative preference shares and 1.47m 60c 8% non-cumulative preference shares.

The FBD Trust, the charity associated with the company, held 5,383,930 ordinary shares in FBD by 2 March 2026. The Trust has been an active buyer of shares in FBD plc since August 2023, when a change in the charity’s constitution led to a change in its policy towards its FBD shareholding.

Since then, the Trust has increased its holding by 2.4m shares. The Trust’s holding of FBD shares were valued at €38.65m in August 2023. The current value of its holding is approximately €88.8m.

The Trust also holds just over 2m 60c 8% non-cumulative preference shares.

The preference shares also holding voting rights, meaning that between them Farmer Business Developments and FBD Trust control approximately 46.5% of voting rights at FBD insurance.

Comment

FBD Insurance produced a strong set of results in what started out as a challenging year for the insurance sector in Ireland. The company’s reinsurance policy certainly helped protect it from the worst of the costs associated with storm Éowyn, and the relatively benign winter of 2025/2026 means it is well set up for the year ahead.

The results do contain a good lesson for everyone in how inflation can become a structural problem for economies. The rises in average premiums across motor, property and farm were relatively large during the year. The 7.7% average increase in home premiums in 2025 comes on the back of a 10.3% increase in 2024. Similarly, the 9.7% increase in the average farm premium follows an 8.1% increase the previous year. These increased premiums have been driven by the index-linking of rebuild costs, meaning that as the price of construction rises, so does the cost of insuring for losses. These higher premiums, which are common across the insurance industry, are an increased cost of doing business for farmers, homeowners and businesses.

This increased cost will have to be covered by higher prices for the goods produced, or wages earned, by those people, which, in turn, will lead to more inflation, and further increases in index-linked insurance costs.

Economists call this phenomenon ‘cost-push inflation’ and it is something which policymakers across governments and central banks are both very aware of and generally spend a lot of time trying to control.