67%
Life insurers, most of them Polish, earn the highest returns in the region
Return on equity of NN Asigurări de Viață in 2025; Erste Allianz Życie, PKO Życie, Allianz Życie and Nationale-Nederlanden also exceed 45%. Poland makes €2.4bn of the €5.14bn of net profit reported for 2025 by insurers writing 95% of the region's premium.
Among insurers with more than €20m of equity, the most profitable in Central and Eastern Europe, measured by return on equity, are life insurers: NN Asigurări de Viață (RO, 67%), Erste Allianz Życie (PL, 62%), PKO Życie (PL, 51%), Allianz Życie (PL, 49%) and Nationale-Nederlanden (PL, 45%). Four of the five are Polish, several of them selling mainly through banks, such as Erste Allianz Życie and PKO Życie. Protection policies sold with loans need little capital and carry low claims and expense ratios.
Poland dominates profits overall. Its insurers report €2.4bn of net profit for 2025, 48% of the €5.14bn reported across the eighteen markets with profit figures; PZU alone made €1.19bn. Czech insurers follow with €803m.
Losses are rare: among insurers with more than €20m of equity, five reported one: GRAWE (RO, −35%), Link4 (PL, −27%), UNIQA (BG, −3%), Vzajemna (SI, −3%) and Credit Agricole Ubezpieczenia (PL, −3%). Profit figures are company accounts as reported; added up by market, a dividend between two insurers of the same group is counted once and a Baltic company counts in each country with that country's share of its premium.
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More insights
Underwriting made money in 17 of 18 markets in 2025, and Poland took 48% of the profit
17 of 18Claims and costs took less than the non-life premium after reinsurance in 17 of the 18 markets in 2025. The region's non-life insurers earned €1.88bn on underwriting and €2.01bn on investments, and insurers reported €5.14bn of net profit, 48% of it in Poland. Scroll through the combined ratio, investments, returns on equity, profit and five years of results.
Hungarian insurers earn the highest return on equity in the region, 24%, Croatian insurers about 7%
24.4%Hungarian insurers returned 24.4% on average equity in 2025, Czech insurers 22.0% and Romanian insurers 20.1%. Polish insurers earned 19.2%, up from 10.4% in 2021. In Croatia the return has stayed between 6% and 8% in every year since 2021.
40 of 64 large non-life insurers in the EU markets made an underwriting profit after reinsurance in each of the last five years
40 of 64Among insurers in the eleven Solvency II markets with at least €50m of non-life earned premium in every year from 2021 to 2025, 40 kept their combined ratio after reinsurance below 100% each year. All of them in Czechia, Bulgaria, Slovenia and Latvia did; in Slovakia, one of six.
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Polisa. (2026). Life insurers, most of them Polish, earn the highest returns in the region [Data version 2026-11-11.13378f]. Retrieved November 11, 2026, from https://polisapro.com/insights/polish-bancassurance-returns
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@misc{polisa_insights_polish_bancassurance_returns_2026,
author = {{Polisa}},
title = {Life insurers, most of them Polish, earn the highest returns in the region},
year = {2026},
version = {2026-11-11.13378f},
howpublished = {\url{https://polisapro.com/insights/polish-bancassurance-returns}},
note = {Accessed 11 November 2026}
}Reuse: Polisa's compilation CC BY 4.0 · source data under each publisher's terms, see Method.