Assurant, Inc. (AIZ): what the price assumes

In the published model solve dated 2026-Q2, anchored at $285.65, Assurant, Inc. (AIZ) is priced for 14.9% return on equity. boothcheck publishes no house fair value, target price, or buy/sell rating; individual model outputs and user-controlled scenarios are analytical inputs, not Boothcheck targets. Narrative composed 2026-07-25.

Generated: 2026-08-31 · Source: https://boothcheck.com/report/AIZ

Headline

FieldValue
TickerAIZ
CompanyAssurant, Inc.
Sector / IndustryFinancial Services
Current price$285.65/sh
CompositionGlobal Lifestyle 77% / Global Housing 23%

What The Price Assumes (Inversion)

The assumption today's price embeds, recovered by inverting the valuation.

FieldValue
Inversion basisfinancials
Return on equity needed14.9%
Return on equity now14.7%
ROE gap+0.2pp
Price-to-book2.31x

Solve inputs: computed at a 8.7% cost of equity with 4% terminal growth over a 10-year stage, on common book equity (FY2026).

How unusual the bet is: within-range

ReferenceValue
vs own history+1.48σ
cohort percentile (of 78 peers)69
sustained it ~10 years at this level60%
implied end-window share0%

Valuation X-Ray

The price is supported by asset-based value. A value/asset-supported name, not a pure growth bet.

How the valuation models price the stock relative to the market price. Price/FV above 1.0 means the market pays more than that lens defends (expensive); at or below 1.0 the lens can defend the price.

FamilyMedian price/FVModelsReads
Asset1.18x3expensive
Earnings1.26x1expensive
Relative—0—
Growth—0—

Families that justify the price: Asset

The models below discount at their own flat-beta convention rates (cost of equity 9.3%, WACC 4.1%); the inversion above states its own rate.

Per-Model Detail (n=4)

ModelFamilyFVPrice/FVApplicableMethodology
DCF Perpetual GrowthGrowth——no—
Bank Fair Value (P/TBV)—$175.301.63xyesTBVPS $59.89 × 2.93x (ROE (TTM) 17.4% / CoE 9.3%, g=5.0% (sustainable: 65% retention × ROE, 5% cap; not the terminal-growth assumption))
Relative ValuationRelative——noP/E 11x (static sector reference · 2026-04), scenarios: 9.2x / 11.0x / 12.8x (bear / base = reference held flat / bull), EV/EBITDA 10x
Simple DDMGrowth——no—
Two-Stage DDMGrowth——no—
Simple Excess ReturnAsset$233.101.23xyesBV/sh $123.63, ROE (TTM) 17.4%, ke 9.3%
Two-Stage Excess ReturnAsset$315.940.90xyes5yr excess ROE then converge to ke=9.3%
Discounted Future Market CapGrowth——noRev $13.5B, growth 9% (input: historical growth; tapered), Terminal P/S: 0.9x / 1.0x / 1.2x (bear / base = today's held flat / bull, cap 8x)
Peter Lynch Fair ValueRelative——noEPS $20.90, growth 35% (input: historical EPS growth), PEG=0.38 (Undervalued)
Margin TrajectoryGrowth——no—
Earnings Power ValueEarnings——no—
Residual IncomeAsset——no—
Graham NumberAsset$241.121.18xyes√(22.5 × EPS $20.90 × BVPS $123.63) — Graham's conservative floor
EV/EBITDA RelativeRelative——no—
FCF YieldEarnings——no—
SBC-Adj FCF YieldEarnings——no—
Ben Graham FormulaEarnings——noEPS $20.90 × (8.5 + 2×15.0%) × (4.4 / 5.3%)
ROIC-Justified P/BAsset——no—
P/Sales SectorRelative——no—
PEG Fair ValueRelative——noEPS $20.90 × (PEG 1.5 × growth 25.0% (input: historical EPS growth)) → PE 37.5x
Earnings YieldEarnings$225.951.26xyesEPS $20.90 / required return 9.3% (Rf 4.3% + ERP 5.0%)
Funds From Operations MultipleRelative——no—
Clinical Phase NPVGrowth——no—
MertonAsset——no—
V5 Mechanical———no—

Economic-Unit Decomposition (Sum Of The Parts)

The issuer is a funded financial business. Debt, interest, and cash flows are operating inputs, so industrial EV, net-debt, WACC, and free-cash-flow lenses do not apply; value the common-equity claim with book, earnings, capital, and payout economics.

UnitRoleValuation basisRevenueReported profitValue evidenceStatus
Global Lifestylefinancialequity$9.9b—withheldunresolved standalone equity facts required
Global Housingfinancialequity$2.9b—withheldunresolved standalone equity facts required

No unit-level total common-equity value is stated. Each financial unit requires supported standalone common equity, normalized earnings, capital adequacy, and payout capacity. Consolidated debt, interest, and cash are operating balances, not an enterprise-to-equity bridge; company-level book, earnings, capital, and payout lenses remain the coherent cross-checks.

Solvency

FieldValue
Share count CAGR (buyback)-2.4%

Deposit/float-funded balance sheet: debt is funding, not corporate leverage, and GAAP operating cash flow follows loan flows. Net-debt, interest-coverage, and cash-burn lenses do not apply. The solvency frame for a financial is regulatory capital and payout capacity (CET1, stress buffer, dividends plus buybacks against earnings).

Bullet Takeaways

Bull Case

Look first at what management does with the cash, because for an insurer that is the honest signal. Assurant returned roughly 54% of last year's earnings to shareholders through dividends and buybacks, and in January the Board declared a quarterly dividend of $0.88 per common share, a 10% raise. Over four years the share count has come down about 2.8% annually. A regulated company that hands back half its profit, lifts the dividend by a tenth, and still funds its own growth is saying something specific: it does not need the capital. Capital adequacy is the thing insurance regulators care most about, so a payout of that size is not a gesture. It is a statement about how much cushion sits behind the business.

The engine paying for it is Global Lifestyle, roughly 77% of revenue, and calling it insurance undersells what it does. Assurant sits inside a carrier's upgrade flow. It writes the protection plan, takes the claim, ships or repairs the device, and then puts the recovered handset back into circulation. The 10-K describes a suite of adjacent value-added services - such as trade-in and upgrade and asset value recovery built on a base of secondary-market devices, which is the part that pays whether or not a phone ever breaks. That business is compounding on its own terms: fees and other income increased $228.4 million, or 16%, primarily due to growth from global mobile trade-in programs and higher contributions from financial services from a new program.

Global Housing is the piece that looks like a conventional insurer, and its most useful feature is that it leans against the cycle. Lender-placed coverage attaches when a homeowner's own policy lapses, which happens more often when households are under strain. The company puts it plainly: Should the housing market deteriorate for a prolonged period, we could experience a longer-term increase in our placement rates over time. Most property insurers get worse when the economy does. This one gets busier.

The economics land in returns rather than in margins, which is the right lens for a business carrying the cost of repairing phones alongside the cost of paying claims. Assurant earned about $1.0 billion on roughly $13.2 billion of revenue over the trailing year, a return on equity near 14.9%. On raw net conversion that looks unremarkable next to Old Republic at 10.8% of $9.42 billion or American Financial Group at 10.8% of $8.17 billion. Measured against the capital each profit dollar ties up, it does not: a fee stream built on handset logistics requires far less reserve backing than an underwriting book of the same size, and the return on equity is where that difference finally shows up.

Bear Case

The first quarter of 2026 was a quiet quarter to be insuring houses, and quiet quarters are the ones that flatter. Global Housing's profit more than doubled, and the single largest reason was that pre-tax reportable catastrophe losses arrived $132.3 million lighter than the year before. Weather that did not happen is not an operating improvement. It is a bill that did not come due, and the company is explicit about how large that bill can get: We purchase reinsurance for certain risks, but if the severity of an event were sufficiently high, our losses could exceed our reinsurance coverage limits. Roughly a quarter of the business runs on that arithmetic, and a return on equity measured across a light catastrophe year is measured across the good half of the cycle.

The second issue is who actually owns the customer. Assurant's distribution runs through wireless carriers, retailers and mortgage servicers, and the 10-K discloses that a substantial share of its unrated reinsurance recoverables relate to Global Lifestyle's and Global Housing's agreements to reinsure premiums and risks related to business generated by certain clients to the clients' own captive insurance companies or to reinsurance subsidiaries in which the clients have an ownership interest. Read that slowly. The clients are not only the channel; several of them share in the underwriting result. That structure keeps a large partner aligned, and it also means the partner knows exactly what the program earns when the contract comes up for renewal. Pricing power in that negotiation does not obviously sit with Assurant.

Underneath both sits a demand base that is not in the company's hands either. Device protection volume depends on changes in customer preferences, changes in client promotions and seasonality; changes in client forecasts and demand, and the resale economics depend on the value of used handsets, which the filing notes may also be impacted by adverse foreign trade relationships. Longer replacement cycles and softer secondary-market prices work on the same line at the same time.

None of this is a solvency argument, and the bear case here is not that the price is untethered. It is narrower. At about 2.3 times book, the price asks for a return on equity near 15.2% held indefinitely, against roughly 14.9% recently earned. The gap is small, which is precisely what makes it fragile: there is no cushion inside it. Of the firms that have earned this kind of return, only about 59% still held it a decade later. If Assurant's return settles into the low teens after a normal catastrophe year and a renewal cycle in which its clients press harder on program economics, nothing dramatic happens to the earnings. The multiple on book is what compresses, and that compression is the whole of the downside on offer here. Competition will not make it easier: the company acknowledges some rivals offer a broader array of products and services than we do or more favorable terms, alongside the threat of disruption by traditional players, such as insurers, from new entrants, such as "Insurtech" companies, and from their use of technologies such as AI.

Valuation

An insurer is worth the return it earns on the capital it must hold, so read this price through book value rather than through an operating multiple. At about 2.3 times book, today's price asks Assurant to keep earning roughly 15.2% on equity. It has recently been earning about 14.9%. That is an unusually small distance between what the price wants and what the business does, and it changes the character of the question. Nobody here is being asked for a transformation. They are being asked for continuation.

Continuation still has to be underwritten. Only about 59% of firms earning this kind of return were still earning it ten years on. The level the price wants also sits inside, not beyond, what this business can fund out of retained earnings, with room left above today's level before growth would have to be paid for with outside capital. One sensitivity is worth naming because it has nothing to do with underwriting: the calculation runs at an 8.8% cost of equity, and every additional percentage point there raises the required return by about 2.3 points. A meaningful part of what this price assumes is a view on rates.

The approaches used to triangulate the value mostly agree, which is rarer than it sounds. The price sits about 22% above where book-value-plus-profitability methods land, and roughly 9% above where the forward-looking cash-flow approaches land. Methods that value the company on its current earnings power land above the price, and the ones that convert its recent earnings growth into a multiple land far above it, because they extend a growth rate the company itself does not promise. No family is stranded and none is doing heroic work to reach the price. What that pattern describes is a mild premium to asset value on a business earning solidly above its cost of capital, not a bet on a distant outcome.

The cohort read is about mix, not multiple. Assurant is the largest of its comparison set by revenue and it is not the fastest grower: Old Republic grew revenue 13.1% over the trailing year, Mercury General 9.7%, and Palomar 60.7% off a base of $980 million. What Assurant carries instead is a revenue base where roughly three quarters comes from businesses no hurricane season can reprice, and its price sits in the upper half of the cohort's price-to-book on exactly that argument.

The balance-sheet question for a company like this is not leverage but how much capital it can hand back, and that answer is clean. Half of earnings went out the door last year as dividends and buybacks, the dividend rose 10%, and the share count has fallen about 2.8% a year for four years. Two things follow. The first is that the capital cushion is discretionary rather than strained. The second is more subtle and worth holding: a shrinking equity base is a smaller denominator, so persistent buybacks flatter the very return the price is asking to see continue.

Catalysts

The first quarter of 2026 set a high bar for the rest of the year. GAAP net income rose 87% to $274.1 million, and Assurant raised its full-year outlook and expanded the share repurchase program on the strength of it. The composition of that result matters more than its size. Global Housing supplied roughly half the improvement, and the bulk of the segment's gain traced to pre-tax reportable catastrophe losses running $132.3 million below the prior-year quarter. Global Lifestyle's contribution came from subscriber growth in mobile protection, stronger trade-in activity and better results in the automotive book, which is the part that repeats.

Management's framing of the revised outlook is worth reading precisely: full-year earnings excluding reportable catastrophes are guided to grow low single digits, with Global Lifestyle profit targeted to grow approximately 10%. Stripping catastrophes out of a guide is standard practice for a property insurer, and it also tells you where management believes the visible part of the business sits: in Lifestyle, growing at a pace roughly three times the consolidated figure.

Second-quarter results are scheduled for August 4, 2026, with the call the following morning. Two things are worth watching. Atlantic storm activity concentrates in the back half of the year, so the second-quarter print will say more about Lifestyle subscriber and trade-in momentum than about the catastrophe question, which the third quarter answers. And the expanded repurchase authorization gives a concrete read on management's own appetite: the pace of buying against a share count already falling around 2.8% a year is the clearest available signal of what the company thinks its capital is worth relative to its price.

Peer Cohorts (Per Segment, With Filing Citations)

Global Lifestyle (reported)

Global Housing (reported)

Methodology Note

Fundamentals sourced from SEC EDGAR filings. Current price from Databento. The priced-in inversion and valuation x-ray are computed by the boothcheck engine; narrative composed by AI from the structured data.

Sources

Q1 2026 earnings release, May 2026 · Assurant press release, July 6, 2026 · Q1 2026 earnings release, May 5, 2026

View the full interactive AIZ report on boothcheck