The simple version

Most businesses buy cover. Some carry a large part of the risk themselves, which means they pay the claims out of their own pocket.

A company doing that cannot wait for the bills to arrive. It has to record now what it expects those claims to cost, and that recorded amount sits on the books as money owed.

The hard part is that some accidents have already happened and nobody has told the company about them. Those have to be counted too, even though nobody has reported them.

The numbers

• The accounting term is an insurance reserve: the liability for unpaid losses and loss adjustment expenses.
• Uber states in its 2025 annual report, for the year ended December 31, 2025, that it uses a combination of third-party insurance and self-insurance mechanisms, including a wholly-owned captive insurance subsidiary, for risks including auto liability, uninsured and underinsured motorist coverage, auto physical damage, and general liability.
• The filing says the reserve includes an amount for case reserves related to reported claims and an amount for losses incurred but not reported as of the balance sheet date.
• The estimate uses what the filing calls generally accepted actuarial methods applied to historical claim and loss experience, plus assumptions based on actuarial judgment about claim and loss development patterns, expected loss costs, and frequency.
• The recorded amounts are substantial. Short-term insurance reserves were 3,387 million dollars at December 31, 2025, against 2,754 million a year earlier. Long-term insurance reserves were 9,076 million, against 7,042 million.
• For scale, the company reported total liabilities of 33,719 million dollars and total assets of 61,802 million at the same date.
• The filing is unusually direct about the uncertainty. It states that while management believes the reserve amount is adequate, the ultimate liability may be in excess of, or less than, the amount provided.
• It goes further and says the variability is increased for this company because of limited historical experience and the nature of the coverage provided.

The two halves of the figure

The first half is ordinary bookkeeping. A claim has been filed, it has been reviewed, and a specific amount is set aside against it.

The second half has nothing filed behind it at all. An accident happened, the person involved has not got in touch yet, and the company still has to carry a figure for it.

That second half comes from patterns in past claims: how many eventually get filed, how long people take, and how much they settle for. It is statistical work, not a tally of anything, and it changes whenever the pattern does.

The actual math on one company's reserve

Add the two recorded lines together and the total comes to 12,463 million dollars, up from 9,796 million a year earlier. That is an increase of 2,667 million, or about 27 percent.

Set that total against the 33,719 million dollars of everything the company reports as owed and it works out at about 37 percent. For a company most people think of as a rides app, that is a larger share than the business it is known for would suggest.

The split by timing is the other striking part. Of the 12,463 million, 9,076 million sits in the long-term line, which is roughly three quarters not expected to be settled within a year.

What this means

A reserve going up is not the same as claims going up. It can move because the actuarial assumptions changed, and the filing will say so if you read the policy note rather than the headline figure.

It also means a company that carries its own risk is running something close to an insurance business alongside its main one, with the same estimation problem and, by its own account here, less history to work from.

What this is NOT

This article explains how a company that carries its own accident risk records the cost of claims, including claims not yet reported, using Uber's 2025 annual report as the worked example because that filing states both the policy and the recorded balances. It is not a recommendation to buy or sell any security, not an assessment of whether this or any reserve is adequate, and not a prediction of what any claims will finally cost. It is not advice about your own insurance, and it does not explain employee benefits: workers' compensation appears in the filing's own list of covered risks and is not the subject here. The arithmetic adding the short-term and long-term lines to 12,463 million dollars, the 2,667 million increase, the 27 percent change, the 37 percent share of total liabilities, and the three quarters long-term split is all ours, computed from figures the filing reports separately. The company states its own estimate carries increased variability, and that caveat belongs with every figure above. This is not a political endorsement or criticism of anyone.

Sources

• Uber Technologies, Inc., Form 10-K for the fiscal year ended December 31, 2025 (accession 0001543151-26-000015), summary of significant accounting policies, insurance reserves.
• Uber Technologies, Inc., same filing, consolidated balance sheets, for the short-term and long-term insurance reserve lines and the liability and asset totals.
• US Securities and Exchange Commission, EDGAR filing archive, read November 7, 2026.