CAT claim
Definition
- Related pages
- 5
- Last revised
- 23 August 2026
A CAT claim is a claim handled under a catastrophe designation. When a single event, a hail outbreak across a metropolitan area, a derecho, a hurricane, produces losses above an industry threshold, it is assigned a catastrophe serial number, and carriers open dedicated catastrophe operations: claims are coded to the event, adjusters are brought in from other regions or licensed on an emergency basis, and settlement practices are adapted to the volume. A claim inside that designation is a CAT claim.
The designation changes how a claim is handled more than what it is. A CAT claim is likely to be inspected by an adjuster who has never been to the area, worked under time pressure, and settled against an event the carrier is paying for thousands of times over. The date of loss is rarely disputed, because the event is known; what is disputed is whether this property's damage is that event's, or an earlier storm's, or not storm damage at all.
The record for a catastrophe day is the deepest the archive holds. Hundreds of reports, many independent sources and a swath drawn across whole counties mean that the storm is not in question and the file's work is at the roof. A report for an address on a catastrophe day is about distance and size, not about whether it hailed.
In the report
How the document prints it
The report does not carry a catastrophe number, which is an industry designation rather than a weather record. On a catastrophe day the document's Records section is long, the Storm map carries a swath across the whole neighbourhood, the hail finding is usually strongly corroborated, and the reader's attention goes to the distance and bearing column and to the largest measured size nearest the address. The Findings list how many days inside the window carried hail, so a catastrophe day can be seen beside the earlier days a file may need to segregate from it.
From the record
14 Mar 2025
The busiest day on record
- Reports on the day
- 4,810
- Hail
- 1,111
- Wind
- 3,430
- Tornado
- 269
The busiest day on record is 14 March 2025: 4,810 reports in all, 1,111 hail reports, 3,430 wind reports and 269 tornado reports, filed under 27 states and carried by 3 independent sources. A day like that is what a catastrophe designation is opened for, and a report for an address on it is about distance rather than occurrence.
Measured Detected, not measured
The page these figures come fromRelated
The terms this page uses and the guides that go further. Each is shown against its own example from the record.
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Term
Desk adjuster
An adjuster who handles a claim from an office, from photographs, estimates and records, without inspecting the property in person.
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Term
Storm day
A calendar date on which hail, wind or tornado reports were filed, counted as one day however many reports it carries.
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Term
Public adjuster
A licensed adjuster retained by the policyholder, paid a share of the recovery, who prepares and negotiates the claim against the insurer.
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Term
Hail swath
The area a storm is estimated to have dropped hail of a given size over, drawn on a map from radar analysis or traced between ground reports.
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Guide
How far away a hail report can be and still count
A hail report is a point: where a person stood, or where a radar placed a signature. A property is another point. The distance between them is the first thing a reader checks and the first thing a reader misreads. This guide states what a distance establishes, how the report bands it, and why a record filed to a county cannot be measured from at all.
Sources
The primary references. Each opens on the agency's own site.
The glossary defines the word. The report is what uses it.
Everything above is definition: what the word means in the document, and what it does not. None of it says what reached one roof.
Run the address and the archive is searched at the property: the storm, the date, the measured size, the distance and bearing from the roof, and the federal record each figure came from, in a document that states its own method. About a minute.
How this page is made
- The text
- Written by the editors and last revised 23 August 2026. It explains the record and how the report reads it; it contains no figure of its own.
- The example
- Drawn from the archive when the page was compiled, 24 August 2026, and rebuilt daily as the record deepens. Every figure in the panel marked From the record is computed, not written, and links to the page it came from.
- Measured and detected
- A report from a person or an instrument is measured. A radar-derived size is detected, not measured, and is marked as such, here and in every document we issue. The two are never added together.
- What this is not
- A definition of a word the report uses. It is not a report on any property, and it states no opinion about one. The coverage page states what the record holds, by kind and by year.
About this record
Everything here is reproduced from public federal and volunteer weather records, as the agencies and observer networks that publish them released it. Titan Weather compiles the record; it does not observe the weather, and it is not affiliated with any source it cites.
No archive holds everything. Storms cross places where nobody is standing, instruments and spotters cover some areas better than others, sources revise their records, and recent reports can take weeks to arrive and settle. Where this page shows nothing, nothing was found in the sources searched, within the period and area it states. That is not a finding that no weather occurred.
These pages describe the public record near a place or on a date. They do not establish what reached any particular property, and nothing here is insurance, legal or engineering advice.