Independent agency owners watching their own valuation trajectory got an unusually public lesson in 2025, courtesy of the one insurance distribution company whose price is quoted every trading day. Brown & Brown started the year priced by public markets at roughly 17.8 times EBITDA. By December, that multiple had slid to about 12.9x, according to an analysis by Sica Fletcher published in Insurance Journal. The move tracked a steady deceleration in the company's organic growth rate, which slipped from 10.0% in the second quarter of 2024 to 3.6% by the same quarter in 2025.
That's a meaningful re-rating for a business that didn't shrink, lose major accounts, or suffer a balance-sheet shock — it simply grew more slowly, and the market repriced it accordingly. For agency owners thinking about what their own book might command someday, the lesson isn't about Brown & Brown specifically; it's about which lever actually moves valuation.
Midmarket held its footing while the giant swung
While the public multiple gyrated, the same Sica Fletcher analysis shows the broader midmarket — agencies with $1 million to $10 million of EBITDA — barely budged, opening 2025 at an average of 11.9x and closing near 11.4x. Owners in that range didn't experience anything close to the volatility Brown & Brown's shareholders did, a sign that buyer appetite for solid, steadily-growing books stayed intact even as pricing expectations cooled at the very top of the market.
That top end told its own story. Deals the market had penciled in for 17-19x multiples in 2024 — the kind involving brokerages with $250 million or more of EBITDA — ultimately closed lower. Gallagher's purchase of AssuredPartners, roughly a $1 billion EBITDA business, priced around 14.5x, and Brown & Brown's own acquisition of Risk Strategies, near $600 million of EBITDA, landed close to 16.0x, per the same Insurance Journal/Sica Fletcher reporting.
Multiple arbitrage is still doing a lot of the work
One dynamic keeping deal volume up even as top-line pricing softened is what Sica Fletcher describes as multiple arbitrage: acquirers buying smaller agencies in the 10-13x range and folding them into platforms that later trade or sell in the mid-teens. That spread has underpinned much of the consolidation activity of the last several years, and it helps explain why MarshBerry's Q4 2025 and Q1 2026 U.S. Retail M&A Market Updates still rank 2025 as the third-busiest year on record for brokerage M&A, with deal momentum carrying into early 2026 despite economic uncertainty, geopolitical strain, and AI-driven disruption weighing on sentiment.
Growth, not just size, is the differentiator
Why did the biggest, best-known name see the sharpest correction? Slower organic growth compresses the multiple a buyer is willing to pay, regardless of how large the underlying book is. From a Pexara operator and underwriting vantage, consistently good performance can matter more than the sheer size of the credit. Decelerating revenue is not the same problem as declining revenue, but consistent earnings reinforce the view that management knows how to run the book through changing market conditions. That matters right now because commercial P&C rate increases — a major organic-growth tailwind for the last several years — have cooled from a peak of 11.7% in the third quarter of 2020 to just 0.2% by the fourth quarter of 2025, per the same Insurance Journal analysis. As pricing tailwinds fade, retention and genuine new-business growth carry more of the valuation load.
Reagan Consulting, which has completed roughly 400 agency valuations over the past five years and runs a quarterly Growth & Profitability Survey used across the industry to benchmark retention and growth in near real time, is one resource agencies use to see how their own numbers compare to peers before assuming a market multiple applies to them.
The takeaway for independent owners is straightforward: scale still matters, but in a market where rate tailwinds are fading, buyers are increasingly pricing organic growth and retention discipline into the multiple — a dynamic worth tracking locally as well as nationally. For agencies in fast-forming, carrier-rich markets like Florida, understanding the underlying structure of the local market — fragmentation, carrier access, and consolidation share — adds useful context to that conversation. See the Florida market intelligence page for more.