PERILS has finalised its industry loss estimate for Windstorm Éowyn at €765 million, confirming the January 2025 storm as a major European wind event and the largest windstorm loss in Ireland for at least 45 years.
The Zurich-based catastrophe data specialist said the figure, based on property loss information collected from affected insurers, covers residential and commercial property lines across the Republic of Ireland, Northern Ireland and the UK.
The final number compares with earlier PERILS estimates of €619 million six weeks after the storm, €696 million after three months and €747 million after six months, meaning the industry loss was already 91% of the final figure by April 2025.
Of the €765 million total, the Irish market accounted for €316 million, an “exceptional” outcome that PERILS said marks the country’s largest windstorm-related loss in at least four decades. For the UK, where industry losses reached £378 million, Éowyn sits toward the upper end of recent domestic windstorm experience but does not stand in isolation. While significant, the UK loss was lower than the combined storm impacts seen during some recent multi-event periods, when successive named storms drove elevated aggregate losses across a single winter season.
By comparison, UK insurers paid £585 million for weather-related damage to homes and possessions across the whole of 2024, according to ABI data, reflecting the cumulative effect of multiple storms rather than a single extreme wind event. More recently, adverse weather contributed £322 million to property insurance claims in the second quarter of 2025 alone, underlining how frequent, moderate-to-severe storms can rival or exceed the loss burden of one-off extreme events such as Éowyn.
Éowyn struck the Republic of Ireland, Northern Ireland and Scotland’s Central Belt on Jan. 24 to 25, 2025, as a particularly intense extratropical cyclone, with hurricane-force gusts of up to 185 km/h recorded in Ireland, exceeding previous national records.
The storm triggered red warnings, mass travel disruption and severe infrastructure damage. ESB Networks reported “unprecedented, widespread and extensive damage” to electricity infrastructure, with around 768,000 customers losing supply at the peak. Subsequent updates showed between 725,000 and 768,000 premises initially without power as crews and international support teams worked to restore the network.
In total, about 1.8 million premises experienced power outages and more than 1.4 million people were left without mobile coverage across the affected territories, PERILS noted. Thousands of trees were uprooted, heavy vehicles overturned and entire roofs ripped off buildings, while two fatalities were reported in storm-related incidents.
From an insurance perspective, the physical footprint and wind intensity of Éowyn set it apart from other recent UK storms, many of which have produced substantial losses through a combination of wind, surface water flooding and prolonged rainfall. Events such as Storm Floris in August 2025 and Storm Goretti in January 2026 generated sharp spikes in UK claims volumes, particularly in residential and agricultural lines, but without the concentrated extreme gust speeds that characterised Éowyn.
Commenting on the evolution of the loss figures, Luzi Hitz, product manager at PERILS, said the relatively modest uplift from the initial estimate underlined the maturity of UK and Irish catastrophe reserving practices.
“Given the rare intensity of Éowyn, the robustness of the loss estimates over the last 12 months is quite remarkable,” he said. “Early insured loss estimates by insurers are typically based on insights from similar past events and if no precedent exists, projections can be more challenging. Therefore, the 24% increase from €619 million six weeks post-event to €765 million one year post-event, and in particular the 10% increase from €696 million three months post-event to the 12-month figure, represent a relatively modest loss development. This stability underscores the robustness of the cat loss estimation practices in the UK and Irish insurance markets.”
He added that Éowyn is especially valuable from a modelling perspective. “While it did not dominate the headlines for long, Windstorm Éowyn is a valuable event from a data perspective. It provides rare data points for exceptionally high wind speeds. Further, it was predominantly a dry event with little contribution from water-induced losses. As such, Éowyn serves as an ideal data source for calibrating vulnerability functions at extreme gust speeds for which data is generally limited.”
