Ongoing global warming is likely to increase the return frequency of very intense hurricanes in the North Atlantic. Here, we analyse how this frequency increase may impact on economic growth. To this end, we introduce an event-based macroeconomic growth model that allows us to assess how growth depends on the heterogeneity of hurricane impacts, by temporally resolving the economic response dynamics to individual hurricanes making landfall. We calibrate the model to hurricane impacts in the United States and find that economic growth losses scale super-linearly with the heterogeneity of hurricane impacts. We explain this by a disproportional increase of indirect losses with event severity which can lead to an incomplete recovery of the economy between consecutive intense landfall events. Based on two different methods to estimate the frequency increase of intense hurricanes, we estimate annual growth losses to increase by moderate 7% up to 146% in a 2°C world compared to the period 1980-2014. Our modelling suggests that higher insurance coverage may be a viable means to mitigate this climate change-induced increase in growth losses.