Why Population Is the Wrong Way to Size This Market

Bermuda has around 64,000 residents. Its insurance register carried 1,210 companies at the end of 2025, and those companies wrote USD 362 billion in gross premiums during 2024. Both numbers are correct. Only one of them tells you anything useful about whether search is worth funding, and most planning for this territory starts by picking the wrong one.

The error is understandable. Population is the number everyone reaches for when sizing a market, and for most places it works well enough as a rough proxy. Bermuda breaks the proxy completely, because the overwhelming majority of the commercial activity conducted from the territory is conducted on behalf of people who have never been there and never will.

This article works through what the numbers actually say, where they come from, and what follows for anyone deciding how to allocate a search budget. It also flags, with reasons, several widely repeated figures about Bermuda that do not survive checking.

Start with the territory, because most sources get it wrong

Bermuda is a British Overseas Territory in the North Atlantic. It is not a sovereign country, it is not in the Caribbean, and it is a very long way from anywhere: the nearest landmass is Cape Hatteras in North Carolina, roughly 1,030 kilometres to the west-northwest. Miami is about 1,770 kilometres away. Hamilton is the capital, the territory has been settled since 1609, and it has had internal self-government under its 1968 constitution with the Governor representing the Crown.

None of this is trivia. Each fact has a direct commercial consequence. Because Bermuda is not part of the United Kingdom for legal purposes, UK and European privacy law does not apply by default and the territory has its own statute. Because it has its own regulator in the Bermuda Monetary Authority, supervisory requirements are set locally. Because the Bermudian dollar is pegged at par to the US dollar and both circulate freely, commercial figures in USD carry no conversion risk. And because Bermuda has its own ISO country code, search engines and structured data treat it as a distinct territory for geographic targeting rather than folding it into a regional bucket.

It is worth being blunt about how often this is botched. Auto-generated location pages targeting Bermuda routinely describe it as a country, place it in the wrong ocean, or transplant paragraphs written for an entirely different territory. A reader in Hamilton spots this immediately. So, increasingly, does a model reconciling a page against government and regulator sources before deciding whether to cite it.

What the register actually holds

The Bermuda Monetary Authority's figures, as tabled in the House of Assembly in June 2026, give a clear picture of scale.

At 31 December 2025 there were 1,210 insurers and reinsurers on the register. Fifty-six were added during the year. In 2024, those entities collectively wrote USD 362 billion in gross premiums, up USD 46 billion on the USD 316 billion written in 2023, and held total capital and surplus of USD 447 billion, up from USD 404 billion. Bermuda accounts for somewhere between a third and 36 per cent of global reinsurance depending on whether you measure capacity or net premiums earned, which is a distinction worth keeping straight rather than averaging away.

The long-term life and annuity segment is the part most people underestimate. At the 2024 financial year end it held USD 1.52 trillion in total assets, growing 19.1 per cent, on gross written premiums of USD 200.1 billion. Net income more than doubled to USD 26.3 billion. That sector serves roughly 90 million policyholders worldwide, and more than 70 per cent of its reserves originate in the United States.

Beyond insurance: 608 captives at the end of 2025, 21 licensed fund administrators holding USD 199.5 billion in assets under administration, 766 registered funds split between 636 Bermuda funds and 130 overseas funds promoted locally, and 49 operating digital asset business providers. Licensed investment business providers held USD 300.2 billion in assets under management, up from USD 230.5 billion. Total equity market capitalisation on the Bermuda Stock Exchange reached USD 297.0 billion at the end of 2025 against USD 217.6 billion a year earlier, and 209 new insurance-linked securities were listed during 2025 against 156 in 2024.

Set that against the domestic economy. Real GDP was USD 7.1 billion in 2024, growing 1.9 per cent. Visitor spending reached USD 549.9 million in 2025. International Business contributed 29.3 per cent of GDP, the largest single share, across 5,040 filled jobs.

The ratio is the point. The domestic economy is roughly seven billion dollars. The register handles hundreds of billions, and in the long-term segment, trillions.

The consolidation nobody mentions

Here is a finding that did not appear in any of the eight research documents assembled for this project, and which only emerged from the primary government publication: Bermuda's entity counts are falling.

The register held 1,210 insurers at the end of 2025, down from 1,239 a year earlier, despite 56 additions during the year. Captives fell to 608 from around 632, where the number had been broadly static since 2021. Fund administrator licences dropped to 21 from 24. Registered funds slipped to 766 from 784. Only digital asset providers grew, from 36 to 49, and that is the smallest base of the five.

So the money is growing and the entity count is not. Consolidation is outpacing formation in four of five categories.

For search planning this changes something specific. If your addressable market is a few hundred named entities and is getting smaller each year, then traffic volume is close to useless as a primary target. A page that produces two hundred enquiries from parties who cannot buy has failed. A page that produces two enquiries from captive owners evaluating a redomiciliation has succeeded, and no traffic dashboard will show the difference. Every KPI decision downstream follows from accepting that.

Who is actually searching, and from where

The geography of demand is well documented for the insurance sector and almost entirely undocumented for everything else, which is worth stating plainly rather than papering over.

For the long-term sector, the BMA reports that more than 70 per cent of reserves originate in the United States, with Asia second and European business including the UK below 5 per cent. The trade body representing that sector separately reports that more than 80 per cent of its ceded business comes from the US. Those are two different measures, reserves and ceded business, and they should not be merged into a single figure even though both point the same way. On the captive side, risks originating in North America and Bermuda combined accounted for roughly 71 per cent of premium at the 2023 year end, with Europe at about 8 per cent, though the regulator changed its geographic reporting categories between years so year-on-year comparison here is unreliable.

What this means operationally is straightforward. If you are a regulated Bermuda entity, your search audience is a risk manager in Hartford, a captive owner in Chicago, a fund counsel in New York or London, an allocator in Tokyo. They are searching in English, from a US or UK or Japanese IP address, about a domicile. Country targeting set to Bermuda will find almost none of them.

For the resident-facing economy the picture inverts. A restaurant, a dental practice, a marine services business or a retailer in Hamilton is competing for genuine local search, and that search is small in absolute terms but not worthless. Bermuda's own statutory definition of a small business, under the legislation establishing the Economic Development Corporation, is one with gross annual sales below USD 1 million or an annual payroll below USD 500,000, owned and operated by Bermudians. That is the segment local agencies serve, alongside a persistent layer of auto-generated foreign landing pages with no presence on the territory at all.

These two markets share a postcode and nothing else.

Evidence of buying, graded honestly

One of the most useful things we found is also the most mundane. A Government of Bermuda public contracts notice records three digital and marketing agency engagements, all with firms based outside the territory: a Halifax agency at BMD 1,059,400 running from March 2025 to February 2027, a Florida agency at BMD 385,000 covering seven months of 2025, and a second Canadian agency at BMD 540,000 running to April 2027. Roughly BMD 1.98 million in disclosed agency spending, all of it tourism-related, all of it awarded offshore.

That is hard evidence, in a public record, that Bermuda buyers engage foreign agencies at meaningful values. It is also evidence about tourism only.

For the financial sector, no comparable public data exists that we could locate in any source. Specialist marketing firms serving Bermuda reinsurers are visible and name their clients on their own websites, which tells you the category is bought, but nobody publishes what is spent. The honest grading looks like this.

Buyer segment	Where they search from	Evidence they buy agency services	Confidence
Tourism and hospitality	United States, Canada, United Kingdom	Three foreign agency contracts totalling roughly BMD 1.98 million recorded in a Government of Bermuda public contracts notice	Verified
Reinsurance and captives	United States primarily, Asia second, Europe below 5%	Specialist marketing firms serving this sector are visible and name Bermuda-domiciled clients, but no spending data is published	Reported
Funds and administrators	Institutional allocators, mainly North America	No published evidence located in any source reviewed	Unavailable
Digital asset business	Global, dispersed	No published evidence located, though this is the only register category that grew	Unavailable
Professional services on-island	Mixed, local and inbound	Local agencies exist and are active, mostly branding and design led rather than search led	Reported
Resident-facing retail and trades	Within Bermuda	Served by local agencies and by auto-generated foreign landing pages with no local presence	Reported

We have deliberately left the middle rows at reported and unavailable rather than promoting them. An agency that tells you the Bermuda financial sector spends a specific amount annually on search is quoting a number that does not exist in any public source we have been able to find.

Three figures about Bermuda that circulate and should not

Cross-checking the research behind this article surfaced several widely repeated claims that fail on inspection. They are worth naming because they will keep appearing in briefing documents.

That International Business is over 60 per cent of GDP. The actual figure from the Government of Bermuda's 2024 annual GDP publication is 29.3 per cent, and that is the largest single contribution of any industry. The 60 per cent figure traces to reference material whose economic section has carried an out-of-date notice since 2013. A separate figure of around 85 per cent circulates in rating agency commentary and measures something different again, total economic contribution or foreign currency receipts rather than direct industry value added. Three numbers, three definitions, and averaging them produces nonsense.

That there are around 900 captives. There are 608 as at the end of 2025. The higher figure appears to derive from historical counts on a broader measurement basis, and Bermuda had 723 licensed captives as far back as 2017. Captive counts have been drifting down, not up.

That tourism is 28 per cent of GDP. This comes from the same out-of-date reference source as the 60 per cent claim. Tourism is materially smaller than International Business on a value-added basis, though the precise share depends on whether you count direct contribution or total economic impact.

The pattern in all three cases is the same, and it is more dangerous than outright invention: a real number, from a real source, attached to the wrong year, the wrong population or the wrong definition. It looks checkable. It survives a casual glance. It only fails when someone traces it back.

The number that settles the population argument

If one figure had to carry the whole case, it would be this one.

Over the first nine months of 2025, International Business generated USD 2.29 billion in foreign currency earnings for Bermuda, up 4.5 per cent year on year. Tourism generated USD 436.7 million over the same period. That is roughly five times more foreign currency brought in by an industry employing 5,040 people than by the industry most outsiders associate with the territory.

Foreign currency earnings are the cleanest available measure of what Bermuda sells to the outside world, because they strip out domestic circulation entirely. Money spent by a Bermudian at a Bermudian shop appears in GDP. It does not appear here. What appears here is what people who are not in Bermuda pay to Bermuda.

So the search question reframes itself. You are not marketing into a territory of 64,000 people. You are marketing into a channel through which several billion dollars a year flows inward from people who have never set foot on it.

Some further scale markers, all from regulator or government publication. Total assets across the whole insurance register stood at USD 2.17 trillion in 2024. Members of the main reinsurance trade body wrote more than USD 188 billion in gross premiums with equity above USD 178 billion. Between 2016 and 2024, Bermuda commercial insurers and reinsurers incurred approximately USD 1.1 trillion in gross claims paid to policyholders and cedants worldwide, and the long-term segment alone paid USD 549 billion of that. Consolidated banking sector assets, by contrast, were USD 26.1 billion in 2025. GDP per capita was USD 143,878 in 2024.

Notice the spread between those numbers. The banking sector, which serves the resident economy, is measured in tens of billions. The insurance register, which serves the world, is measured in trillions. Same territory. Two different orders of magnitude, and only one of them has anything to do with how many people live there.

One thing worth knowing before a compliance conversation

A question that comes up early when non-Bermudian counterparties are involved: where does the territory sit on international tax cooperation lists?

As at the European Union's February 2026 update, Bermuda appears on neither the list of non-cooperative jurisdictions nor the accompanying watch list of jurisdictions with outstanding commitments. It was removed from the former in May 2019 and, having been added to the latter in early 2022 over an economic substance recommendation, subsequently had that reference deleted once the commitment was assessed as fulfilled.

Two cautions on using this. The lists are revised twice a year, with the next scheduled revision in October 2026, so any statement about them carries a shelf life of months rather than years and must be dated wherever it appears. And the fact itself is not a marketing claim, it is background a counterparty may verify independently. State it with its date or leave it out.

The same discipline applies to the tax position generally. Bermuda introduced a 15 per cent corporate income tax under legislation assented to in December 2023, applying to fiscal years beginning on or after 1 January 2025 for businesses that form part of multinational groups with annual revenue of EUR 750 million or more, aligned with the international minimum tax threshold. Businesses outside that scope remain outside income tax. Content that still describes Bermuda as a no-tax jurisdiction without qualification is now describing a position that changed at the start of 2025, and a reader in this market will notice.

What follows for a search programme

A few things fall out of the numbers rather than from opinion.

Decide which market you are in before you write anything. Institutional and resident-facing are separate programmes with separate keyword sets, separate content formats and separate success measures. Trying to serve both from one set of pages produces content that reads as if it were written for nobody, which is roughly what it is.

Set geographic targeting to where the buyers are, not to where the entity is domiciled. For institutional work that means the United States first, then the UK, Canada and Japan. Segment Search Console by country from day one, because that is the only volume data specific to your situation that you will ever have.

Treat the jurisdiction itself as the product. Buyers are not comparing your firm against another Bermuda firm as a first move. They are comparing Bermuda against Cayman, Guernsey, Vermont or Luxembourg, and only then choosing a provider within the winner. Content that answers the domicile question earns the right to answer the provider question.

Build reporting around a small named universe rather than around volume. When the addressable set is a few hundred entities and shrinking, account-level visibility beats aggregate sessions every time. And when a single mandate can be worth millions in premium or assets under administration, an honest report showing two qualified enquiries is worth more than a dashboard showing a traffic curve nobody can connect to revenue.

Finally, get the territory right. It costs nothing and it is the first thing a Bermudian reader checks.

Tessar Napitupulu writes about how market structure and regulation shape search and AI visibility programmes across jurisdictions in Found Before They Search, available as a free gated edition, with retailer editions on Amazon, Google Play and Apple Books.

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Frequently Asked Questions

Is Bermuda a country?

No. Bermuda is a British Overseas Territory in the North Atlantic, self-governing under its 1968 constitution, with the Governor representing the Crown and the United Kingdom retaining responsibility for defence and external affairs. It is not sovereign, it is not in the Caribbean, and it is roughly 1,030 kilometres from the nearest landmass at Cape Hatteras, North Carolina. The distinction matters commercially because Bermuda has its own regulator, its own privacy statute, its own currency pegged at par to the US dollar, and its own ISO country code, which is how search engines treat it for geographic targeting.

How many businesses are actually in Bermuda?

Around 16,000 companies were registered as at late 2023, roughly 2,000 local and 14,000 international, according to figures cited by the Premier at the time. The regulated subset is smaller and better documented: 1,210 insurers and reinsurers on the register at 31 December 2025, 608 captives, 21 licensed fund administrators, 766 registered funds and 49 operating digital asset business providers. That regulated set is the realistic addressable market for institutional search work, and it is small enough to enumerate by name.

Is Bermuda's economy growing or shrinking?

Both, depending on what you measure, and the split is the interesting part. Real GDP grew 1.9 per cent to USD 7.1 billion in 2024, a fourth consecutive year of growth, with nominal GDP up 6.9 per cent. Gross premiums written across the insurance register rose to USD 362 billion in 2024 from USD 316 billion, and total capital and surplus rose to USD 447 billion from USD 404 billion. But entity counts fell. The register held 1,210 insurers at the end of 2025 against 1,239 a year earlier, captives dropped to 608 from around 632, and fund administrator licences fell to 21 from 24. Fewer, larger entities handling more money.

What is the biggest industry in Bermuda?

International Business, which contributed 29.3 per cent of GDP in 2024, the largest single contributor, across 5,040 filled jobs, a record high. It grew by USD 48.5 million in 2024, the largest absolute increase of any industry, and its share has risen from 25.1 per cent in 2018. Tourism is a distant second. Figures published above 60 per cent for International Business circulate widely online but trace to reference material that has not been updated in over a decade, and they should not be relied on.

Do Bermuda businesses buy digital marketing from overseas agencies?

Yes, and there is documentary evidence for it in the tourism sector specifically. A Government of Bermuda public contracts notice recorded three digital and marketing agency engagements, all awarded to firms outside Bermuda: a Canadian agency at BMD 1,059,400 running from March 2025 to February 2027, a Florida agency at BMD 385,000 for seven months of 2025, and a second Canadian agency at BMD 540,000 running to April 2027. For the financial sector, no equivalent public evidence of SEO or search spending exists that we have been able to locate, so we treat institutional buying as reported rather than verified.

How much search volume does Bermuda actually have?

There is no reliable published figure, and we would rather say that than quote an estimate as though it were a finding. Mainstream keyword tools do not report stable jurisdiction-level volumes for a market this small; they either fold the traffic into global pools or return zero for specific institutional terms. A zero estimate should be read as sitting below the tool's reporting threshold rather than as proof that demand does not exist. Anyone quoting a precise monthly figure for a term like Bermuda captive formation should be asked which database, which country setting and which date.

Should a Bermuda business target local search or international search?

It depends which of two very different businesses you are, and conflating them is the most common planning error here. If you serve residents and visitors, local search is real but small in absolute terms, and should be scoped to match. If you are a regulated entity serving institutional clients, your audience is not resident at all: more than 70 per cent of Bermuda long-term insurers' reserves originate in the United States, with Asia second and Europe including the UK below 5 per cent. Those two audiences share a domicile and almost nothing else, and a single content programme built to serve both usually serves neither.

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