Brokerage Operations Snapshot
A sample of results from The Council of Insurance Agents & Brokers’
2026 Operations Benchmarking Survey
The Council of Insurance Agents & Brokers conducted its third-annual Operations Benchmarking Survey in summer 2026, covering topics including growth and profitability, operational efficiency, budgeting, and staffing.
Fifty-seven firms participated in the survey, representing annual revenue ranging from less than $25 million to over $1 billion. The following pages offer a glimpse into the operational metrics of leading insurance brokerages.
Key Findings
- In FY 2025, organic growth continued the deceleration seen over the survey’s prior two years. The percentage of respondents reporting organic growth of less than 5% rose 10 percentage points from FY 2024, from 15% to 25%.
- EBITDA margins declined across every revenue segment from FY 2024 to FY 2025, pulling the overall average down from 26% to 23.5%. The lowest and highest EBITDA margins for FY 2025 were 8% and 35.9%, respectively.
- For FY 2025, respondents reported similar selling expense ratio (calculated as total operating expense divided by NCF) results to the previous year, though trending slightly higher. Fifty-two percent of respondents reported a selling expense ratio of 75% or higher for FY 2025, up from 43% in FY 2024.
- AI remains most often applied to back-office work, with the largest percentage of respondents this year (83%) using it for processing documents, compared to 76% last year (also the most popular use that year).
