property and casualty insurance

Think of everything that can go suddenly, expensively wrong with your stuff and your daily life: your car gets crumpled in a crash, a storm tears off your roof, a customer slips in your shop and sues you, a fire guts a warehouse. Property and casualty insurance is the family of insurance that pays for these accidents and mishaps. It is the part of the industry that is not life insurance and not health insurance — the coverage for cars, homes, businesses, and the harm we sometimes cause to others.

More precisely, 'property' coverage pays for damage to or loss of things you own (a house, a car, a factory), while 'casualty' coverage — often called liability — pays when you are legally responsible for injuring someone else or damaging their property. A single policy frequently bundles both: a homeowners policy repairs your burned kitchen (property) and also defends you if a visitor breaks an arm on your steps (casualty). Outside North America this whole bucket is usually called 'general insurance' or 'non-life insurance', and the distinguishing feature is that the policies are typically short — one year — and the loss amount is uncertain in both whether it happens and how big it is.

P&C work is a major branch of actuarial practice, distinct from life and pension work. The contracts are short and renewed yearly, claims can be reported and settled long after the policy expires, and a single event (a hurricane, a wildfire) can hit thousands of policies at once. That mix of short contracts, late-emerging claims, and clustering of losses is exactly why P&C needs its own pricing, reserving, and capital methods — and its own vocabulary, which the rest of this field lays out.