For two years, independent agency owners have been told the M&A boom was ending. The data now suggests something different: it's leveling off at a new, still-elevated normal — and P&C agencies remain squarely in the crosshairs.
OPTIS Partners counted 148 insurance agency M&A deals in the first quarter of 2026, down 6% from the same period last year, according to a report distributed via Morningstar/ACCESS Newswire on April 27, 2026. That marks the tenth straight quarter of deal volume below the long-run trend line. But OPTIS partner Steve Germundson framed the slide as reaching a floor rather than continuing to fall: "The industry has ridden down a three-year slide in deal volume, which we believe is beginning to bottom out to about 650 deals per year."
Six hundred fifty deals a year is not a retreat — it's a durable pace. For context, OPTIS tallied 695 total agency transactions in 2025, itself down from 787 in 2024, with the fourth quarter producing the fewest deals since 2019, per Insurance Business America's coverage of the firm's year-end data. The buyer base also narrowed, from 104 firms announcing acquisitions in 2024 to 95 in 2025 — meaning fewer, larger acquirers are absorbing a similar volume of sellers.
Who's doing the buying matters as much as how many deals close. Private equity-backed buyers accounted for 72% of all Q1 2026 acquisitions, according to OPTIS, with 29 of the quarter's 55 active buyers PE-backed — including four making their very first acquisition. That's consistent with the Sica Fletcher Index, which found PE-backed buyers responsible for 87% of transactions among its tracked group of 22 major acquirers across 242 agent-broker deals in the first half of 2024, as reported by Insurance Journal. Two of the most active buyers in Q1 2026, per OPTIS, were serial acquirers that each posted double-digit deal counts in a single quarter — one of them doubling its prior-year pace.
And the sellers lining up are overwhelmingly P&C shops. OPTIS found that property and casualty agencies made up 101 of the quarter's 148 transactions — 68% of all deals, by far the largest category. OPTIS managing partner Tim Cunningham put the long arc in blunt terms: "the vast majority of the 25,000 to 30,000 firms nationally are very small and will have to be sold eventually," pointing to an emerging wave of private-equity- and family-office-backed buyers now targeting that smaller-agency segment specifically.
The headline-grabbing deals still happen at scale — Insurance Business America cited AssuredPartners' $2.9 billion sale to Arthur J. Gallagher and Accession Risk Management's $1.7 billion transaction with Brown & Brown among six firms exceeding $25 million in revenue that changed hands in 2025 — but the volume driving that 650-deals-a-year floor is happening at the local level. Insurance Journal reported that World Insurance Associates, ranked #14 on the publication's Top 100 Independent P/C Agencies list, closed on a Brooklyn-area agency on March 1, 2026, with M&A advisory firm Sica Fletcher representing the seller — a pattern repeating in metros nationwide as platform buyers build density.
What does that mean for an independent owner in Texas or Florida deciding whether to stay the course? State licensing and carrier-appointment records show the vast majority of agencies in both states are still independently owned — Texas at 99.7% independent, Florida at 95.3% — but that gap is where the structural pressure shows up first. Consolidation platforms already hold roughly 3.9% of Florida's licensed P&C agencies versus just 0.2% in Texas, a meaningful early signal of how uneven this pressure is by metro and by state.
The practical takeaway isn't urgency to sell — it's clarity about market position. Understanding how concentrated or fragmented your metro is, and how that compares to the national buyer pool actively targeting P&C books, is now a basic input to running an independent agency, not a footnote. A fuller breakdown of metro-level agency density and ownership concentration is available at /intelligence/insurance.