Moving to the more formal update on our numbers, we in fine tradition, we always start with our exhibit hall sales from the exhibit hall yesterday. And the interesting thing is last year was a record as you may guess, but fortunately this year sales were very consistent with '24. We're basically at 1.5 million sales. But the point is we'd always love to get to two million and we're not there yet. So we've got something to work on. But importantly, what the exhibit hall represents is our businesses showing their products and services and you get to see this great commitment of our leadership team and their passion for Berkshire and their passion for the owners. I was fortunate to spend some time going through the exhibit hall yesterday and that's a wonderful experience because we're getting the opportunity to engage with all of you as owners. So we treasure the exhibit hall and what a great experience. And I'll just add it's open till 4:00 today and feel free to spend a little money.
Now truly moving to the more formal aspects of the business update. We issued our 10Q this morning and had the related press release. You can see the results and I'll touch on those. I'll start with Berkshire just as a whole. Obviously we have our insurance as I've referenced as our heart of Berkshire, was our foundation. But as we move to the non-insurance businesses, we're really fortunate to have a number of businesses in there, but in their aggregate, they're fundamental and really central to American businesses and American industry and to the American consumer. And when I combine those, it's really the unique opportunity we have to excel across those businesses. And that will continue. It's been our focus and it'll very much continue to be our focus.
If I start by looking at these results, I'll start with the insurance, total insurance. And I'm starting there because there's a couple really important points to make. You can see in 2026, the first quarter, we're actually up quarter on quarter. And yet in the letter that I sent out just in February highlighted the fact that we unlikely to see stronger results in 2026. But there are some important points here. In 2025, we have an $860 million after tax charge associated with California wildfires that we insured. The adjustment's not so important. It's just to highlight that the 2026 results and what we're feeling in the insurance industry right now, there's two things. One, our 2026 results do not reflect any catastrophic events. It was a pretty benign period. There were some storms in the northeast part of the United States, but relative to 2025 and past years very benign. And that highlights again that our insurance businesses, but the industry as a whole, the pricing we've talked about that hardening, i.e. can you get the proper premium for risk, it's becoming a more challenging market. What's driving that over when you see a benign environment and I'll touch on further results another layer but you start to see competition coming into the industry. They bring a variety of products and forms but it's really they're bringing capital into the industry. So just wanted to really highlight we still see that as a softing market and I'll expand on that.
Now when we discuss insurance we have two core objectives at Berkshire. We want to underwrite at a profit so create a profit for our ultimately for our shareholders but truly underwrite at a combined ratio. I'll come back to it because there's a lot of insurance jargon here and there's a lot of numbers so I'll come back to it. And then the second core objective is to increase our float. Now the insurance jargon and the numbers on here. Go to the combined ratio on the left and go way over to the right. The 10-year average 93%. I'll give you a little bit of color here. If we have a $100 premium that comes in associated with a policy, the 93% represents the costs incurred associated with that premium. It can be the cost of writing the premium, the commissions, or the loss reserve we set up. The 7% i.e. $7 on $100 is our operating profit on that premium. And then if I go back to the $93, just roughly $23 of that would be the expenses, the administration of running the business. And that's just an average. It varies across our businesses and across it varies across the industry. The other $70 and this is very important. That's actually what goes down into float. So when you see our float growing, we take that $70, it goes into our float and we'll incur premiums against it over the years to come. And when the premium shows up, we pay out against that 70. But if you take a simple small commercial business or personal insurance that $70 effectively gets paid out likely over a 3 to four year period that premium sits there as float. We earn on it and Warren's referenced it many times. It's a valued part of Berkshire and it's really the opportunity to continue to create value for you as our owners and shareholders. You can see on the float we've going back to 2015. It's effectively doubled through 2025. There's a small increase in the current quarter, but I wanted you to all see it, but it's not the fact it increased. It could have decreased because it's just subject to the payment cycle we're in. The really core and important objective is that we grow it over the long run. And we'll continue to provide those type of updates to you as our owners.
Now, if I go back up to the underwriting results and you see the combined ratio again, but we'll focus on 2026. Primary and reinsurance, they're both 87% 89.6%. The amazing thing there is that there's an eight in that number. You can, again, our 10-year average is in the 93%. So we're actually realizing more operating insurance income profit there. Again, what's driving that? A very benign environment when you think of the catastrophic environment we insure into. The last time there was a hurricane that hit landfall in the US was 19 months ago. So our quarterly results our results last year do not reflect those type of outcomes. Again that means we have more capital coming into that industry. Yes, we like those results. But the reality is as that business as our insurance business softens and we cannot realize the value we should for the related risk, Ajit and our insurance team across the businesses. We start writing less premium. We still want to write it at an underwriting profit because there's still opportunities there and there's a number of risks we'll ensure, but we'll be much more cautious and specifically across the primary and reinsurance businesses.
Now, let's move to GEICO. As I highlighted, we have a new CEO. We're fortunate to have Nancy leading that team. They even have a better combined ratio 87.3%. That means associated with that business 12% plus operating income coming off of each dollar of premium we write there. Exceptional result. What's driven that is that four or five years ago the GEICO team stepped back and said that they felt they weren't relative to the risk getting the proper premium the proper price for risk and over the last four years we've seen a bet we have worked hard the GEICO team worked hard to get the proper balance across that that meant our premiums went up for our customers across certain classes of drivers. They worked hard to segment that customer. And by the way, that happened across the auto industry. Generally speaking, you saw an increase in the overall premium as they manage that underlying risk. Again, what's that mean to the industry? What's that mean to Geico? Well, one, there's a lot of folks out there pursuing those customers. Anytime you increase a customer's insurance premium and especially over a period of time and this is I'm talking about both Geico and our competitors. Listen, people start evaluating and shopping and we've seen unprecedented shopping activity across the auto space and you see the advertising that's out there. They're pursuing customers and they're pursuing the Geico customers. So yes, there's an important balance I want to highlight to all of you is that and this is what our GEICO team's working on. Yes, we have to get the price to risk right, but there's two other important things we really need to balance. The second piece is we really do want to retain our customers. There's no more valued customer than our Geico customers. Many of you as shareholders and owners of Berkshire are Geico customers. We want to retain all of you. We want to retain every Geico customer. So, as we found that right price to risk, the next challenge is making sure we retain our customers. And Nancy and her team have that as a clear objective and they're working hard on that. And then the third piece of that balance is to grow GEICO. How do we measure growth in that industry? It's policies enforced. And if I touch on what we've experienced as growth in GEICO, if we go back to last quarter 2025 versus this quarter ending March of this year, our policies in force grew by 2%. Now compare that to the number one competitor in our industry, Progressive. They just announced their first quarter results. They grew by 11%. And our team at Geico fully acknowledge, as I said, that balance that they have to find across the three metrics, including growth. It's not going to be easy to just restart the growth engine. We acknowledge that. But they understand the objective and as we go through '26 and into 2027, two important objectives as I said they have is that okay let's retain our customers and let's start growing GEICO.
Again the last thing I'll just touch on the insurance business and it's Tokyo Marine. I'm not going to expand a lot but other than we announced the transaction in the fourth week of March a great transaction by Ajit and his team and it's a strategic transaction in that and I'm highlighting that because yes there's a financial aspect of it and we're thrilled with that but it is a long-term strategic partnership and when Ajit's on stage I'll have him expand on that. So well done Ajit. Thank you to you and your team.
